Ask HN: List of Hacker Blogs?

I wonder if you could generate this automatically. Let me explain where I'm coming from. I made the Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator (http://feedworld.net/toc), and part of the reason I didn't set up more aggregators with the software was that you need domain-knowledge to create the blogrolls.

My idea was that you could start from 2 or 3 "seeds" on a given topic, find which blogs they are linking to, filter them by pagerank or technorati rank or whatever, and use an off-the-shelf machine learning tool to determine if they are on the same topic. I never got around to it; other projects I'm working on took up all of my time.

But if you can build this intelligence, you can create aggregators/memetrackers/whatever for an unlimited number of topics. And further create communities around each one and so on.

If someone wants to collaborate on this idea, let me know.

P.S. To build my aggregator, I started off with planet planet (http://www.planetplanet.org/), but made a bunch of improvements like automatic comment import. There is an unreleased version with a lot more features (including a google reader-like UI) that I will be happy to show anyone who's interested.

bootload · on Nov 29, 2008

"... I wonder if you could generate this automatically ..."

Combing through here ~ http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_points reveals

- http://codinghorror.com/

- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

- http://mattmaroon.com/

- http://pmarca.com/blog

- http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/

- http://raganwald.com/

- http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/

- http://catonmat.net/

- http://ejohn.org/blog

bootload · on Nov 29, 2008

and I'd add

- http://www.kk.org/

- http://scriptingnews.com

bootload · on Nov 30, 2008

and

- http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/

- http://blog.dawdle.com/

wheels · on Nov 30, 2008

Incidentally, one of the data sets that we have from a friend of ours that we're playing with internally is a collection of links from the entire German blogosphere. From there we can do queries to see which blogs are similar to others, so if you had a starting point of blogs that you liked, it can suggest others.

Completely unrelated, a while back we did start putting together a planet for some of the folks from HN. It didn't really take off, but there's still some good reading there:

http://planetstartup.directededge.com/

brandnewlow · on Nov 29, 2008

In a perfect world, that's exactly how I'd do it, too. Right now though, I'm still working out the bugs on how to get the mix of sources right and make the presentation interesting. Machine learning is being applied to which sources make the front page and lead the memes, based on clicks from readers. Ideally, the "picking up" of sources would also be automated as well.

cperciva · on Nov 29, 2008

My blog (a combination of tarsnap, FreeBSD, and general computer security): http://www.daemonology.net/blog/

PStamatiou · on Nov 29, 2008

bookmarked your site when tarsnap beta came out/was on HN. Skimmed it briefly bit but honestly couldn't figure out how tarsnap worked so I tagged it "toread" and left it at that. ;-P Will go back through your archives now.

cperciva · on Nov 30, 2008

honestly couldn't figure out how tarsnap worked

Tell me more -- what was unclear?

PStamatiou · on Nov 30, 2008

I remember wondering if it was a local thing that I had to pay for or if it was some cloud like service that I pay for and upload to..

cperciva · on Nov 30, 2008

Tarsnap is a backup service -- you pay to store your backups on it.

And thanks for replying; knowing what people find unclear will make my life much easier when I write all the text for the tarsnap website. :-)

PStamatiou · on Nov 30, 2008

yeah i gotcha. when I first heard about it I wasn't sure if it was more a security tool or a backup tool, and/or how it compared to my current S3 setup.

cperciva · on Nov 30, 2008

Tarsnap is both a security tool and a backup tool. It's a tool for secure backups; and good backups, as a risk mitigation tool, are an important part of security.

toby · on Nov 29, 2008

I'll add mine here, I try not to participate in blog noise and only write about things I've actually, so it might not be so interesting for memetracking:

http://blog.kiwitobes.com/

sh1mmer · on Nov 29, 2008

So my blog is http://kid666.com/ which has a blogroll of a bunch of engineers who work(ed) for Yahoo in Europe.

There is also the Yahoo blog directory which is probably hideously out of date. (http://kid666.com/yahoo-blogs-employee-bloggers-directory/)

PStamatiou · on Nov 29, 2008

I'd love to plug my blog here - I've touched on coding a few times but it's generally tech with a dabbling of what's up with my startup here and there and problems we have/how i get around them.

http://paulstamatiou.com

timcederman · on Nov 29, 2008

Ahh, you're the source of the "German keyboard" Apple repair story. Saw that linked on the Consumerist the other week.

evdawg · on Nov 29, 2008

lol-- isn't your blog banned from digg?

anthonyrubin · on Nov 29, 2008

A few I haven't seen mentioned:

http://blog.plover.com/

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/

http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/

brlewis · on Dec 1, 2008

I'm a hacker and I have 3 blogs.

http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/ is mostly about OurDoings but with content geared toward people interested in web startups.

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/ is more random.

http://ourdoings/com/index.html is geared toward customers and potential customers of OurDoings, i.e. people who want to share photos that tell a story.

ricardo · on Nov 29, 2008

Steve Yegge's essays are a great read: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/

raw-- · on Nov 29, 2008

Share! Would love to check your memetracker out!

jrockway · on Nov 30, 2008

Feel free to add my blog, http://blog.jrock.us, to your reading list. It is usually about Perl or Lisp, and I try to keep it instructional instead of "omg this is shiny" or "why I hate $programming_language_foo". Some of that creeps in from time to time, and I apologize in advance :)