I mean no disrespect to the maintainers, but am I the only one who doesn't find lists like this particularly useful?
They're the kind of thing I used to bookmark, thinking that I'd come back to it at some point when I wanted to learn more about X (containers, networking, etc), but I'd never return.
I think the problem is that lists like this _feel_ good but aren't useful. They feel good to write and good to read, because you feel productive. But they don't actually fit into any flow - a learning flow, a problem-solving flow. They're just productivity porn.
As a counterpoint, I sometimes find these lists very useful when I'm trying to broaden my knowledge of something and need pointers to where to start looking.
For example, when I was learning about object capabilities recently, it was very helpful to have awesome-ocap to refer to: https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap
It feels like it's meant to follow the mission of the Whole Earth Catalog.
But I agree that it's hard to imagine the real life context in which this collection of knowledge is of high value comparing to either other books or the rest of the Internet.
I'm thinking that it would be great if web search worked to generate such a list. For example, if I searched for "list of DNS tools", it would give a list of one-line descriptions and links just like in the original article:
dnsdiag - is a DNS diagnostics and performance measurement tools.
fierce - is a DNS reconnaissance tool for locating non-contiguous IP space.
subfinder - is a subdomain discovery tool that discovers valid subdomains for websites.
sublist3r - is a fast subdomains enumeration tool for penetration testers.
amass - is tool that obtains subdomain names by scraping data sources, crawling web archives, and more.
namebench - provides personalized DNS server recommendations based on your browsing history.
massdns - is a high-performance DNS stub resolver for bulk lookups and reconnaissance.
knock - is a tool to enumerate subdomains on a target domain through a wordlist.
dnsperf - DNS performance testing tools.
dnscrypt-proxy 2 - a flexible DNS proxy, with support for encrypted DNS protocols.
dnsdbq - API client providing access to passive DNS database systems.
grimd - fast dns proxy, built to black-hole internet advertisements and malware servers.
etc.
Is that asking for too much? It seems like it should be possible -- it's basically web search but with further curation, organization, and better presentation.
This is significantly harder than it appears at first glance, because there is no way to determine whether such descriptions are correct, and they are extremely easy to game. This is the challenge that the essentially torpedoed the semantic web.
As a user you have to trust the source of the descriptions and ideally would know the process by which they were selected. Curation is hard to scale, but for things like open source software it has been done by the package manager teams. That said, try to figure out the difference between icedtea and openjdk.
If you are down in some tiny niche it might work, but imagine the descriptions that would come up for fast food restaurants near me.
Tangent: when I was young, I had a book that catalogued a whole variety of random skills (building a crossbow, making a compass, how camouflage works, etc). It was a wonderful tool for juicing my imagination and a license to build (crappy) versions of almost anything.
Reminds me a little of a certain cookbook that was very popular, certainly set the imagination wild. One fond memory was bringing a "recipe" to my highschool chemistry teacher and he actually allowed us to try it under his supervision.
Good ol Jolly Roger! Man for a bored mountain kid that was a fun book to have around. I miss that early days of the internet, it seems now so much more free thinking and assumption busting than it is now.
It feels like a gap to me, I got a lot of interest in chemistry/science in general from that book, and thankfully was able to safely experiment with it from a combination of cool science teachers and living in a rural area.
Not so practical for people growing up in cities, but I think there's a benefit in allowing kids to play around with dangerous things in a controlled way such that they better appreciate the implications of them.
I'm browsing through the list of contents and uh, everything looks both alien and magical, probably beyond my comprehension. Too many lifetimes compressed on a single seemingly never-ending page.
I feel like the list is so long that it's no longer useful. Like, it would take me hours if not days to read through all this (and from what I've skimmed, most of it doesn't seem very secretive). For something like this, I feel like the shorter the better so it can focus on THE things that are powerful and unknown, not Zsh and Vi (not that they aren't powerful ofc, but far from secret).
They're the kind of thing I used to bookmark, thinking that I'd come back to it at some point when I wanted to learn more about X (containers, networking, etc), but I'd never return.
I think the problem is that lists like this _feel_ good but aren't useful. They feel good to write and good to read, because you feel productive. But they don't actually fit into any flow - a learning flow, a problem-solving flow. They're just productivity porn.