Bret Devereaux's https://acoup.blog/ is a fantastic weekly read. I was drawn in by some of the comparisons between Lord of the Rings and historical battle practices [0][1]. Right now, he's in the middle of a series on how Paradox Interactive games portray history, what things are accurate/inaccurate, and how to best connect with students whose interest in history was sparked by Paradox games [2].
I have wondered why a historian's blog ends up being a regular favorite on Hacker News. I would imagine because it is nearly surgical in its descriptions of technical and mechanical processes. He goes into granular step-by-step detail about how things work, both at a low-level and at a high-level. Not unlike the work of a programmer!
I mean, when discussing archers, he actually brought physics, empirical studies, historical anecdotes, analyzed artwork, and compared to modern video games and TV.
Thank you for this heads up. I've just dived into a discussion/state of play/essay of medieval medicine by an expert in the field. I'm now in the middle of a personal paradigm shift, if that's not too ridiculous!
This is part of a longer paragraph with some more context but it is indicative of the treasures to be found:
"So, we have a doubly difficult time understanding what medieval medicine was, because the people who practiced didn’t write about it, and the people who wrote about medicine thought practice was beneath them."
I highly recommend “A half-hour to learn Rust” if you’re interested in Rust but haven’t tried it yet. The article is very engaging with many small snippets that make sense to a person with a good programming background but no specific Rust knowledge.
I have been also building a developer blog aggregator called https://diff.blog to make it super easy to disover and follow dev blogs. Would love if you folks can give it a try :)
Thanks! There is an FAQ at https://diff.blog/FAQ/. It used to be linked form the left sidebar. But I made a major website redesign a couple of months back, which removed that sidebar. Will add it back soon :)
I maintain a feed aggregator focused only on ruby at http://rubyland.news -- doesn't have the interactive/personalization features of yours, you have gone quite a bit furhter!
But anyway, is there a way I can suggest blogs to diff.blog? (including my own). Or, if you'd like to just scrape the ones I've already "curated", feel free. http://rubyland.news/sources.opml
> But anyway, is there a way I can suggest blogs to diff.blog? (including my own).
Yes. You can suggest new blogs at https://diff.blog/suggest. The recommended way to add your own blog is by going to profile settings since that allow you to change the URL as well as refresh the feed. But both are fine :)
Yeah. I will give it a go one of these days. Hard part is I need to get the GitHub handle of each of these blogs since all the blog in diff.blog should have an associated GitHub account.
Aw, nice! Rubyland.news has been a low-feedback endeavor, I'm never sure anyone has even noticed it, so that's nice to hear!
You have definitely taken it a bunch of steps further with diff.blog! I thought about that but definitely didn't have the free-side-project time for it.
I love all efforts to keep blogging and RSS feeds alive, in the world of gated social media!
You may check https://hnblogs.substack.com/ if you want to add new blogs. These are usually 'less professional' blogs than the ones you just quoted though
I've always had a hard time finding new interesting dev blogs but with diff.blog I can stop having that problem! Thanks for it, will be using it from now on!
https://cheapskatesguide.org -- Cheapskate's Guide to Computers and Internet. Low-end and frugal computing in the 21st century. Long, opinionated posts on a pink(!) background.
http://ranprieur.com/ -- Ran Prieur. Frugality, societal collapse, "dropping out", and beyond. Has been constantly blogging for ages; it's really interesting to see how his views have changed in time.
http://joeyh.name/ -- Joey Hess, former long-time Debian developer, author of git-annex. Frugal living and computing in the wilderness (he used to do everything on a 9-inch Dell Mini 9).
https://datagubbe.se/ -- Carl Svensson. Great long-form essays on frugal computing and, uh, what has gone wrong after 1994 or so.
http://len.falken.ink/ -- I just really like the "layout", even if it feels a little pretentious to some. IIRC, his essay "Writing for the Internet across a Human Lifetime" also had some feedback on HN.
http://viznut.fi/en/ -- Viznut. Demoscene, "low-end technical extremism", permacomputing. Updates are rare, but the older pieces are well worth a read.
Agreed. A naked list of links isn't much use. There already seem to be hundreds of them here and no way to evaluate most on a glance without clicking every single one.
It's fascinating to see how dependent modern tech is on a constant, or at least semi-regular, internet connection for tokens, etc., and how that "model" fails completely on the open ocean.
I first saw Dan Luu's list of programming books (https://danluu.com/programming-books/) when researching CLRS during my sophomore year of high school. This list and his insights on pure CS are really enjoyable to read and pique my interest. Also, his post on latency [4] secured the idea that minuscule UX improvements is as important as UI and that we should optimize for both. jvns introduced me to the Recurse Center and dluu confirmed that I could, in fact, participate and do something cool. (I also took his Hugo template for my own blog which has served me well though this week I'll be designing my own with cues from the latter.)
Arun is a physical/digital design nerd and someone I read religiously. From photography to the design minutiae of the Apple Card [5] /Mac Pro [6] /iPod HiFi [7] his in-depth posts really allowed me to appreciate even the smallest of design choices and how they play into the larger, big picture, design system as a whole.
Sorry, nothing else in this genre comes to mind. There is always Agner Fog's optimization resources which are mind blowingly awesome if you worry about the performance of your C or C++ code like I do - his site is in https://www.agner.org/ and the optimization manuals are in https://www.agner.org/optimize/#manuals (I suggest starting from optimizing_cpp.pdf)
A lot of the tech ones I follow have already been listed so I will try to list some that others may not be aware of.
1. Applied Divinity Studies. Rationalist adjacent. Obviously influenced by Scott Alexander, but less optimistic, a bit more cynical. - https://applieddivinitystudies.com/
2. Scott Locklin's blog. He used to post on HN. Mostly covers tech related things (but physical tech, not web stuff). Many HN readers will find him too abrasive and will miss the point. - https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/
3. Granola Shotgun. Hard to pin down what this blog is about exactly, but generally focused on tradeoffs between different configurations of the built environment. The author will baffle the ideologically prejudiced. He's a gay guy in SF who has nice things to say about Mormons and rednecks. - https://www.granolashotgun.com/
Paul Graham is great and his blog is one of the most quotable and inspiring blogs I have ever read. I even bought Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. It is a must read for anyone attempting to found a new start up company.
Not sure if you mean "individuals" compared to companies or organizations, or actually just solo bloggers, so I'll include a few that have more than one individual author but are "personal".
Not only that it makes less work for you, and takes up less space in the browser. As in you don't have to visit each site on a regular basis, and you don't have a whole bunch of bookmarks sitting around.
And even though it's not a written blog, a special mention goes to Ben Eater's website, which links to his fantastic YouTube series on building an 8-bit CPU from logic chips, and on building a 6502 computer.
Strong second, and I'll recommend his Analog Antiquarian blog as well, covering general history in a pleasantly lyrical style. Jimmy can tell a story like nobody's business! Definitely worth your while.
Luke Smith has some interesting ideas about free software and his Linux/Vim tutorials are very good. However, he's someone who harbors a lot of racist and hateful views. Don't believe me? Watch his livestreams.
His recent crusade to get many people on Monero likely stems from him getting busted[1] for accepting a $30,000 donation in Bitcoin from a French white nationalist who donated[2] $500,000 in Bitcoin earl to far-right groups last year, some of whom were directly involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Luke Smith's article on the 4 causes is great and captures an important idea about what modernism lacks.
if you like melting asphalt (probably the best blog I've ever read) you'll probably also like:
- Venkatesh Rao's https://ribbonfarm.com (it's very much a diamonds-in-the-rough type blog imo)
- the farnam street blog https://fs.blog/ consistently puts out good content
- /sometimes/ lesswrong puts out good ideas when they're not busy modelling spherical cows in a vacuum - https://www.lesswrong.com/
- if you're really into systems theory and don't mind reading strongly management-consultant oriented prose (can't abide it myself but the content is good), https://thesystemsthinker.com/
+1 on Brain Pickings. Recently discovered this and have been using the Surprise Me button to find random goods to read
https://www.brainpickings.org/surprise/
Exactly. People usually try to optimize for "first impressions". However, if you visit a site regularly, you're _only_ interested in the content, everything else is unnecessary, bloated noise.
I like Kalzumeus' and your blog a lot. And Julia. Tania started out OK, but everything she's produced in the past 2 years is insipid. She seems pretty unlikable.
- Mark Brooker :: https://brooker.co.za/blog long time lead engineer @ AWS blogging technical info on distributed systems
- Chris Wellons :: https://nullprogram.com/ lots of interesting explorations in code
Have you thought of getting a RSS feed reader so you don't have to check? I use Feedbro which is also a browser extension so its very easy to see when theres a new post.
Australia Politics, an independant and thoughtful analysis but an journalist: https://johnmenadue.com/
South East Asian Affairs, a collation of a scholars own writings and compliaiton of others that they find interesting: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/
and of course WaitbutWhy for the joy of reading about the universe as it relates to ourselves, all through great doodles: https://waitbutwhy.com/
Christian Robert https://xianblog.wordpress.com/
Andrew Gelman https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/
Deborah Mayo https://errorstatistics.com/
Frank Harrell https://www.fharrell.com/
Radford Neal https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/
Variance Explained http://varianceexplained.org/
Larry Wasserman (inactive) https://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/
20% Statistician https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/
Jim Albert https://baseballwithr.wordpress.com/author/bayesball/
The R blog https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/
Graphic Detail, by The Economist https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/rss.xml
The Royal Society Data Science Section https://rssdss.design.blog/blog-feed/
Many good “blogs” can be created by following good users on Cross Validated. StackExchange provides RSS feeds of user activity.
Many statistics journals also offer RSS feeds. These feeds are sometimes hidden, but an RSS reader like NewsBlur can discover them for you. This post[1] is a good starter collection of statistics journal RSS feeds.
Several of the blogs I enjoy are already linked within this thread, but I recently started reading a coworker's blog after finding out he'd spent more than 20 years consistently writing articles online, mostly about tech and philosophy. The archive has some very interesting articles: https://stpeter.im/journal/
Of those posted, I will +1 daringfireball, jwz, idlewords, filippo, and danluu as people worth reading.
My favorite is Aaron Swart'z weblog. Unfortunately it is no longer active but the webserver is still running thanks to friends of his http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/archive
The best one, of course, is Bret Devereaux's acoup (https://acoup.blog). It's the only one I follow with any regularity. It's a weekly blog focussing on history and sometimes on its interaction with popular media, like GoT or EU4.
I also enjoy reading Martin Tournoij's blog whenever he updates it (https://www.arp242.net/). He's the author of goatcounter and writes about tech and sometimes certain social issues in tech.
Vedica Kant and Anmol Maini write about the Indian startup ecosystem at https://www.kuwi.news/ (it's a substack newsletter). I don't read it all the time but certain pieces are pretty good.
And, finally, to plug my own self, I write about health economics, health policy, and systems thinking at Hawk Radius (https://hawkradius.com)
I love Matt Pharr's blog [0]. He's one of the authors of the Physically Based Rendering book [1] and his blog is mostly centered around that topic, with really well written and interesting articles.
https://brandur.org has lots of interesting posts about databases, especially Postgres. Also posts about interesting technical problems and their solutions. One of my favorites is this one about implementing an idempotent API:
ah just got notified of this shoutout via f5bot.. very kind of you! i am def still figuring out what im doing with the blog, all i know is its a long term game haha
Zeynep Tufecki's (https://zeynep.me/) newsletter is pretty good, and sometimes she publishes elsewhere like The Atlantic but links back to it, which I like too.
"Every investor is making bets on the future. It’s only called speculation when you disagree with someone else’s bet.
In hindsight there was as much speculation in the 1990s that Kodak and Sears would keep their market share as there was that eToys and Pets.com would gain market share. Both were bets on the future. Both were wrong. It happens.
Of course there’s a speculation spectrum. But let’s not pretend that others speculate while you only deal with certainties."
"I am an arbitrage trader at heart. In May 2013 brimming with my experience as a delta one trader, I entered the crypto capital markets. The first trade I ever put on was buying Bitcoin from Mt. Gox, depositing them on ICBIT, then selling BTC/USD June 2013 inverse futures contracts at a premium. My first trade captured a premium of 200% per annum (PA). When the futures expired, and my PNL matched my spreadsheet calculations exactly, I thought to myself, holy shit, “Bitcoin is LIT!”"
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/ - DCRainmaker is THE run/bike/swim tech reviewer. Extremely in depth reviews with lots of pictures of any and every major tech device that hits the fitness world.
https://weatherwest.com/ - In depth explanations of mostly California weather phenomena and medium term predictions.
I use https://sumi.news - it has both a chronological feed of all posts, and a list of only the recent post for each feed. Also it gives you an email to follow newsletters with.
^^ His blog has changed quite a bit since I started reading it in 2013. Used to be more about ways to save money, but he's long since moved on to just writing about various current issues. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but I find his experiences and opinions very interesting.
- https://lukesmith.xyz/ - Quirky minimalist linux & free software stuff. I don't agree with many of his opinions but his rants are entertaining + offer a refreshing view on certain things.
My absolute favorite discovery this past year has been Monica Belevan's Covidian Aesthetics blog.
Some of the best writing about being alive right now to be found if you're interested in anthropology, art history, and philosophy. Can't recommend it enough.
Warning, better copy paste the link than clicking on it. When redirected from HN site, the displayed page is an NSFW page, probably shows jwz's aversion to hordes coming via HN.
“Futility Closet is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible.” The podcast is good too!
https://danluu.com/ - his metrics articles is how I found him out, but other articles really good too.
https://paulefou.com/ -- This is my blog. I write about self-development for software engineers and my experience with different strategies on the path
For personal finance: "Of dollars and data". Mainly short articles, approximately weekly, and, rare enough to be noted, the code for all analysis is shared.
I come across a lot of blogs when I curate for my newsletter Interesting Things [1]. Just looking through the links that have been curated in the past month or so, I would suggest:
Matt Levine on Bloomberg for everything finance: While I am only medium interested in finance, Matt Levine makes it all sound farcical. It is usually a fun read, and I learn something about how the world runs (or usually in which creative ways people abused the way the world runs) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
Derek Lowe on medicine. He is an absolute expert on the topic, but doesn't mind to speak his opinion and to explain it on a sufficient level for me.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/
Scott Aaronson on algorithms and quantum physics. Scott is a great communicator, and of course an absolute expert on these topics. He does sometimes go a bit off topic though. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
Sabine Hossenfelder on experimental physics. Expert on these topics, and has a (very) critical opinion, which is refreshing in this field and can give a feel about what is going on. Lately, she did shift to more pedagogical explanations which are a bit too low level for me, but the blogposts still contain gems from time to time.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/
Glenn Greenwald on journalism and politics. While he is very sharp and opinionated, he digs up new stories and has an out-of-the-box but well-informed opinion I largely agree with (I'm an anarchist).
https://greenwald.substack.com/
Scott Aaronson is IMHO worth reading even when he writes about non-technical topics. And he tags his posts with categories such as "Quantum", "Complexity", "Rage Againts Doofosity", etc, so it's easy to skip topics that you aren't interested in.
https://www.otherhand.org/ - An interesting blog by a Southern Californian native who recount's search and rescue missions as well as other historical and scientific research.
Big fan of https://n-o-d-e.net Lots of unique content to the DIY, maker, hacker community.
I also have a much much longer list that is always growing on my own blog, under "Blogs (Independent)":
https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/bookmarks
Obviously I was influenced by NODE's hyphenated domain. It's been a fun SEO challenge haha
If you are a manager / founder in a startup with a visionary interest in corporate culture, then you might find https://bradhenrickson.substack.com/ to be worthy of exploration. Brad has held leadership positions in a wide variety of startups and early stage companies so he is walking the talk with these personal blog posts.
I guess people mainly write what they're passionate about, and for the same reason they know a lot about those topics because they already spent a lot of time thinking about it.
It's a mix of personal interest and seeking to develop an expertise. It's also a lot of discipline. I wrote more publicly in the early part of my career, but my writing is more company-internal these days.
I'm subscribed to Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram which is a newsletter of blog posts from "Schneier on Security". I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in security practices, surveillance, data breaches, or cryptography:
Brian Hayes was once an editor of Scientific American. The blog covers a variety of topics, some related to computer science or math, some not. It reminds me a bit of the old Computer Recreations column that used to run in Scientific American.
My job is about operations research and optimization. One of my favourite blogs is "Yet Another Math Programming Consultant", that contains great articles about this topic.
https://yetanothermathprogrammingconsultant.blogspot.com/
Hasn't been updated in a while, but if you haven't read it yet and like old(-ish) tales from the games industry, check out Patrick Wyatt's Code Of Honor: https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/
Nitin discuss from a fresh perspective what it will take to prevent climate change. He distills and synthesizes books and articles into short essays that push my thinking forward.
This one looks at unintended consequences of tech and tries to understand systems. Looks at examples in history as well as recent news: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/
Anybody remember the URL of that one psychiatrist blog?
Paraphrasing a quote from there: "No, I can't be narcissistic, I hate myself too much! In fact, I spend all day looking in the mirror and thinking about how much I hate myself."
Acquisition Talk: about weapons system acquisition, government procurement, etc. Something I wanted to follow because it's a huge sector that doesn't get a lot of attention.
Jo Walton's Reading List: Not strictly a blog, but it's in my RSS feeds. I like to see what she's reading lately, and sometimes I get good recommendations from her (e.g. KJ Parker).
I like Daring Fireball and read it mainly because it is one of the default NetNewsWire feeds and I never removed it.
That said, some of his political posts are offputting - not because I disagree with them on a liberal/conservative spectrum, but because they sometimes have an "I drank the kool aid" tone.
Self-promotion: I run Thinking About Things [0], a simple newsletter that is a single link every other day to something interesting. Many subscribers have told me they've learned about a diversity of new blogs through the newsletter.
Is there an RSS feed somewhere, or possible down the line? My whole day is drenched with emails so I try to stay away from them whenever else possible.
[0] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/siege-of-gondor/
[1] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-battle-of-helms-...
[2] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/teaching-paradox/