275 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] thread
Bruce Dawson's https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ is excellent resource for obscure and complex details of native code and modern platforms.
+1! Do you have any other recommendations from Windows land who still stay active and relevant?
Sorry, nothing else in this genre comes to mind. There is always Agner Fog's optimization resources which are mind blowingly awesome if you worry about the performance of your C or C++ code like I do - his site is in https://www.agner.org/ and the optimization manuals are in https://www.agner.org/optimize/#manuals (I suggest starting from optimizing_cpp.pdf)
Everyone would already know: The Old New Thing
Matt Levine on Bloomberg for everything finance: While I am only medium interested in finance, Matt Levine makes it all sound farcical. It is usually a fun read, and I learn something about how the world runs (or usually in which creative ways people abused the way the world runs) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

Derek Lowe on medicine. He is an absolute expert on the topic, but doesn't mind to speak his opinion and to explain it on a sufficient level for me. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/

Scott Aaronson on algorithms and quantum physics. Scott is a great communicator, and of course an absolute expert on these topics. He does sometimes go a bit off topic though. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

Sabine Hossenfelder on experimental physics. Expert on these topics, and has a (very) critical opinion, which is refreshing in this field and can give a feel about what is going on. Lately, she did shift to more pedagogical explanations which are a bit too low level for me, but the blogposts still contain gems from time to time. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/

Glenn Greenwald on journalism and politics. While he is very sharp and opinionated, he digs up new stories and has an out-of-the-box but well-informed opinion I largely agree with (I'm an anarchist). https://greenwald.substack.com/

Scott Aaronson is IMHO worth reading even when he writes about non-technical topics. And he tags his posts with categories such as "Quantum", "Complexity", "Rage Againts Doofosity", etc, so it's easy to skip topics that you aren't interested in.
Hey, I really like diff.blog. I just made an account.

A little feedback would be to add an "About page" so I can understand what is it without having to login.

And a pat on the back for not abusing Github access permissions. Felt really good to see "email (read-only)" access.

Keep the good work!

Thanks! There is an FAQ at https://diff.blog/FAQ/. It used to be linked form the left sidebar. But I made a major website redesign a couple of months back, which removed that sidebar. Will add it back soon :)
https://ma.tt I wonder how much that domain costs. 2-letter domains are always sold at a premium regardless of TLD.
Google's featured snippet answer suggests that the owner of that domain has a net worth of $400mm USD. It's indeed a nice flex.

I had a cheap five-byte domain once, but the registrar decided one day to up my renewal fee to five figures, so I don't any longer.

Matt Mullenweg actually registered the domain for $500 per year for the first 2 years :)

.tt domains are quite expensive in general so I think he got a pretty good deal for ma.tt

https://ma.tt/2008/01/on-matt/

Interesting conincidence, the .blog TLD used by diff.blog, is owned by Automattic, the company started by Matt Mullenweg :)

Ahh. Another coincidence. It's 18 years today since the first wordpres release was made by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.
According to nic.tt it ranges from 600 to 2000$ for 3 years. If the domain was bought on aftermarket, it was probably way more expansive though
You may check https://hnblogs.substack.com/ if you want to add new blogs. These are usually 'less professional' blogs than the ones you just quoted though
Cool. I will go through them and ones that looks interesting :)
Tried out diff.blog but it doesn't render anything but the header with javascript off.
Yeah. Sorry. I haven't done any work to make load it without JS :(
I maintain a feed aggregator focused only on ruby at http://rubyland.news -- doesn't have the interactive/personalization features of yours, you have gone quite a bit furhter!

But anyway, is there a way I can suggest blogs to diff.blog? (including my own). Or, if you'd like to just scrape the ones I've already "curated", feel free. http://rubyland.news/sources.opml

Hey, rubyland was one of the inspirations for diff.blog. Thanks for building it :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23914685

> But anyway, is there a way I can suggest blogs to diff.blog? (including my own).

Yes. You can suggest new blogs at https://diff.blog/suggest. The recommended way to add your own blog is by going to profile settings since that allow you to change the URL as well as refresh the feed. But both are fine :)

> Or, if you'd like to just scrape the ones I've already "curated", feel free. http://rubyland.news/sources.opml

Yeah. I will give it a go one of these days. Hard part is I need to get the GitHub handle of each of these blogs since all the blog in diff.blog should have an associated GitHub account.

Aw, nice! Rubyland.news has been a low-feedback endeavor, I'm never sure anyone has even noticed it, so that's nice to hear!

You have definitely taken it a bunch of steps further with diff.blog! I thought about that but definitely didn't have the free-side-project time for it.

I love all efforts to keep blogging and RSS feeds alive, in the world of gated social media!

I've always had a hard time finding new interesting dev blogs but with diff.blog I can stop having that problem! Thanks for it, will be using it from now on!
I really like the look of diff.blog , signed up! Is there any way to subscribe to my feed as an RSS feed?
Don't have a feature for that at the moment but I have added it to my todolist.
I wish people wrote some description and not just ten links.
Not sure if you mean "individuals" compared to companies or organizations, or actually just solo bloggers, so I'll include a few that have more than one individual author but are "personal".

https://marginalrevolution.com/ - on economics but so much else

https://avc.com/ - Fred has some of the best startup insights

https://abovethecrowd.com/ - Gurley doesn't blog much but when he does it's great

Luke Smith's article on the 4 causes is great and captures an important idea about what modernism lacks.

if you like melting asphalt (probably the best blog I've ever read) you'll probably also like:

- Venkatesh Rao's https://ribbonfarm.com (it's very much a diamonds-in-the-rough type blog imo)

- the farnam street blog https://fs.blog/ consistently puts out good content

- /sometimes/ lesswrong puts out good ideas when they're not busy modelling spherical cows in a vacuum - https://www.lesswrong.com/

- if you're really into systems theory and don't mind reading strongly management-consultant oriented prose (can't abide it myself but the content is good), https://thesystemsthinker.com/

> https://lukesmith.xyz/blog

Luke Smith has some interesting ideas about free software and his Linux/Vim tutorials are very good. However, he's someone who harbors a lot of racist and hateful views. Don't believe me? Watch his livestreams.

His recent crusade to get many people on Monero likely stems from him getting busted[1] for accepting a $30,000 donation in Bitcoin from a French white nationalist who donated[2] $500,000 in Bitcoin earl to far-right groups last year, some of whom were directly involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/12/far-right-open...

[2]: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/capitol-riot-bitcoin-do...

Please add a one line description of the blog's URL/name and hopefully another line why you like it so much.
Agreed. A naked list of links isn't much use. There already seem to be hundreds of them here and no way to evaluate most on a glance without clicking every single one.
Surprised I haven't seen https://www.swyx.io/ mentioned for articles in the JS world and general dev stuff

https://kentcdodds.com/ Is also great for JS, React especially testing opinions

ah just got notified of this shoutout via f5bot.. very kind of you! i am def still figuring out what im doing with the blog, all i know is its a long term game haha
I've gotten out of the habit of checking blogs on the regular (which is a bad thing), but I do catch up on these when it crosses my mind:

- http://rachelbythebay.com/

- https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Have you thought of getting a RSS feed reader so you don't have to check? I use Feedbro which is also a browser extension so its very easy to see when theres a new post.
Bret Devereaux's https://acoup.blog/ is a fantastic weekly read. I was drawn in by some of the comparisons between Lord of the Rings and historical battle practices [0][1]. Right now, he's in the middle of a series on how Paradox Interactive games portray history, what things are accurate/inaccurate, and how to best connect with students whose interest in history was sparked by Paradox games [2].

[0] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/siege-of-gondor/

[1] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-battle-of-helms-...

[2] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/teaching-paradox/

I clicked on this thread wondering how high in the comment section would his blog appear.

I'm not disappointed.

I have wondered why a historian's blog ends up being a regular favorite on Hacker News. I would imagine because it is nearly surgical in its descriptions of technical and mechanical processes. He goes into granular step-by-step detail about how things work, both at a low-level and at a high-level. Not unlike the work of a programmer!
I mean, when discussing archers, he actually brought physics, empirical studies, historical anecdotes, analyzed artwork, and compared to modern video games and TV.

The guy thinks and that's fun to watch.

Thanks for linking the paradox post, very interesting!

Unfortunately, this writer is seriously overusing parentheses and this disrupts the reading flow.

Disrupts the reading flow for you.

I find his parentheticals, italics, and bolding, make the structure of the thoughts behind his words more clear to me.

I appreciate this style of writing, at least for these sorts of topics.

People are different.

Thank you for this heads up. I've just dived into a discussion/state of play/essay of medieval medicine by an expert in the field. I'm now in the middle of a personal paradigm shift, if that's not too ridiculous!

This is part of a longer paragraph with some more context but it is indicative of the treasures to be found:

"So, we have a doubly difficult time understanding what medieval medicine was, because the people who practiced didn’t write about it, and the people who wrote about medicine thought practice was beneath them."

Dan Luu! https://danluu.com/

He talks about systems performance and it's super deep and detailed. Highly respectable and inspiring.

daedtech.com - Erik Dietrich - software, consulting, entrepreneurship, slow travel while doing the aforementioned
Warning, better copy paste the link than clicking on it. When redirected from HN site, the displayed page is an NSFW page, probably shows jwz's aversion to hordes coming via HN.
Check out my blogroll: https://jlelse.blog/blogroll

Do you have blogrolls as well?

This is the coolest shit I've seen today.

Great take on a webring.

Thanks! — let's adopt this, wow.

Blogrolls are good things, but unfortunately they aren't universal these days.