Ask HN: What software/tech blogs/magazines should I be reading in 2024? Currently read the mainstream things: Stratechery, Wired, Verge, Arstechnica, etc. but looking to diversify my sources in 2024. Any recommendations? |
Ask HN: What software/tech blogs/magazines should I be reading in 2024? Currently read the mainstream things: Stratechery, Wired, Verge, Arstechnica, etc. but looking to diversify my sources in 2024. Any recommendations? |
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.
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.
Every year I look for one, and every year I come up empty handed. Every newsletter is daily at a minimum.
"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.
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!
- 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.
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.
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.
# 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.
Happy new year btw, thanks for posting this!
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.
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.
> 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.
like Stratechery meets Money Stuff
> Stratechery meets Money Stuff
Couldn't imagine more glowing praise for a newsletter. Bookmarked.
The former is more CS x economy. The latter is more Science x history x economy.
You might learn something. If you don't laugh, you might be too serious. See a professional.
He explores old day's tech with insider stories, at least if you childhood was Windows-based like me.
Very relevant on this AI age
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.
Which Intel manuals in particular? How much relevance remains in Intel's content given the popularity of ARM nowadays?
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.
FT, WSJ, NYT, one Indian paper from back home. I don't read all of course, just pick the ones I want to read from RSS reader and any interesting things I come across on HN and some subreddits, also via RSS.
They usually don't cover tech that much, but it's reasonably good politics and business.
Happy to also add you to the recipient list!
I found having a Dropbox folder with hundreds of books to be both completely useless and paralyzing. I kept switching books, or i was unable to pick one due to too much choice and ended up just scrolling instagram or Reddit.