Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow?

Dan Luu's Blog https://danluu.com/

Drew DeVault's Blog https://drewdevault.com/

For a broader scope:

Derek Sivers' Blog https://sivers.org/blog

If you love books, Maria Popova's Blog https://www.brainpickings.org/

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html

The Quantum Mechanics itself is generally over my head, but it's super well-written and interesting nonetheless.

Shtetls optimised, slate star codex, xkcd, smbc, existential comics, put a num on it, don't worry about the vase, fake nous, overcoming bias, backreaction, preposterous universe, Krebs on security, the old new thing, torrent freak, Matt Levine Bloomberg, random critical analysis, Scott Sumner econlog, the money illusion, stratechery, freakonomics, Greg mankiw blogspot, the grumpy economist, crimestory.com, likelihood of confusion, Fred Wilson AVC

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/

https://granolashotgun.com/

meaningness - Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value. https://meaningness.com/

Whereas sites like SSC and LessWrong are rationalist, both of these suggestions are predominately post-rationalist, but perhaps you’re like I was – reading the rationalist sites because I didn’t know there were post-rationalist sites

Pat Collison [1] (Co-founder, CEO Stripe) doesn't blog often, but is one of the most interesting and insightful people I have ever read

I don't know much about Alexey Guzey [2] yet, but he also has some very good posts (he writes more often and more long form, and is more similar to Gwern and SSC, in part because I think those two blogs have influenced him heavily)

[1] https://patrickcollison.com/

[2] https://guzey.com/

Vital Vegas: https://vitalvegas.com

Chicago Architecture: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org

Even though I don't live in either place, their cheeky writing styles can be a nice change from the pretense we see so often in blogs.

http://www.windytan.com/ - Oona Räisänen - great hacker of signal-related stuff (audio, video, wireless, etc), graphics, and more.

https://syonyk.blogspot.com/ - a lot of hacking around batteries, off-grid energy, and teardowns and repairs of various devices.

Non-tech related, Ken White at https://www.popehat.com/ can be quite funny, though he hasn't been posting as much lately.

You might enjoy seeing the complexity of optimising these systems that you know so well but only superficially. There may be articles about your region, and it will point out some huge mistake with the subway interchange at <x> that is totally obvious once you read about it. At that point you'll be sharpening some pitchfork and trying to find where that totally corrupt mayor from the 90s now lives. But on the way over to his nursing home you miss the connection at <x> and have enough time to finish the article, which gives a reasonable-but-not-totally-satisfying reason the problem couldn't be avoided.

You turn around, and pretty soon you're back in a happy mood. Because at least you don't have to suffer some US transit system.

(Sorry, I got slightly carried away in the narrative fiction there)

https://apenwarr.ca/log/ - programming, high level perspective

https://www.benkuhn.net/ - programming, startups, effective altruism

https://danluu.com/ - programming, hardware

https://pedestrianobservations.com/ - public transit

https://sideways-view.com/ - lots of interesting ideas, very eclectic

And plugging my own blog: https://www.jefftk.com - effective altruism, contra dance, diy, not very focused

I revisit his article "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" (link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...) every time I get the itch to rewrite code from scratch.

https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

The blog is authored by Bill McBride who correctly called the 2008 downturn and housing market blow-up. I find his data points and corresponding analysis to be much better than any coverage in major media organizations, and it has majorly influenced the financial decisions that I have made over the past decade.

At the moment he is posting about a series of 10 questions about how the US economy will perform in 2020 that are worth checking out.

Disclosure: I write for the blog from time to time.