Ask HN: What software/tech blogs/magazines should I be reading in 2024?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38828682

by bk146 • 3 years ago

184 98 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Currently read the mainstream things: Stratechery, Wired, Verge, Arstechnica, etc. but looking to diversify my sources in 2024. Any recommendations?

idlephysicist2• 3 years ago

I'm always amazed by the information that can be had in the comments section on this site.

SushiHippie• 3 years ago

Agreed, many HN posts discussing articles/posts from the aforementioned sites have comments that give more insight than TFA and maybe even corrections. Which you would not get by reading the articles/posts alone.

idlephysicist2• 3 years ago

I frequently find myself spending as much or more time reading the HN comment section than reading the submitted article/link itself.

walterbell3• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

thefourthchime• 3 years ago

This is great, thank you

mooreds2• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing these links!

ClimaxGravely• 3 years ago

I've recently started reading bluesnews again after a 15+ year hiatus. I love how the site seems to be more or less exactly the same. Runs great on all my devices (crazy I have to point that out in modern times).

For those that don't know it's primarily a game news site but has some daily rundowns of some various tech news stories so I think it fits the criteria.

davidchua• 3 years ago

I second bluesnews. It reminds me of a bygone era when news aggregators like bluesnews were all curated by a person/small team and while the content is not exhaustive, it is actually enough.

dev_0• 3 years ago

Communications of ACM

owlninja• 3 years ago

I would love any recommendations for physical magazines. I know they are mostly ads and yada yada, but I like to sit down with an actual magazine for some reason.

julianeon• 3 years ago

2600. It's worth a subscription for at least one year.

houseatrielah• 3 years ago

They still sell them at my local Barnes & Noble

Joe_early_MD• 3 years ago

yes

walterbell3• 3 years ago

Could old computer magazines be printed on demand?

https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE

kjellsbells• 3 years ago

I strongly recommend Foreign Affairs magazine (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/). It's full of essays from the serious policy and academic establishment. You might disagree with them heartily, but they are well reasoned and don't hew to any particular political viewpoint (or rather, the magazine has contributions from all sides). About $60 USD per year for six issues plus an app, downloadable articles and audio, and website.

zacwest• 3 years ago

"Communications of the ACM" (https://cacm.acm.org/) is a great source for a variety of topics. It recently went digital-only and is included in an ACM membership.

walterbell3• 3 years ago

https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess

ACM will become fully Open Access by the end of 2025, but we have already begun that process in phases and large parts of the ACM Digital Library are already Open Access today, including the first 50 years of ACM's archive - all articles published between 1951 and 2000 have been placed in front of the ACM Digital Library subscription paywall.

brushfoot• 3 years ago

In addition to the answers here, I'd recommend checking with your local library. I recently found out that mine has a subscription to Udemy. They have tech magazines as well. A great resource that can fly under the radar sometimes.

frankdenbow2• 3 years ago

I've been putting out videos from (mostly) bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are outside of the normal tech news cycle in a youtube channel called INFLECTION Community: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsO80DSMypJSSDcgdDywgdQ

Brajeshwar• 3 years ago

This is interesting. Subscribed to the Youtube Channel and also to the Newsletter. Best of luck.

frankdenbow2• 3 years ago

Awesome! Appreciate that. The Teespring story is a good episode of the new podcast coming out in February: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTPTBDQGPSQ

jdve• 3 years ago

Asterisk Magazine is refreshing. The physical copies are high quality without any ads.

https://asteriskmag.com/

aurelius• 3 years ago

None of them. Study Knuth. Study the Intel manuals. Study “The Art of Multiprocessor Programming”. Study compilers. Study TCP/IP. Study algorithms and data structures. Write lots of code for all of those things.

Disregard the noise. Ban yourself from reading blogs and magazines and tech news. Focus on what is fundamental to the field. Look where nobody else is looking.

haolez• 3 years ago

I don't know about this. It seems that there is more demand for high level work than low level. But I hope you are right!

spacecadet• 3 years ago

I think OP is saying to go off and study tech and build shit, don't waste time reading hype noise BS. I agree!

adrianN2• 3 years ago

Low level pays pretty well.

bawolff2• 3 years ago

Good knowledge of fundamentals translate well into high level work.

Understanding the timeless things deeply will serve you much better than continually trying to understand what is hyped only to have to constantly move on to the next hyped thing before being able to get more thana superficial understanding.

golly_ned• 3 years ago

Have you done these things?

gaws2• 3 years ago

Absolutely not.

jwoq9118• 3 years ago

Guys like Sam Altman did exactly not this. They gained breadth in what was specifically relevant to the problem being solved.

coolandsmartrr• 3 years ago

Study the Intel manuals.

Which Intel manuals in particular? How much relevance remains in Intel's content given the popularity of ARM nowadays?

rerdavies• 3 years ago

Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer Manuals

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

Before the internet, Intel used to distribute these manuals in hard-copy for free. One just had to drop by your local Intel sales office to pick up a copy. A good solid foot of shelf-space.

These manuals used to be so much easier to read back in the 486/Pentium era. One could almost build a complete mental model of how a 486 worked, and how to manually optimize code to best effect by avoiding processor stalls.

Since then, intel processors have accumulated an extraordinary amount of cruft, so it becomes much harder to develop a complete mental model. Compilers have also gotten a lot more clever as well, in order to deal with the added complexity of SIMD instruction sets.

For those of us who started with the 8086 Architecture manuals, each generation of processors added additional features which one learned by occasionally revisiting the architecture manuals for new processors.

Coming to the Architecture manuals without having the foundation of previous Architecture manuals as a basis must be a daunting task. But I'm sure there's rich material there anyway.

wyclif3• 3 years ago

When you say "the Intel manuals", what books are you specifically referring to?

uptown• 3 years ago

I don’t read it often but when I do, I usually enjoy “MIT Technology Review”.

jesse__• 3 years ago

I've found a small number of indie game devlogs to be inspiring in seeing the amount of shit 1 guy can get done

bttf• 3 years ago

That sounds awesome. On TIGSource by chance? Care to share any?

ecliptik• 3 years ago

The Playdate Dev Forums have some good dev logs [1]. I've been going through the one for Resonant Tale [2] and it's fantastic.

1. https://devforum.play.date/tag/devlog

2. https://devforum.play.date/t/orkns-pulp-prototypes/4146

SSLy• 3 years ago

lookk up factorio dev blog

nop_slide• 3 years ago

Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut

Very relevant on this AI age

wizzerking2• 3 years ago

I prefer the moon is a harsh mistress by Heinlein More benevolent AI, less monster AI

jcrubino• 3 years ago

Paged Out! Institute https://pagedout.institute/

# What is Paged Out!?

Paged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.

It's made by the community for the community. And it's not-for-profit (though in time, we hope it will be self-sustained) - this means that the issues will always be free to download, share, and print.

Reminiscent of the vintage original Freaker/Hacker Publications, though clearly devoted to one page technical articles.

sdsd• 3 years ago

This is so cool. I wish I could read this right now but it's late so I'll have to dream about it.

Happy new year btw, thanks for posting this!

bolobo• 3 years ago

That’s a real little gem! I never heard of it before but I love the format and the content, thank you! Any other *zine suggestions ?

eterps• 3 years ago

Nice! I think it deserves a post on its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38830777

slipperlobster• 3 years ago

Wow, this is super cool. Thank you! I love the straight-to-the-point nature of the articles, constraining them to a single page.

exolymph• 3 years ago

https://www.thediff.co/

like Stratechery meets Money Stuff

screye• 3 years ago

Like calling a physicist : "Neumann meets Einstein"

Stratechery meets Money Stuff

Couldn't imagine more glowing praise for a newsletter. Bookmarked.

rounakdatta• 3 years ago

This. Very high-quality writeups. Also, one should read Roots of Progress newsletters - I found the signal:noise ratio extremely high for these two newsletters.

The former is more CS x economy. The latter is more Science x history x economy.

mooreds2• 3 years ago

Love this newsletter.

shicholas• 3 years ago

This guy is awesome - https://www.twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen

gaws2• 3 years ago

For someone who's a FTE at Netflix, it's interesting how much spare time he has to livestream and make YouTube videos.

navyad• 3 years ago

This guys rocks !!

nomilk2• 3 years ago

Slightly contrarian perspective: I'm trying to read less temporal (things that matter now) and more fundamental (stuff that mattered 1+ year ago and will still matter in 1+ year, with even wider intervals for non-tech content).

This does result in missing ~important things occasionally (e.g. I still don't know what happened with SamA at OpenAI, and yes, I am curious), but that's a small price to pay for greater intellectual sanctity and an increased attention budget to distribute across important tasks or funnel into something hyper focussed.

dfgert• 3 years ago

I am trying to do this as well, but being surrounded by news/social/stream outlets that just push unnecessary hype its hard to achieve this. Any recommendation on how to filter out the junk?

firecall• 3 years ago

Read Books, is the answer I think.

The entire online news chain is polluted it seems to me.

If you have access to a decent Library, I believe the benefits to the individual by using it are:

1) economic, save you money 2) social, you interact with people 3) physical, you are moving around 4) mental health, you are using a different part of your brain and being proactive by planning to engage in new knowledge

Then hopefully you can feel positive, optimistic, and look forward to reading the books you just borrowed!

Then you reappear the cycle when you return them!

nomilk2• 3 years ago

Some tips:

- If material is a few years old yet still very highly regarded, it's probably worthy.

- Prepare yourself some content in advance that's both interesting and useful so it's low-effort to switch if you find yourself reading or scrolling out of boredom. I have rails guides bookmarked for this purpose - 5 minutes waiting for an uber gains me some useful knowledge while alleviating boredom.

- Search wide, be selective. A few good reads is better than a lot of average/bad ones. Be prepared to skip chapters if it isn't delivering value after 2-3 chapters, and quit entirely if you can't find worthy content after reading a few chapters + table of contents and skimming a few more chapters. Give it a little longer if you're unfamiliar with the topic or style.

- A lot of 200+ page books could have instead been 10 page essays. Quickly move over unimportant sections if you get the impression they're filler. Same (or, more so) for other mediums too.

andrewjanke3• 3 years ago

My approach is mostly to curate your news/social/stream feed to individual people that post the sort of things you like, and to slower-moving publications. Limit your follows on social media. Prefer blogs and RSS over Twitter-style social. And/or read journals/magazines/books and reviews of them instead.

E.g. the old "The Morning Paper" blog by Adrian Colyer (https://blog.acolyer.org/) seems maybe up your alley? It's over now; dunno if what the new online versions of that are. For substantive programming stuff, these days I mostly read magazines and books, like CODE, Logic, and 2600. (IEEE Computer Society and ACMD have journals, but they're prety theoretical and academic; guessing that's not what you want here. I haven't found them very useful in my own programming work.) Sad to say, the current scene for this doesn't seem great. Old school Dr. Dobb's sounds like maybe what you want, but AFAICT there isn't really much like that any more? LWN and OSNews seem like modern online versions of stuff in that area, for system programmers at least. MIT Technology Review is also decent, but less about programming per se.

alanfranz• 3 years ago

I’m not affiliated with them, but I think O’Reilly Learning is quite good. A lot of resources on various topics without a marketing push.

ryloric5• 3 years ago

RSS and a designated slot to consume your feeds in a reasonably systematic manner.

Letting algorithms figure out the presentation of information just doesn't work well for people. Even FT which I read is always putting random crap on the front page and pushing important bits down to the second or third page-down.

pclmulqdq• 3 years ago

I think a lot of good tech bloggers (and I try to be one of them) are also trying to focus on content that is less of-the-moment in nature. See Dan Luu's blog for great examples.

andrewjanke3• 3 years ago

Dan Luu is great. If he's up your alley, you may also like Steve Sinofsky ("Hardcore Software"), Raymond Chen ("The Old New Thing"), and if you're in to the business & finance side of things, Patrick McKenzie aka patio11 ("Bits About Money").

rokkitmensch• 3 years ago

I strongly recommend slogging through both the old and new testaments in that case. Bang for buck, you're not going to find a better lens on western paradigmatics

andrewjanke3• 3 years ago

Big +1 to this. Much of the programming stuff I've read that's made a big difference to me and my skills and career has been the older "classic" and fundamental stuff. Unless it's directly related to the specific tools you're working with on your current project, and even specific issues with those tools, maybe let it age before you spend time on it.

"1+ year" actually sounds pretty short to me. Maybe 5 or 10 years to see if something has real insight and staying power and you want to spend your time on reading it. For stuff that's like, books or serious papers & essays, and not small news or release-notes or security-update posts. Many of the things I've read the last ~10 years that had lasting value were from the '90s or even '70s. (Though there's often updated editions of them, and AFAICT the new editions are pretty much always better.)

There's a "Somebody's Law" for this that basically goes "for a thing that's currently in use, the older it is, the longer it will probably stay relevant, and vice versa". Can't remember its name or exact wording, but it's basically reflecting that old things still in use have proven their value and flexibility, and are less likely to be just trends, and also have inertia and network effects.

itcrowd• 3 years ago

It's called the Lindy effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

ryloric5• 3 years ago

It's the power law in action isn't it, the older the work that's still being read, the longer it will be read into the future.

0xEF• 3 years ago

This is great and all, but in the spirit of the original question, can you share any blogs or sites you like to go to that discuss or review this fundamental stuff?

samwho• 3 years ago

Same, but writing. I’m very deliberately avoiding things that might not be relevant 10 years from now. This means rarely writing about specific technologies / languages / implementations, and instead focusing on concepts.

ryloric5• 3 years ago

I've been reading all my news on Saturday, I didn't know what happened with SamA at OpenAI for an entire week while it was all anyone would talk about. I just waited until my Saturday slot and now I know probably as much as anyone.

I feel this designated intervals approach is working well for me. You slow down and don't clutter your mind, but at the same time you don't miss anything and probably absorb greater amount of information in a much shorter time.

belter• 3 years ago

You are a value investor instead of a day trader :-)

recvonline• 3 years ago

What's your news source for these Saturdays?

cdeutsch• 3 years ago

I wish someone would make a good weekly digest World News newsletter.

Every year I look for one, and every year I come up empty handed. Every newsletter is daily at a minimum.

tmaly• 3 years ago

My gut tells me this would also work for news. A lot of evidence to support the opposite of what was reported tends to appear 1-2 years later but that never gets reported on as much as the original story.

cushpush• 3 years ago

NextApex -- my eclectic digest (nextapex.co) with a newsletter at nextapex.beehiiv.com -- basically covering science, tech, ai breakthrus in a 3-min rundown. Made a dynamic link sharing site that operates like HN to go along with it and make collation easier.

asylteltine• 3 years ago

Hacker News at most. Otherwise nothing. Improve your skills directly

ashwinne• 3 years ago

https://lwn.net/

bluehat974• 3 years ago

I would say Hugging Face Daily curated papers on Machine Learning to follow the trend https://huggingface.co/papers

StepBroBD• 3 years ago

Freethink [0] has some interesting write-ups, their videos are pretty fun to watch too.

[0] https://www.freethink.com

petabyt• 3 years ago

I want to read a ton of stuff on physics and science. The past few weeks I've read about thermodynamics, next I want to read about quantum physics, optics, then math. Any recommendations for a beginner?

wizzerking2• 3 years ago

Various book sites come to mind that include science as well as programming internet computing rather than get in trouble to advertising their URI, just find a book for sale you want, and google the ISBN-10 ISBN-13 with other criteria like filetype:pdf and use the tools to limit your search to the last year, month etc This website only has free/creative commons and/or older books https://freecomputerbooks.com/ This website I use for tech and bio is creative commons https://www.intechopen.com/ And of course for the bleeding edge with or without code all the arxiv pre-print sites.

ivanmontillam• 3 years ago

I find Dave Plummer's YouTube channel very fascinating ("Dave's Garage").

He explores old day's tech with insider stories, at least if you childhood was Windows-based like me.

irvingprime• 3 years ago

I apologize for this blatant self promotion but if you want to hear about science and tech news with a strong dose of humor, check out. https://technoscreed.substack.com

You might learn something. If you don't laugh, you might be too serious. See a professional.

Ask HN: What software/tech blogs/magazines should I be reading in 2024?

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