Ask HN: What is your daily reading list? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your daily reading list?

117 pointsnns74 comments

Besides HN can you list one website that you go to the moment you get connected.

I'm a politics junkie/anorak for Australia/UK as well as multiple other countries and polities.

I have been completely dissatisfied with the precipitous decline, as well as pay-walling, of broadsheets over the last decade and a half that I've been a regular reader. They simply can't do serious coverage because adverts demand they do lowest common denominator reporting. Also I want more than one side to a story and basically all papers, whether they like to declare it or not, have a position and so I end up at least going to two broadsheets to settle my mind on an issue.

Reddit was good for a while but the memes, insults, manipulation of multiple subreddits by racist groups (/r/worldnews, /r/europe) and the bashing down of anything that isn't left-wing on others (again, I want to see all points of view) got me very tired of it.

Twitter is good, but there is so much you can miss, links aren't headlines and I have absolutely zero interest in the meme-like jocularity and 'what I had for lunch' postings. Although discovery is fairly good it's entirely subject to the filter bubble effect and people are often ranting to a select group of yes-women and yes-men.

I want clustered news and opinion, and I want it ranked globally not against my own personal filter bubble. As there is nothing out there that fits my reading pattern I have started building http://jkl.io . However crowdfunding hasn't worked to get it going beyond a prototype and so it's going to be longer development cycle to add further features like machine learning (plus votes) ranked comments. But hopefully all that will be done by the end of the year as well as different views and ways of getting into the data. That said, it's now at a stage where it's genuinely my first stop before all the others, and once there are more sources, comments and the like, it will be the perfect overview - for me personally, perhaps not for others - of news/politics/policy/economics/science/tech across the world.

Also: criticism here would be most welcome, my other thread asking for feedback from HN never caught on.

I don't have a daily reading list, as I've found that it harms my productivity. I usually let the problem I'm trying to solve drive me to reading and research. Other than having something to talk about at the water cooler, I've found that trying to "stay informed" or "keep abreast of industry trends" are just excuses for not doing real work.

Which is why you find yourself here?

If you must know, I was glancing over the headlines while eating breakfast, pondering how to get a colleague to stop being so theoretical and actually try putting some of their ideas into action. (A very smart person who, as you may have guessed, reads tons of stuff everyday.)

To mutilate an old saying: In theory, reading about something and doing something are the same thing. In practice, they're not.

(edit: P.S. There was a time when I read everything I could get my hands on. I eventually learned that I much prefer to be effective, not smart.)

  http://consumeconsume.com/
  http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
  http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/
  http://www.contemporist.com/
  http://randomghost.tumblr.com/

Contemporist currently showing errors and occasional CloudFlare messages - load issue? It's architecture/interiors/furniture.

If you like futuristic concepts, Random Ghost and its infinite scroll will eat your day. It's amazing.

Consume Consume is an incredible mixture of bizarre, awesome or amusing images. A good, occasional break from the grind.

Why is Consume Consume so awesome? Thx

Because of our planet and everyone on it.

The subreddits I subscribe to:

http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/

http://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/

Except for TIL and worldnews, this is a good mix since they all have about the same level of voting and activity.

Reddit should compensate voting based on subreddit activity. I only have a few subreddits on my homepage, and for example the Bitcoin one gets entirely overruled by TIL.

Reddit, for sure. If you haven't tried it for a while, give it another go. There are some excellent sub-Reddits and just turning off some of the worst default ones can make a big difference to the quality.

What subreddits do you recommend?

This one is oddly fascinating -

http://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/

There are also these -

http://www.reddit.com/r/coffee/

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/

http://www.reddit.com/r/chemicalreactiongifs/

There's also /r/startups, but it's plain boring.

> This one is oddly fascinating -

>http://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/

I love that Reddit. I use it to practice my websearch skills. When I have some knowledge about something I know what words to use, so going to that subreddit gives me a bunch of stuff where I have no knowledge at all, and I need to learn the right words to use.

There's almost a sub-Reddit for everything so making recommendations is a bit like recommending your favorite bands, but some I particularly enjoy are..

/r/business, /r/coding, /r/cogsci, /r/compsci, /r/compscipapers, /r/etymology, /r/html5, /r/javascript, /r/LifeProTips, /r/programmerhumor, /r/programming, /r/tinycode, /r/wheredidthesodago

In a way it's a bit like the new Usenet, at least in terms of being able to pick and choose from so many different topics.

Reddit have said they're opposed to the concept of 'killfiles', which improve the experience for the person using them but not for the group as a whole. Reddit prefers you to downvote comments that shouldn't be there.

That can be good when you get the right subreddit.

And we used to have DejaVu (then Google) keeping all of Usenet, and it's now available. There have been some important (for computing) announcements made on Usenet and it would have been a shame to have lost those. I can imagine Reddit could get to the point where people make announcements there; and it's gently worrying that no-one is archiving this kind of stuff.

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ is reasonably good imho.

Yes sir what should we follow?

I joined reddit about 4-5 years ago and soon got sick of the same old posts, memes, jokes and comments over and over. Switching off the default subreddits and joining some smaller ones relevant to my interest turned it into an entirely different experience. It's only a shame that in light of recent events (r/findthebostonbombers, r/creepshots, etc) people see the site as a single-minded community rather than a diverse collection of very different ones.

EDIT: some of my subs include gamedev, getdisciplined, depthhub, truereddit, dailyprogrammer, entrepeneur

I recently decided that I could probably really enjoy Reddit again if I did some Spring cleaning.

First, I went to http://www.reddit.com/subreddits/mine and clicked the link in the sidebar title "multireddit of your subscriptions". I backed this up, mostly because maybe I have a problem with letting things go.

Then you can either manually click all of the "Unsubscribe" buttons, or use some javascript to do it for you (make sure you use a setTimeout(), otherwise once you refresh you'll realize that it only clicked one of them).

Lastly, I subbed to a small handful, making my frontpage a lot more interesting, and definitely more focused on my current interests:

http://reddit.com/r/truereddit

http://reddit.com/r/truetruereddit

http://reddit.com/r/cerebral

http://reddit.com/r/scifi

http://reddit.com/r/futurology

http://reddit.com/r/philosophy

http://reddit.com/r/programming

http://reddit.com/r/python

http://reddit.com/r/depthhub

http://reddit.com/r/foodforthought

edit: already I want to add more, having read Peter Cooper's comment with some, reminding me about ones I have forgotten! I'll spare making this list larger though, as I'd probably just keep filling it and filling it.

I get as much value from the comments as the stories themselves so:

- HN (still the king for quality of comments as well as generally interesting links)

- Reddit (some sub-reddits are very interesting, especially domain specific ones)

- Stackoverflow sites (some great info here, but their rather draconian rules on questions that require opinions can cause frustrations as many answers do require some sort of opinion. It is quite amazing how often I get value from questions that have been closed as not constructive.)

- BoingBoing.net (used to be a regular but has become too weird for my tastes)

* My email, where I maintain good, legitimate correspondence.

* My RSS reader, where I subscribe to the blogs of friends, plus the Machine Learning Research Institute, Ben Goertzel, and Venkatesh Rao.

* Reddit, where I'm split evenly between smart things and slutty things: http://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism+anarchotranshuman... )

I don't really visit websites as such. I use Google Reader as my jumping off point for 75% of what I read online. I hope that once Reader goes dark that I'll find something that fills the void well enough for the transition not to be too harsh.

The rest of my reading is done here and in the accompanying comment threads, of course, and also NeoGAF, a video game forum that (I only realized this week) I've been frequenting for well over a decade.

I switched to Feedly from Google Reader, and have more or less adjusted to it.

Its main problem is that it demands you use their browser extension, which makes it far less convenient than Google Reader.

Is the extension at least stable? I seem to have terrible luck with extensions and also seem to run into memory leaks or other issues so I tend to avoid them lately.

For news I like bbc.co.uk/news and france24.com

I have quite a few rss feeds that I read in the morning

Webcomics : gunshowcomic.com dilbert.com smbc-comics.com nedroid.com whompcomic.com http://invisiblebread.com/

http://lawandthemultiverse.com/ is an interesting blog giving a legal perspective on comics and science-fiction.

Some web/design blogs : http://speckyboy.com http://smashingmagazine.com http://css-tricks.com

Hardware : http://anandtech.com http://bit-tech.net http://hardware-canucks.com http://youtube.com/linustechtips http://youtube.com/timetolivecustoms http://toolsandtoys.net

A few people have mentioned Reddits, and some of them really are great. For those who use RSS, you can subscribe to your front page. https://ssl.reddit.com/prefs/feeds/

Similarly, if you want a feed of some specific subreddits, you can use something like reddit.com/r/programming+entrepeneur/.rss

HackerNews and LessWrong. I go to Reddit only when I'm looking for something particular or when I'm procrastinating heavily.

Rather than having a daily list, I use Feeder (Chrome extension: http://feeder.co/) to read my RSS feeds, I had always preferred it to Google Reader, I never did get myself into the mantra of checking Reader often (it ended up being once every few months, when I randomly remembered) ; however Feeder is nice in its minimalistic approach, just showing me how many items for each feed, which encourages me to zero it out, although unlike Reader it just shows the titles of RSS feed items, so I end up judging whether or not to read an article based on the title.

A few feeds I follow:

News

* Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss [a lot of the posts are repeated over both, and note these are not necessarily the front page posts, my guess is that they are upvoted new posts, so I end up reading some posts before they reach the front page])

* Phoronix - http://www.phoronix.com/ (http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php)

* ThreatPost - http://threatpost.com/ (http://threatpost.com/feed)

* TheNextWeb - http://thenextweb.com/ (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thenextweb)

* Wired - http://www.wired.com/ (http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index)

* iClarified - http://www.iclarified.com/ (http://iclarified.com/rss/rss.xml)

* TorrentFreak - https://torrentfreak.com/ (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Torrentfreak)

* r/WorldNews - http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews (http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/.rss)

Blogs

* Securelist - https://www.securelist.com/ (https://www.securelist.com/en/rss/allupdates)

* Buffer Blog - http://blog.bufferapp.com/ (http://blog.bufferapp.com/feed/)

* Raptitude - http://www.raptitude.com/ (http://www.raptitude.com/feed/)

* Priceonomics Blog - http://blog.priceonomics.com/ (http://blog.priceonomics.com/rss)

* Schneier on Security - http://www.schneier.com/blog/ (http://www.schneier.com/blog/atom.xml)

* Daring Fireball - http://daringfireball.net/ (http://daringfireball.net/index.xml)

* xkcd blag - http://blag.xkcd.com/ (http://blog.xkcd.com/feed/)

* Nota Bene (Eugene Kaspersky's blog) - http://eugene.kaspersky.com/ (http://eugene.kaspersky.com/feed/)

* Troy Hunt's Blog - http://www.troyhunt.com/ (http://www.troyhunt.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss)

Various

* xkcd - http://xkcd.com/ (http://xkcd.com/rss.xml)

* What If? - http://what-if.xkcd.com/ (http://what-if.xkcd.com/feed.atom)

* OzBargain - https://www.ozbargain.com.au/ (https://www.ozbargain.com.au/feed)

* Bret Victor's website - http://worrydream.com/ (http://worrydream.com/feed.xml)

You don't really read this every day, do you? If so, how much time do you spend on it per day?

Do you use an RSS reader? If a site doesn't update in a day, its impact on you is 0. By feedreader standards, that would be a fairly small list.

I've got about 40 feeds in mine, most of the fairly quiet. It doesn't take that long at all.

"Rather than having a daily list" I check this very regularly, based on the amount of feed items displayed on the icon. And it's hard to tell, but I do end up reading quite a wide variety of articles some days, other days, I just open the interesting ones, but it's just a sensory overload so on those days, I just end up just opening tabs and leaving them there to read in the future.

you must have a lot of time to be able to read all of them.

Is feeder 19$ a month or indefinitely? They don't mention it on their website.

That's Feeder Pro, Feeder, the Chrome extension, is free.

I know, I was inquiring about the Pro version. Is the 19$ monthly, yearly or one-time. Its weird that they don't mention on the site.

Ah, turns out it is one-time.

Randy Pausch said in his time management lecture (a good companion to "The Last Lecture") that your criterion for office reading material should be "Will I lose my job if I don't read this?" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy/

I don't think that's good advice and leads to some very short term thinking.

Reading only the stuff that you must in order to not get fired is tantamount to doing to bare minimum. Having a sciolistic knowledge about many topics is helpful when coming up with new ideas (and more importantly, knowing where to look when you need to do a deep dive), as well as making you a well-rounded person.

Articles:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/

http://www.genbetadev.com/ (Spanish)

http://android-developers.blogspot.com

Webcomics:

http://xkcd.com/ (Monday, Wednesday & Friday)

http://explosm.net/comics/new

http://mountsaintawesome.com/index.php

http://abstrusegoose.com/

Above all, obviously, Hacker News. I spend even more time than all others summed up.

Well since the question asked for one website, I'd say Google News. It gets me quickly caught up with what's what in the world.

OTOH, for a longer read with topics I'm interested in, I hit Zite on my iPad or on my Android phone. I've got Zite configured with my favorite subjects, and now I'm fairly comfortable that I'm hitting 80-90% of the most interesting articles/goings-on without having to hit dozens of feeds or sites.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/ and http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/

i use this chrome extension to easily check for new content: http://feeder.co/

Hackernews, security.stackexchange.com, the Dutch security.nl and Google+.

Also Reddit and Twitter now and then (I don't follow a while lot of people, so I can read back the whole week in a matter of minutes).

Once a month or so I read xkcd.com and exocomics.com, usually when I'm utterly bored or in a bad mood.

Thomson Reuters Foundation - (http://www.trust.org/?show=alertnethumanitarian)

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs -(http://www.irinnews.org/)

Whenever I need a break from tech:

http://www.lewrockwell.com

Also, my reddit preferences

http://www.reddit.com/r/austrian_economics/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/

http://www.reddit.com/r/voluntarism/

http://www.reddit.com/r/MarketAnarchism/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/

http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/

600 headlines, 60 tech feeds - http://skimfeed.com

This is cool ! Thanks for the link.

I gave it a try and the first thing I noticed on the top of Popular category "Memes: How Many Can You Name?". So no, thanks.

Some of the stackexchange websites

http://stackoverflow.com/

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

http://answers.onstartups.com/

I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned http://www.launch.co - @jason's news ticker.

Switching to just that has been the most productive thing for my time, and still feel comfortable I'm not missing any relevant news.

Ruby Daily - http://rubydaily.org - for instant news about ruby and webdev. Stackoverflow - http://stackoverflow.com/ - for dev questions and answers.

http://hubski.com

http://popurls.com

http://www.brainpickings.org/

http://kottke.org

Thanks for the popurls plug

I prefer using Flipboard to skim through my Twitter feed + some channels like Gaming, Robert Scoble, Wired (and Hacker News Comments).

Edit: and - of course - whenever I find something interesting, I stop skimming and start reading :)

Collection of High-Quality Feeds: http://talll.com for tech and http://filll.com for finance.

I recommend http://blog.cwa.me.uk/ for new web stuff (somewhat .NET oriented)

For business, marketing, and growth-related topics, I use http://quibb.com

From November to April - http://www.winterhighland.info/

http://stern.de for catching up with normal news.

Facebook and Hacker News. My friends post a lot of intriguing articles.

http://techdiem.com/

In order: Feedly, Reddit, and Quora.

Finnbay - www.finnbay.com

phys.org singularityhub.com fastcompany.com

lots of Heinlein and Azimov

Techmeme

Business Insider

FT?

Financial Times - http://www.ft.com/

slashdot.org

jezebel.com

Slashdot: http://slashdot.org, and I have been for over 10 years.

I read Slashdot for many years however Hacker News has replaced it for me now. The quality of discussion has become very poor over there plus the stories are often a few days old before they hit the frontpage.

I think the summaries are the thing that make me stay on /., especially as HN has strict no-editorializing title policy. I've many times missed an interesting story on HN, then read it from /. and came back to HN for comments.

The quality of discussion on slashdot has never approached "very poor". It was always much worse than that, going all the way back to 1998.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com