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Ask HN: Apart from Hacker News, what else you read?
310 points by kodeshpa on May 13, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 172 comments



Books.

Books have a relevance that's hard to match with blog posts, newspapers and magazines.

Books from 200 to 2000 years ago still have a lot of relevance. (Human nature hasn't changed much).

So instead of reading about the latest privacy invasion from Facebook or the latest startup that no one will know about in 2 years, try a book.

I'm trying this myself. Spending less time on hacker news, and more time with good books. So far, much more satisfying. You feel like you accomplished something after finishing a good book. Versus feeling like you wasted a morning/night reading through "timely news".


And go for the ones with real pages on real paper.

The ones you can lend to your friends after having read them. The ones that your parents have read, kept and that you took in their bookshelf when you were a kid.

The ones that your friends gave back to you and that will wait in your bookshelf for your children to take and read. The ones their friends will borrow and that will probably giggle a bit, because they will have difficulties deciphering the notes your father wrote on a margin.

Because if content has a price, knowledge ought to be free.


To be frank - your comment is just an appeal to nostalgia, not practicality. It comes off in the same way as when some people try to tell you that buying MP3s on the net is wrong and that buying physical CDs are the only right way to do it.

Ebooks have huge advantages compared to physical books. They're availble everywhere (no need for long errands/waiting just to find the book you seek), much cheaper, searchable and don't take up space in your home. They're not lendable (yet), but that's the only issue with them.

I'm not saying that ebooks are "the correct choice". A lot of people still love the feeling of physical books, perhaps rightly so. But please don't tell me that buying ebooks are somehow wrong or any lesser than buying physical books.


To add to that

- Ecological advantages. Am I crazy or does it seem many pro-environment types are pro-dead-tree? Nostalgia is a factor, but I think vinyl vs. mp3 would be a better analogy in that the proponents can point to certain experiential benefits (tactile, smell of an old book etc).

- Ergonomically more practical in most cases. Weight, page flipping, etc. Downside is eye strain in low light, but the current kindle is not too far off from reading a printed page.


Don't forget about the lack of a secondhand market for ebooks. That's a big disadvantage.


They're not lendable (yet)

Pirate them. Then they are lendable.


IMHO books are one place where you can reflect yourself, extend your imagination and look beyond the obvious. You learn a lot about life, and things that make you what you are. But books aren't something where you can understand what goes around you. Also books are not the best preachers, though there are exceptions to this one. Book can be a mirror but not a light. Now comes the case of understanding the present. When things are so damn fast, when you can do what not by just a click of button, i doubt book can even catch up with it. You might have often heard undergrads saying that the books are heavily outdated, as technology is much advanced now a days. This is in fact true. If you want to learn whats happening now in present, and want to be informed, or want to read something interesting, i would suggest that you read blogs, go through the forums, reddit, see some suggested pages that you like on stumbleupon. Its just that what you read totally and completely depends on what you want to read.


I've been using Goodreads to log 'interesting' books that I come across online, and getting from the library&amazon when I need more. They do get more in depth, and force you to focus a bit more - no mail or tweets popping up in the middle of a chapter!


Agreed. I find that reading books on my kindle somehow helps satisfy the desire to be doing something geeky/technical (even if the book is anything but). Able to kill 2 birds with one stone... :)


I subscribe (i.e. physically) to The Economist and GQ.

I'm subscribed to 243 feeds in Google Reader, of which maybe 50-67% are still updated. Reader tells me I 'read' 7,189 items in the past 30 days. Usually I skim headlines and look for interesting things.

My favorite feeds right now are my city's alt weekly newspaper's blog, my neighborhood's unofficial blog (http://capitolhillseattle.com/), James Altucher, Ben Horowitz, and Cliff Mass (a meteorologist at the University of Washington, and a fascinating writer).

I'll skim Twitter a couple times a day when I'm waiting in line, brushing my teeth, etc. I do so more now than I used to because a website of mine gets a huge amount of traffic from tweets, and I like to stay ahead of the curve on that.

I'll skim TechMeme late at night when I've exhausted everything else.

I'll troll through the NYT and longform.org a couple times a week to add interesting things to Instapaper, too.


Reader tells me I 'read' 7,189 items in the past 30 days

Wow, I didn't know this info was available. For anyone who is wondering, it's under "Trends" in the sidebar.

All Reader needs to do now is track how long users spend on each item, relative to how many words are in it.


That only works with RSS feeds supplying full articles, rather than excerpts.


In order of priority:

1. gmail. I still have a manageable amount of email, and I enjoy my inbox. My best conversations happen on it. I leave my inbox empty every night.

2. hacker news

3. arc forum and, recently, factor archives

4. google reader. I subscribe to 150 low-volume feeds that I want to read every last thing on. They generate about 25 articles a day.

5a. I intermittently read every single comment on HN for periods of time using http://hackerstream.com (disclosure: I built this with a friend)

5b. I intermittently scan high-volume feeds on http://readwarp.com (disclosure: my site)

My reading's gotten streamlined since I separated high-volume and low-volume sources in my mind (I even wrote a rant about this epiphany: http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc). High volume sources are all in 5 above, and as new ones come up I'll build specialized tools for them.


+1 for HackerStream. Looks excellent!


Trying to pick things not yet mentioned.

Cooking blogs (I read a bunch more, but these are the best):

http://thestonesoup.com/blog/

http://smittenkitchen.com/

http://globaltableadventure.com/

A blog ostensibly about learning Japanese but really about learning anything:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/

Humor:

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

Programming:

http://prog21.dadgum.com/

Inspiration / business:

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/

http://unicornfree.com/

A little of everything:

http://jsomers.net/blog/


+1 for James Altucher's blog, no one writes about business war stories like he does. He lays it out straight for you.


I've got to +1 Hyperbole and a Half, very funny.


I physically subscribe to Harper's Magazine (http://harpers.org) and the New York Review of Books (http://nybooks.com).

I use Google Reader, through which I have 222 subscriptions and have read 11,321 items in 30 days; I mostly skim through most summaries and articles and read maybe 1 in 20-50. I bookmark particularly interesting articles in my Delicious account and then try to re-read them within a week to see if I a) still find them interesting, and b) whether new perspectives and thoughts crop up about the themes of the article.

If you're curious you can get the OPML export of my Google Reader subscriptions here: https://gist.github.com/970230

My daily reading routine is:

- Guardian's international articles (guardian.co.uk/world)

- International Herald Tribune (iht.com)

- Techmeme (techmeme.com)

- Skim the first page of HN

- Skim the newest articles on Metafilter and AskMefi.

- Flick through all my Google Reader items throughout the day.

You don't explcitly mention this but I also voraciously read books, at a rate of about two every month. Right now I'm going through a serious counterinsurgency phase.


So much less than I used to. I used to average something like 15000 read items a month in google reader.

Now just HN and Techmeme and I try to get on with getting things done.


Lew Rockwell's blog : http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/

Economist.com blogs, especially the Johnson blog (http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson) and the "Free exchange" blog (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange)

Planet Python : http://planet.python.org/

The Erlang sub-reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/erlang


Even though I am mostly an OS X user http://lwn.net/ provides great in-depth coverage of Linux and BSD.


Here are few off the beaten path:

http://minimalissimo.com

http://trendir.com

http://archdaily.com

http://typophile.com/forum

Very inspirational, really helps with getting stuff into a shippable state :)


You may like http://freshome.com http://desiretoinspire.net


Ars Technica (surprised no one mentioned this one yet), Economist, WSJ, NYT, Phoronix, OSNews, Financial Times.

I used to read books, but then college started. Now the only books I read are textbooks. A tragedy.


I am amazed how many people in the field don't read Ars Technica. If there is a better source for quality tech and science news reporting, I haven't found it.


The Economist (dead tree edition)

http://lesswrong.com/ Thinking about thinking

http://www.realworldtech.com/ For really in depth articles on computer topics, and the forums

http://www.anandtech.com/ for hardware benchmarks and reviews

http://blog.regehr.org/ a blog about C compilers and hiking

http://marginalrevolution.com/ Economics progressor joint blog

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/ Intelligent and sane liberal blogger

http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle/ Intelligent and sane conservative blogger. "Conservative" might actually be a bit of a stretch there...

http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/ About space travel/combat - its almost a guilty pleasure.

Also the blogs of a few authors and friends.


http://moreintelligentlife.com/ this is a good read I found on a trip to the UK, a quarterly from the Economist. Long interesting articles


Robert Fisk at the Independent writes brilliantly on the Middle East.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/


Zite on the iPad is absolutely amazing. It's a dynamic newspaper/daily magazine with the cobtent you are intersted in. It somehow always finds the best new content relevant to me with stunning accuracy.

Most of the stuff I really love in HN also appear in my Zite-magazine


Arts & Letters Daily: http://www.aldaily.com/

Cool Tools: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/

Philip Greenspun's blog: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/


Excellent science blogs:

Bad Astronomy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy

Frontal Cortex (neuropsych type stuff): http://www.wired.com/wiredscience

Not Exactly Rocket Science (general science, mostly biology): http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience


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


Essential: http://www.24in60.com/

Tech: http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://arstechnica.com/ http://www.techmeme.com/

News: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ http://www.france24.com/en/ http://english.aljazeera.net/ http://alarabonline.org/english/ http://www.haaretz.com/news/international http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/index.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/ http://www.mcclatchydc.com/ http://www.csmonitor.com/ http://therealnews.com/ http://www.globalpost.com/

Politics: http://reason.com/ http://mises.org/daily/ http://www.zerohedge.com/ http://www.tomdispatch.com/ http://www.fpif.org/ http://www.newstatesman.com/

Opinion: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog http://exiledonline.com/

Periodicals: http://nplusonemag.com/ http://thoughtcatalog.com/ http://guernicamag.com/ http://forth.ie/ http://purple.fr/magazine/ http://mondediplo.com/ http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/ http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/

Other: http://www.quora.com/ http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ http://www.godrinktea.com/


I've been looking for something like 24in60.com for a long time!


The only disappointment there is the lack of reference links. However, it is an interesting site.


Actually this site seems interesting enough to warrant a separate discussion -- here it is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2544778


I really like the site, too. I noticed there's no ads at all, and no subscription. The About link explains the site adequately and briefly, but no mention of the owner. I'm curious of the ownership - it doesn't appear to be a business with any revenue for such a good idea.


You like what site? He listed about 25.


I would guess 24in60.com - people occasionally respond not to the comment they mean to but that comment's parent, and the only other discussion on keane's comment is about 24in60.com. That's just an educated guess, though, as there's no way to know unless kebaman clarifies his comment (either through responding or editing it).


24in60.com, sorry.


probably 24in60.com


24in60


24in60.com looks good !


I limit my subs to mostly tech and feeds that post infrequently but well.

I go back and forth between enabling Hacker News and disabling it. It's too busy and distracting sometimes when I need to get things done and I don't want to get lost it some lengthy article somewhere.

Here are my current feeds sans HN

http://abstrusegoose.com

http://xkcd.com/

http://cmurphycode.posterous.com

http://acmel.wordpress.com

http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/

http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/blog/

http://www.cpeterson.org

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

http://blogs.iss.net

http://ignorethecode.net

http://blog.lastinfirstout.net/

http://linuxsysadminblog.com

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com

http://planetsysadmin.com/

http://teddziuba.com/

http://toroid.org/ams/etc


German suggestions:

Tech: http://heise.de/newsticker/ http://blog.fefe.de/ (security & conspiracies) http://blog.koehntopp.de/ (database stuff)

Design: http://designtagebuch.de/ http://ulani.de/

Media: http://bildblog.de/

Economics: http://blog.zeit.de/herdentrieb/ http://weissgarnix.de/ http://verlorenegeneration.de/

Politics: http://blog.till-westermayer.de/


HN, macrumors etc. but of the more interesting sort:

http://www.loper-os.org/

http://fangsandarrows.com/

http://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/

http://jadering.blogspot.com/

http://www.quietearth.us/

http://www.pulpmovies.com/

http://undeadbrainspasm.blogspot.com/ and backbrain

http://lighthouseinteger.blogspot.com/


http://kottke.org is my favorite website.


"...what else do you read?"

I sincerely apologize for giving in to my Grammar Nazi impulse. Please understand that although it is not an excuse, reading the "Logical Punctuation" article has made me ... temporarily insane. Thank you.


H-Online, especially the features: http://h-online.com


Metafilter, Lifehacker and bits of most of that network, Onethingwell, Marco.org, DaringFireball, BBC news, Arstechnica, Superuser, GiveMeSomethingToRead.

I've bookmarked about 100 blogs to read later, so I ignore new posts from these sources to those blogs. I'd say Metafilter is my main and highest quality source.

In real life all I read is http://www.theweek.co.uk/ and Instapaper with the odd tech or music magazine.


http://www.thedailywtf.com


Right now I'm reading "Game of Thrones" on my kindle. Before that I was on a Jules Verne kick: "Around the World in 80 Days", "Journey to the Interior of the Earth" and "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" are all great fun.

Sometimes I even read something work-related: "Bureaucracy" by James Wilson and "Managing the Unexpected" by Weick and Sutcliffe.


Since my wife offered me a Kindle, I happen to read interesting classics found on http://www.gutenberg.org:

   Les Mémoires du prince de Talleyrand
   De la démocratie en Amérique, Alexis de Tocqueville
   À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust


http://www.lesswrong.com

http://www.kottke.org

http://www.boingboing.net

http://www.longform.org

http://www.reddit.com


  Currently reading: 
    Much Fall of Blood: Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint

  Recently read:
    Wise Man's Fear: Patrick Rothfuss
    Cryoburn: Lois McMaster Bujold
    Miles in Love: Lois McMaster Bujold

  RSS, highlights
  
    Comics
      A Softer World | http://www.rsspect.com/rss/asw.xml | http://www.asofterworld.com 
      Chart Porn | http://chartporn.org/feed/ | http://chartporn.org 
      Dr. McNinja | http://www.rauros.net/drmcnrss2.php | http://drmcninja.com 
      Dresden Codak | http://feeds2.feedburner.com/rsspect/fJur | http://dresdencodak.com 
      ErfWorld | http://www.erfworld.com/feed/ | http://www.erfworld.com 
      Errant Story | http://www.errantstory.com/feed | http://www.errantstory.com 
      FoxTrot | http://feeds.feedburner.com/Foxtrotcom | http://www.foxtrot.com 
      Girl Genius | http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ggmain.rss | http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ 
      Goats | http://goats.com/index.xml | http://www.goats.com/ 
      Gunnerkrigg Court | http://feed43.com/4503041127548424.xml | http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/index2.php 
      Indexed | http://indexed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default | http://thisisindexed.com 
      Order of the Stick | http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.rss | http://www.giantitp.com/Comics.html 
      Penny Arcade | http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/pa-mainsite | http://www.penny-arcade.com/ 
      PS238 | http://feed43.com/ps238-link-only.xml | http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/ps238/comics/index.php 
      PvPonline | http://www.pvponline.com/rss/?section=article | http://www.pvponline.com 
      Ratfist | http://ratfist.com/feed/ | http://ratfist.com 
      Sluggy Freelance | http://feeds.feedburner.com/sluggy_freelance | http://www.sluggy.com 
      Wapsi Square | http://wapsisquare.com/feed/ | http://wapsisquare.com 
      xkcd | http://xkcd.com/rss.xml | http://xkcd.com/ 
  
    Development
      Paul Graham essays | http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/feeds/pgessays.rss | http://www.paulgraham.com/ 
      Woodgears.ca | http://woodgears.ca/rss.xml | http://woodgears.ca/ 
  
    Misc
      Ask Metafilter, Recent best answers | http://feed43.com/2602451534003772.xml | http://ask.metafilter.com/bestanswers.cfm 
      Last Psychiatrist | http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/index.xml | http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ 
      lesswrong | http://lesswrong.com/.rss | http://lesswrong.com/ 
      Lifehacker: Top | http://lifehacker.com/tag/top/index.xml | http://lifehacker.com/tag/top 
      Mostly Maths | http://www.mostlymaths.net/feeds/posts/default | http://www.mostlymaths.net/ 
      OkTrends | http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/feed/ | http://blog.okcupid.com 
      Poetic Home | http://feeds.feedburner.com/PoeticHomephLivingInVintagePoetry | http://www.poetichome.com 
      Steampunk Home | http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheSteampunkHome | http://thesteampunkhome.blogspot.com/ 
      Steampunk Workshop | http://steampunkworkshop.com/steam.xml | http://steampunkworkshop.com 
  
    Money + Business
      A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks | http://feeds2.feedburner.com/blogspot/smartbear | http://blog.asmartbear.com 
      I Will Teach You To Be Rich | http://feeds2.feedburner.com/IWillTeachYouToBeRich | http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com 
      Len Penzo dot Com | http://feeds.feedburner.com/LenPenzo | http://lenpenzo.com/blog 
      MicroISV on a Shoestring | http://www.kalzumeus.com/feed/ | http://www.kalzumeus.com 
      Millionaire Mommy Next Door | http://feeds.feedburner.com/MillionaireMommyNextDoor | http://millionairemommynextdoor.com 
      Simple Dollar | http://feeds.feedburner.com/thesimpledollar | http://www.thesimpledollar.com 
      Steve Blank | http://steveblank.com/feed/ | http://steveblank.com 
      Unicornfree | http://feeds.feedburner.com/unicornfree | http://unicornfree.com 
  
    Opinion
      Cool Tools | http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.xml | http://www.kk.org/cooltools/ 
      Joel on Software | http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml | http://www.joelonsoftware.com 
      PawPrint.net | http://www.pawprint.net/news/rss/news.xml | http://www.pawprint.net 
      Schneier on Security | http://www.schneier.com/blog/atom.xml | http://www.schneier.com/blog/ 
      Slight Paranoia (Chris Soghoian) | http://paranoia.dubfire.net/rss.xml | http://paranoia.dubfire.net/ 
  
    Parenting:
      Game Theorist | http://gametheorist.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default | http://gametheorist.blogspot.com/ 
      Parent Hacks | http://feeds.feedburner.com/parenthacks | http://www.parenthacks.com/ 
      Thingamababy | http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/atom.xml | http://www.thingamababy.com 
  
    People
      AnnaTheRed's Bento Factory | http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnnaTheRedsBentoFactory | http://www.annathered.com 
      Derek Sivers | http://sivers.org/en.atom | http://sivers.org/ 
      dive into mark | http://feeds2.feedburner.com/diveintomark/all | http://diveintomark.org/ 
      Jonathan Coulton | http://feeds.feedburner.com/jonathancoulton | http://www.jonathancoulton.com 
      Patrick Rothfuss - Blog | http://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/feed/ | http://blog.patrickrothfuss.com 
      Telstar Logistics | http://feeds.feedburner.com/TelstarLogistics | http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/ 
      This Tiny House | http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThisTinyHouse | http://thistinyhouse.com 
      WIL WHEATON dot NET: in exile | http://feeds.feedburner.com/wwdn | http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/ 
      xkcd | http://blag.xkcd.com/feed/ | http://blog.xkcd.com 
  
    Personal Development
      Ask The Headhunter | http://corcodilos.com/blog/feed/atom/ | http://corcodilos.com/blog 
      Cooking For Engineers | http://www.cookingforengineers.com/atom.xml | http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ 
      Lazy Way to Success | http://lazyway.blogs.com/lazy_way/index.rdf | http://lazyway.blogs.com/lazy_way/ 
      Study Hacks | http://feeds.feedburner.com/StudyHacks | http://calnewport.com/blog 
      Unclutterer | http://feedproxy.google.com/unclutterer | http://unclutterer.com 
      Zen Habits | http://zenhabits.net/feed/ | http://zenhabits.net 
  
    Video, music
      Armin van Buuren's Youtube feed | http://www.youtube.com/ut_rss?type=username&arg=arminvanbuuren | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=arminvanbuuren 
      Ronald Jenkees' YouTube feed | http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/ronaldjenkees/videos.rss | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=ronaldjenkees 
      Sungha Jung's YouTube feed | http://www.youtube.com/ut_rss?type=username&arg=jwcfree | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=jwcfree 
      Tiesto's Youtube feed | http://www.youtube.com/ut_rss?type=username&arg=officialtiesto | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=officialtiesto 
      Weird Al's YouTube feed | http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/alyankovic/videos.rss | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=alyankovic 
  
    Video, spoken
      Eric Stromer's DIY | http://home.aol.com/rss/home_feed_eric-stromer.rss | http://home.aol.com/rss/home_feed_eric-stromer.rss 
      Google Developers | http://www.youtube.com/ut_rss?type=username&arg=GoogleDevelopers | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=GoogleDevelopers 
      Google Tech Talks | http://www.youtube.com/ut_rss?type=username&arg=googletechtalks | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=googletechtalks 
      Happy Tree Friends | http://podcast.happytreefriends.com/htfrss.xml | http://podcast.happytreefriends.com 
      RSA | http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/theRSAorg/uploads?orderby=updated&alt=rss&v=2&client=ytapi-youtube-rss-redirect | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=theRSAorg 
      TED talks on Youtube | http://www.youtube.com/ut_rss?type=username&arg=TEDtalksDirector | http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=TEDtalksDirector


So, your day job is "reading RSS feeds"?


The only high volume ones are AskMetafilter and thesimpledollar. Right now I just skim the headlines/summaries and only look at the most interesting ones. I'm seriously considering dropping them though.


you should drop them.


Are you still finding I Will Teach You To Be Rich worth reading? I read it several years ago when it first started, but stopped when it turned into mostly fluffy articles and promotions of his ridiculous $800 program to make people more money. The spamminess of it kind of became a turn off.


I Agree, I read it when it first started, now it is totally spammy/scammy/sleazy. He is just preying on 'self help' types.


How did you produce such a well-formatted list? By hand, or do you have some kind of script?


I use Google Reader which allows you to export everything.

  1 - click "Manage subscriptions", bottom left of the reader
      which opens the "settings" page
  2 - click "Import/Export" 
  3 - click "Export your subscriptions as an OPML file"
Now you have a nice XML representation which you can massage inside your editor of choice.

When you're done, prepend 2 spaces to the start of each line so HN will treat it like code.


Excellent, thanks. I'll have to try that and see what kind of RSS mess I have.


I absolutely loved the first book in that series you're reading from, "The Shadow of the Lion", and would strongly recommend it to anyone who thinks the words "historical fantasy" could appeal to them.


If you liked that series and want to check out some other good historical fiction, you might also like:

- the Belisarius series (starting with "An Oblique Approach") by Eric Flint and David Drake which is an alternate history / military science fiction series chronicling Belisarius' (one f the all time great Roman generals) war of survival against a being from our far future. My description doesn't really do it justice... it's a great read.

- the Ring of Fire series (starting with "1632"), also by Eric Flint, in which a small West Virgina mining town is suddenly moved to somewhere in Germany during the 30 Year's War. The first book is a little too pro-union for my taste, but it's still a good read. The series really blossoms a couple of books in when Flint opens things up into a shared universe and invites a lot of other authors to come and play


Wow this is serious good collection , adding my reading list


Hacker News, Techmeme, Slashdot, Twitter, Reddit/r/funny (so much fun, check it out).

I tried to follow Quora but couldn't figure out the UI (I'll try again after 5/23 because I'm very pressured by school right now).

I do check out GigaOM, very good content. Also Engadget sometimes and iPhoneDownloadBlog.com.

I stopped reading TechCrunch & Mashable.


Steve Sailer: thought criminal and smartest pundit you've never heard of. http://isteve.blogspot.com

La Griffe Du Lion: rarely posts but highly interesting. http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com


Steve Sailer is also a white supremacist.


Steve Sailer needs to do a lot more reading. His opinion:fact ratio is much too high. (I think his blog is actually a banned site here on HN.) Here are my reading suggestions for him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...


Magazines: Monocle & The New Yorker

News Websites: http://ft.com (news/finance) http://gq.com (fashion/lifestyle) http://businessinsider.com (tech) http://pehub.com (tech deals)

Blogs: http://kotaku.com (video games) http://www.valetmag.com/ (fashion) http://hypebeast.com (fashion) http://daringfireball.net (opinion)

When bored: reddit tumblr


http://answers.onstartups.com/


I have two things going every morning:

1) I flip through my Reeder app on the iPad which has a mix of blogs in there that either publish far too ofter (like techcrunch) or far too seldom (like avc.com; ok that one's in between). I however try to have a great selection of various topics in there from architecture, design (like swiss-miss.com) to the tech kind-of news.

2) Then I have a selection of apps or Safari bookmarks sitting on my first iPad page that I go through in a bit more detailed fashion. I'm listing them below:

- dribbble.com (dribbblr app)

- quora.com

- forrst.com

- macrumors.com

- thenextweb.com

- flipboard app

- twitter app

Then I'm ready to start the day and go on with it. Not included are philosophical books I try to read, but I don't read nearly as much as I should.


I really like the guys at Short Form Blog, who have a really great, attractive-looking approach to aggregating the day's news online.

http://www.shortformblog.com


ShortFormBlog is on my list too, along with a ton of feeds in Reader, a handful of Tumblr blogs, TechMeme, and the New York Times.


Glad I'm not the only one who likes it...apparently several people dislike it so much they're downvoting me. I'm not a sock-puppet, honest!


Bummer you got downvoted seemingly arbitrarily. :( We work really hard on it.

But glad you like it! Thanks for reading!

- Ernie @ShortFormBlog


I wrote http://bit.ly/kJdNr4 in 5 minutes to quickly scan the headlines from my favorite blogs and pick what to read. It's been really effective.


I'm currently reading a set of 10 blogs that revolve around design/branding/user experience, as I want to improve my skills there. I wrote up a post with links to them here: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2011/05/reading-my-way-to-better-d...

(And to be meta about it, I based that list of blogs on a previous hackernews thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103578)


Here's what I read in google reader -

Coding horror http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror/

Daring Fireball http://daringfireball.net/index.xml

Derek Sivers http://sivers.org/en.atom

Devour http://feeds.feedburner.com/devourfeed

DZone Refcardz http://feeds.dzone.com/zones/refcardz

Geek and Poke http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/atom.xml

Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com/index.xml

Hacker News Daily http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/index.rss

Learn Something Everyday http://cargocollective.com/feed-rss.php?url=learnsomethingev...

Lovely Package http://lovelypackage.com/feed/

Pattern Tap http://patterntap.com/rss

Paul Graham http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/feeds/pgessays.rss

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal http://www.smbc-comics.com/rss.php

SVN http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals/beMH

Steve Yegge http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

The Big Picture http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/index.xml

XKCD http://xkcd.com/atom.xml


I look forward to seeing updates to these feeds, though they aren't always daily.

PeteSearch: http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/

SimoleonSense: http://www.simoleonsense.com/

O'Reilly Radar: http://radar.oreilly.com/

The various "planet" feeds (planet lisp, haskell) and "r bloggers" are always great sources of news too.


Techmeme - Great for the current tech news pulse and multiple sources gives balanced coverage w/ multiple viewpoints on any news topic at the moment.

Real books - a novel idea, I know.


Quora is a great website to read. I participate a lot on it too, depending on whether I have project deadlines or finals coming up.

I also impulsively refresh Google News sometimes...


How can we get an invitation ? I can't even vote.


Any quora user can sent it (the invitation) to your email. If you are interested, I can do that.


I'm interested. I already enjoy participating in stackexchange.com. Could you invite me? Sent me a message to (disposable) zqxeT9Cl5ilpoN7q@bloem.joliekemulder.nl and I'll reply with my real email address.

To stay on topic, I recommend non-tech sites: Language Log, The Satorialist and London Review of Books (all easily found using Google).


Hello could you send me the invitation, please.


I need your valid email for this.


That's interesting... I just signed up using my Facebook account. Do you have a FB account?


Is any specific subject you follow in Quora ?


Yup, here are my topics: http://www.quora.com/Jinghao-Yan/topics

There are 71 of them at the moment, and some of them are overlapping


Tumblr has become a huge source of information for me -- I've never liked the RSS model, where the "unread" count nags at me. On tumblr I just read what's on top, and don't sweat if I miss things -- if it's big news, it'll get reblogged.

On tumblr I subscribe to The Atlantic, Newsweek, the Economist and ShortFormBlog. On top of those, I have a bunch of others who provide art, photography, pictures of puppies and pretty boys. It's the perfect mix :-)


TechNews: Techmeme, Techcrunch, Daring fireball, Oreilly News, Official Google Blog

Hardware: AnandTech, RealWorld Technologies, StorageMojo, ServerFault Blog, Gustavo Duarte,

Security: A Day in the Life of IS investigator, Microsoft Security Research Center, Layer 8,

Fun: Reddit, Boston Globe's Big Picture, Atlantic's In Focus,

Others: Lifehacker, The Art of Manliness, Windows PowerShell blog, Paul Graham Essays, Anil Dash, Catonmat, Joel Spolsky, MintLife, High Scalability, The old new Thing


Many things that have already been mentioned, plus the free newsletter from STRATFOR. I'm thinking of subscribing.

It offers a very cynical view of geopolitics, quite different of what you see in the mainstream media. I find it thought provoking.

For example, their analysis of the Syrian crisis: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110504-making-sense-syrian-...


For those who are interested in business news, I just relaunched http://forlue.com: HN for Business News.


The Techmeme Leaderboard OPML list is worth popping into your Google Reader:

http://www.techmeme.com/lb.opml


In addition to Ars Technica, I also read Kotaku Australia. I find Mark Serrels' contributions to the Australian edition to be some of the best material on the site.

I read /r/australia as a filter for domestic news (mainly links from The Age, SMH, ABC and Crikey).

I also use Stylebot to hide the comments section on every news site I read regularly, generally nothing good will come of reading them.


Random stuff. Really high-entropy, high-novelty stuff, as different from research papers and math/cs textbooks as I can manage (these make up the bulk of my reading material). Currently:

- Portrait of a Lady - The Illiad - A collection of Walter Benjamin's very early work - The Braddock Essays (a collection of award-winning essays about teaching composition to college students)


Penn Olson(http://www.penn-olson.com/) Marketgeek(http://marketgeek.net/net/) Quora(http://www.quora.com/) Techmeme(http://www.techmeme.com/)


http://www.Newz.io - Searchable magazine organized by topic that pulls from thousands of top publishers. For instance if I wanted to see all the bin laden news i go to http://www.newz.io/bin-laden and it'll create a magazine on those keywords


I used to be on reddit constantly but after I found hacker news I am losing interest in reddit and now actually get work done.


metafilter.com


TechMeme, StackOverflow, Quora, and Twitter. As for "old media" online, I like The Economist, WSJ, and Financial Times.


The Economist in paper form, and lots of books again, thanks to my Kindle!

If I had the time, I'd probably get the Financial Times.


Every few days or so I have a look through the new submissions to http://longreads.com. It lists longer articles from other places on the web and is a welcome change to the short contentless articles I come accross everywhere else.


The Economist is great, although I mostly "read" the audio edition in my car on my horrible commute.


The audio edition of The Economist is absolutely fantastic, as well read as it is well written, a pleasure to listen to.


Ars Technica, Qaiku, Twitter. Also, Google Reader:

From your 385 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,616 items, clicked 39 items

For non-tech news I read Skuuppi, which is a bit like HN for Finnish news: http://www.skuuppi.com/


Daily : Somethingawful Forum, my Tumblr feed, Newspaper on iPad.

Weekly : A bunch of design feeds : Abduzeedo, Minimalmac, Bornrich, Joshspear.com, We Make Money Not Art, Changethethought, Yummy fresh grain feed!

Monthly: Zen habits, Stepcase lifehack, Freelanceswitch, Lost Garden, Wired iPad app.


https://blog.fefe.de conspiracy - politics - technology (German) http://www.zerohedge.com/ just stumbled over this one, not sure what to make out of it yet


Zero Hedge is interesting in that it shares the philosophy of the Economist i.e anonymity. In a world now, where everyone appears to be shouting or seeking attention, it's quite refreshing. (Although both could improve the structure of their commenting)


yup, reading fefe too. there should be more blogs like this.


I really like David Brooks' column: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped...

He's the pg of the political world.


Less Wrong.


Books


For purely non-technical (but still very educated and inspired--it helps to be well-rounded): www.newyorker.com, www.givemesomethingtoread.com, www.longform.org, and soon www.grantland.com.


http://hubski.com

Like HN meets twitter.


second.

hubski is my daily stop for interesting reads.


Perl IronMan : http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/

AboutBSD : http://aboutbsd.net/


I've got over 200 feeds in Google Reader. However I broke down in daily readings, weekly readings and monthly. Techcrunch, Mashable, Hack Forum and Delicious feeds are on daily


SAI Techmeme Quora ReadWriteWeb Inside Facebook Gmail/GoogleTV/Goolge/Google Docs blogs engadget (although rarely nowadays)

Outside of tech: Yahoo News SFGate Sportsline HuffPo - occasionally


reddit!


What subreddits do you follow?


Here are mine (minus the silly time wasting ones):

art, askscience, books, buddhism, cfb, coding (it's dead these days though), cooking, fitness, frugal, listentothis, lgbt, longtext, netsec, oney, philosophyofscience, scifi, skeptic, space, sports, starcraft, truereddit, twoxchromosomes,


  offbeat
  truereddit
  philosophy 
  mensrights
  netsec
  sysadmin
  books
  coding
  design
  malefashionaadvice
  investing
  outdoors
  campingandhiking
  opendirectories
  technology
  android
  programming
  woahdude
  coding
  tldr
  unitedkingdom
  freethought
  interiordesign
  earthporn
  webcomics


my favorite is /r/iphone


The best of mine:

/r/machinelearning

/r/javascript

/r/php

/r/coding

/r/programming

/r/askscience


Same here. Now a days I just go to http://www.aggreddit.com for all my serious reddit needs..

programming

gamedev

linux

asm

C_Programming

cpp

cpudesign

embedded

gpgpu

hpc

coding

python

csbooks

compsci


My daily read includes BusinessInsider, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, AllThingsDigital, AllFacebook, InsideFacebook, SocialTimes, Quora, Wired, GigaOm, and Mashable.


Mostly tech blogs and links I come across on twitter. I try to keep my rss subscriptions to a minimum. If I don't read 5-10 consecutive posts I ditch the feed.


Everyone's already mentioned plenty of sites on the net, so I'll just list my quad-fecta of magazines/periodicals - Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, NYRB.


On the web: 1. Hacker News 2. Techcrunch 3. Documentaries on Youtube 4. Interviews of Warren Buffett

Physical: 1. The Economist 2. Books by James Gleick 3. Reader's Digest


I keep trying to get more active in math.stackexchange.


My day starts with http://slashdot.org

Then HN, then general news. I guess I'm a sucker for Technology news.


Books: The Bible, Kundera, Bolano, Borges, Sebald, Robert Caro, Naipaul, Milosz, Blake

Web: Exiledonline, Matt Taibbi, Borderland Beat, NYRB


http://utopic.me/ to provide personal automated reading suggestions.


reddit, somethingawful


Anyone else is in for StackOverflow ??


http://www.harpers.org

get yourself a subscription. today.


http://www.blacklistednews.com/


tech news: http://sayem.me

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

http://finance.yahoo.com/

Twitter, Reddit, StackOverflow, High Scalability


New Yorker, Inc., Wired, Daring Fireball, and a whole bunch of stuff in Google Reader


http://market-ticker.org


I recently deleted all my RSS subscriptions and went Twitter only for "feeds".


Can someone play with the data and report where the HN links are coming from?


i hope HN stops posting interesting news so i could be productive with my job


http://www.techdirt.com


Old media WSJ and nytimes...


http://supapaper.com/


Do the colors provide any meaning? Like maybe red is 'hotter news' or something?


No it's purely for skimming through and making the difference between the articles title. As a separator if you like.


Anything Neal Asher writes "Gridlinked", "The Skinner", "Line War"


Not read, but I listen to NPR's Planet Money podcast


TechMeme, Quora


When I feel like I want to read something other than HN (which basically means I'm _looking_ for distractions) I know something is wrong with me.


Twitter, Quora, and Reddit.


Reddit

Local news website

HN

Email


    > Local news website
It is funny you mention that. I feel as though I have almost forgotten about my local news until recently. Now that I watch the majority of my TV through either Netflix or Hulu, I never catch the 11pm news. I don't subscribe to my local paper, and never went to their website.

I find it amazing on how disconnected I was with anything happening in my current area since all I read was national news or tech websites. I recommend everyone taking a look at their local news website at least once a day to keep up with what is happening around you!


In small areas, the local news website is much more important usually. I can't imagine much of it would apply if I lived in LA or NY,NY - that or there would just be SO MUCH to follow it wouldn't be worth the time.

In my small community, the local news website applies to things happening in my back-yard sometimes.


Dzone


GigaOm , TechCruch for me


alleyinsider.com feedly.com techmeme.com quora.com trendslate.com


Techcrunch and Quora


Slashdot and Hacker Newwwwwever mind.

Also enjoy StackExchange reading material.


not much, hardly even read hacker news any more.

only daily ones: gaming forum for a game a bunch of us used to play back in the day. email

too busy coding.


reddit.com


Twitter


gmail, physics books.


The newspapers. All of them.


http://roem.ru/ (in russian)

A site with news and inside stories on Russian web businesses. It's not technical and pretty narrow, on other hand - big business owners and managers routinely write there (for example, Pavel Durov, creator of Russian social network #1, wrote a few articles).


Apart from HN (i have them all in my bookmarks toolbar):

http://twitter.com

http://arstechnica.com

http://news.bbc.co.uk

http://www.boingboing.net

http://spiegel.de/international/

http://www.technologyreview.com/

http://www.engadget.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/ (yes , i am that guy)

http://europe.wsj.com/home-page

every wednesday:

http://theoatmeal.com/

http://xkcd.com/

shameless plug:

http://textchannels.com/


I used to have a huge list of feeds in google reader. After start reading HN , now I don't even bother to open google reader. If the blog is good enough to read , I am sure it will come in HN in a matter of minutes. Thanks HN :)




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