Slightly contrarian perspective: I'm trying to read less temporal (things that matter now) and more fundamental (stuff that mattered 1+ year ago and will still matter in 1+ year, with even wider intervals for non-tech content).
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've been reading all my news on Saturday, I didn't know what happened with SamA at OpenAI for an entire week while it was all anyone would talk about. I just waited until my Saturday slot and now I know probably as much as anyone.
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.
That hasn't changed from before, just regular ones everyone uses.
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.
Big +1 to this. Much of the programming stuff I've read that's made a big difference to me and my skills and career has been the older "classic" and fundamental stuff. Unless it's directly related to the specific tools you're working with on your current project, and even specific issues with those tools, maybe let it age before you spend time on it.
"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.
This is great and all, but in the spirit of the original question, can you share any blogs or sites you like to go to that discuss or review this fundamental stuff?
I am trying to do this as well, but being surrounded by news/social/stream outlets that just push unnecessary hype its hard to achieve this. Any recommendation on how to filter out the junk?
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!
I have a gigantic Dropbox folder with hundreds of PDF tech books that I am slowly working through. The focus is on the canonical and classic over the hippest or latest new thing. There have been a number of books that I read when they were fairly new that are classics now, like some of the Wiley titles on networking. It's one of the best things you can do for your career. Whenever you have some extended downtime, instead of hopping on social media and doomscrolling, open up this folder and keep working through books you need to read and understand.
I did the complete opposite: I threw away almost all my books, digital or physical. I now restrict myself to having two books I’m actively reading at a time, one fiction and one non-fiction. If I reach the final 15% of either one I allow myself to buy a new book, not before. This has massively increased the number of finished books.
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.
It is true that for it to work you need to have enough discipline to not get distracted by the other books, sticking to one title until you finish it or at least extract the optimal value out of it.
Read the Mythical Man Month. If you have ever managed a software project, it will ring true and right like really good mythology. Write down pithy parts to steal for future slides in presentations to management.
- 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.
My approach is mostly to curate your news/social/stream feed to individual people that post the sort of things you like, and to slower-moving publications. Limit your follows on social media. Prefer blogs and RSS over Twitter-style social. And/or read journals/magazines/books and reviews of them instead.
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.
RSS and a designated slot to consume your feeds in a reasonably systematic manner.
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.
I think a lot of good tech bloggers (and I try to be one of them) are also trying to focus on content that is less of-the-moment in nature. See Dan Luu's blog for great examples.
Dan Luu is great. If he's up your alley, you may also like Steve Sinofsky ("Hardcore Software"), Raymond Chen ("The Old New Thing"), and if you're in to the business & finance side of things, Patrick McKenzie aka patio11 ("Bits About Money").
Same, but writing. I’m very deliberately avoiding things that might not be relevant 10 years from now. This means rarely writing about specific technologies / languages / implementations, and instead focusing on concepts.
My gut tells me this would also work for news. A lot of evidence to support the opposite of what was reported tends to appear 1-2 years later but that never gets reported on as much as the original story.
I strongly recommend slogging through both the old and new testaments in that case. Bang for buck, you're not going to find a better lens on western paradigmatics
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.
None of them. Study Knuth. Study the Intel manuals. Study “The Art of Multiprocessor Programming”. Study compilers. Study TCP/IP. Study algorithms and data structures. Write lots of code for all of those things.
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.
Good knowledge of fundamentals translate well into high level work.
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.
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.
I miss the days of printed manuals, or even manuals at all. I killed a big software purchase years ago because they did not even have a PDF manual. The jerks told us to use their forums. No way I would spend money with such arrogant pr_cks. Needless to say, I find myself spending real coin on manuals on ebay. They are worth it.
Agreed, many HN posts discussing articles/posts from the aforementioned sites have comments that give more insight than TFA and maybe even corrections. Which you would not get by reading the articles/posts alone.
I've recently started reading bluesnews again after a 15+ year hiatus. I love how the site seems to be more or less exactly the same. Runs great on all my devices (crazy I have to point that out in modern times).
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.
I second bluesnews. It reminds me of a bygone era when news aggregators like bluesnews were all curated by a person/small team and while the content is not exhaustive, it is actually enough.
"Communications of the ACM" (https://cacm.acm.org/) is a great source for a variety of topics. It recently went digital-only and is included in an ACM membership.
> 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.
This. Very high-quality writeups. Also, one should read Roots of Progress newsletters - I found the signal:noise ratio extremely high for these two newsletters.
The former is more CS x economy. The latter is more Science x history x economy.
In addition to the answers here, I'd recommend checking with your local library. I recently found out that mine has a subscription to Udemy. They have tech magazines as well. A great resource that can fly under the radar sometimes.
NextApex -- my eclectic digest (nextapex.co) with a newsletter at nextapex.beehiiv.com -- basically covering science, tech, ai breakthrus in a 3-min rundown. Made a dynamic link sharing site that operates like HN to go along with it and make collation easier.
I apologize for this blatant self promotion but if you want to hear about science and tech news with a strong dose of humor, check out. https://technoscreed.substack.com
You might learn something. If you don't laugh, you might be too serious. See a professional.
I want to read a ton of stuff on physics and science. The past few weeks I've read about thermodynamics, next I want to read about quantum physics, optics, then math. Any recommendations for a beginner?
Various book sites come to mind that include science as well as programming internet computing
rather than get in trouble to advertising their URI, just find a book for sale you want, and google the ISBN-10 ISBN-13 with other criteria like filetype:pdf and use the tools to limit your search to the last year, month etc
This website only has free/creative commons and/or older books
https://freecomputerbooks.com/
This website I use for tech and bio is creative commons
https://www.intechopen.com/
And of course for the bleeding edge with or without code all the arxiv pre-print sites.
I would love any recommendations for physical magazines. I know they are mostly ads and yada yada, but I like to sit down with an actual magazine for some reason.
I strongly recommend Foreign Affairs magazine (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/). It's full of essays from the serious policy and academic establishment. You might disagree with them heartily, but they are well reasoned and don't hew to any particular political viewpoint (or rather, the magazine has contributions from all sides). About $60 USD per year for six issues plus an app, downloadable articles and audio, and website.
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.