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Ask HN: What are some good tech magazines?

237 points by basisword ↗ HN
I spend so much of my work and leisure time on devices and have been trying to reduce this. For example, I've recently switched to an iPod Classic for a lot of my music listening which has been quite nice.

I also spend a lot of time browsing and reading interesting articles, particularly on HN and want to replace some of that with 'offline' alternatives. When it comes to other hobbies (sports, music) I have found some great magazines still in circulation that can work as alternatives to browsing online.

I'd love to hear your suggestions for tech related magazines, ideally things I can subscribe to and get monthly/quarterly. These should be varied enough to cover the kind of topics we see here on HN daily as opposed to super general tech news type magazines.

153 comments

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satya71
IEEE Spectrum[1] is really wonderful in the both the breadth and depth of content. It's free with an IEEE membership or $75/yr on it's own.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/

jasonhong
Seconding IEEE Spectrum, it covers a broad number of fun technical topics. Off the top of my head, some articles over the past year included supersonic transportation, satellite transmissions, crowdfunded space travel, COVID detection mechanisms, software failures, and data compression.

Communications of the ACM is also a good print magazine if you are interested in computer science. It has more of an academic bent, but is meant to be of general interest to computer scientists (disclosure: I'm on the Editorial Board of CACM). Again, off the top of my head, some recent articles include K-12 computer science education, a survey of word embedding techniques, software-defined cooking using a programmable microwave (I'm a co-author of this), differential privacy, a survey of AI bias issues, and Green AI.

sometimeshuman
While the initial subscription rate is high, the annual renewal, including this year, has been $19.95. However, given I receive this offer over e-mail it is unclear if this other accounts get the same offer.
TecoAndJix
and a student membership is only $37.00 and that includes Spectrum in both electronic and print!
rbanffy
IEEE's publications, while usually not cheap, are great. I'd also add "Computer" and "Software" to the mix.

And, since I am a retrocomputing enthusiast, "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing" is endless fun.

basisword
Thanks, this looks good as do their other publications. Looks like you need to become a member as non-member prices are high ($50 vs $600 unless I'm mistaken).
chermi
MIT tech review

C&EN

piggybox
Not sure if it's just me, I just feel MIT tech review has too many sponsored and political stuffs...
bloodyplonker22
it's not just you. I stopped reading MIT tech review because of how they like to bring their personal political views into everything.
huqedato
https://increment.com/
rhoml
I was so sad when increment sent its last issue in November
fumar
Oh, I didn't realize it ended. Bummer, I enjoyed keeping those on my desk to read occasionally.
listenallyall
COMPUTE!

Computer Shopper

The Industry Standard

MSDN Magazine

xeeeeeeeeeeenu
All of these magazines are defunct.
listenallyall
Seinfeld ended more than 20 years ago, plenty of people still watch it every day. Same with The Office.
mttjj
From the OP: “I'd love to hear your suggestions for tech related magazines, ideally things I can subscribe to and get monthly/quarterly.”
listenallyall
Order one issue a month/quarter from an eBay seller. Problem solved.

Where are your suggestions, hotshot?

rbanffy
You can also get all of them at once from archive.org.

We don't say often enough how much The Internet Archive is a modern Library of Alexandria and a treasure of inestimable value.

jasonpeacock
DIYODE Magazine is good - variety of projects with full details:

https://diyodemag.com/

LMMojo
You can download all of these magazines for free from the publisher's website. Also "Hello World", "MagPi" & "HackSpace" (raspberrypi.org).
alkonaut
Is there anything like Naitilus or Quanta Magazine in print?
muddib
Nautilus has a print subscription :)
ChuckMcM
My current subscription list includes;

Wired -- has slipped a bit, I worry they have lost the will to cover cutting edge.

Smithsonian -- a wide variety of topics, some tech, some archeologh etc.

Smithsonian Air & Space -- (now quarterly :-() which has good space technology as well as interesting stories of both military and civilian aircraft.

Science News -- which culls from a lot of journals and finds interesting papers to highlight (I will often follow up on an article by writing to the researchers for copies of their papers)

Popular Science, Popular Mechanics -- These have become remarkably similar in their content focus, that said they keep me up to date on a lot of commercial gizmos that I might otherwise miss in the noise.

QST (part of the ARRL membership) -- Which is all about Amateur Radio and so it hits a lot of interesting topics as I continue to explore software defined radios both in theory and in practice.

I use Scansnap scanner and paper guillotine to save articles that I find either particularly interesting, or I am curious if they will go anywhere. There are many interesting "over night" revolutions that appear years earlier as some sort of "wouldn't it be cool if ..." article. Indexing them is a pain, my indexing foo is weak :-).

tinyprojects
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks WIRED has gone down hill a bit recently.
donohoe
Curious as to what you consider "recently"?
wyclif
Not the parent, but Wired has been terrible for the past 15-20 years. Previous commenters are correct that the quality took a dive in the 2000's. The real glory days for the publication were the 1990s before the Internet was a household word and technology was more obscure.
Pawka
I've started subscribing Wired in 2011 and I pretty much liked it for couple of years. For me it seems once Conde Nast purchased the magazine the quality has dropped.
cobbzilla
Wired had an unsuccessful IPO attempt in 1996. Condé Nast bought the print magazine in 1998. Lycos owned the digital properties until 2006 when they were sold back to CN.
ozfive
For me the last straw was when they became strangely obsessed with cameras and lenses. I never thought I would say this but I miss the 90s.
FridayoLeary
OT but i find myself unimpressed by their news website. Arstechnica is a bit better. It seems to be enormously popular on HN is these a good reason for this?
TedDoesntTalk
In my experience, arstechnica writers can include content that is genuine and not sensational. Not always but often. I skip the comments, too much noise there, but they do have a very engaged audience.
giobox
Didn't Ars get bought by same corporate parent (Conde Naste) as Wired? While Ars hasn't sunk quite as quickly, its still not nearly as good as it was pre-acquisition for me.

It's popularity stems from its early significance; Ars is an old, old website by standards of peers like The Verge and it did used to have much more frequent high quality technical writing. Since Conde acquisition it's definitely veered more mainstream (exactly like Wired did too) IMO. I certainly don't think the original Ars crowd imagined they'd one day be a Conde Naste "brand".

> https://www.condenast.com/brands/ars-technica

> https://www.condenast.com/brands/wired

FridayoLeary
arstechnica states that their parent is Wired. I suspected that their success on HN is mainly for historical reasons. It looks like even HN can fall behind the times a bit...
giobox
"Acquired in 2008 by Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast, Ars Technica has offices in Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Today, Ars Technica operates as Condé Nast's only 100% digitally native editorial publication."

> https://arstechnica.com/about-us/

jimbob45
Wired’s willingness to cover quack ideas was part of the intrigue for me. Sure, flying cars, jetpacks, and underwater breathing aren’t near but it’s fun to see the progress we’ve made on those fronts every now and then.
TigeriusKirk
Now they feel like they want to fit in with their peers, and it makes them much less interesting to me.
rileymat2
By recently, do you mean 2005?
ttul
I once owned most of the Wired magazines from 1995-1999. I stupidly sold them on eBay.
rileymat2
I had a subscription for a long time, I think I cancelled in 2008 after being unhappy for a while.

The worst one was Scientific American, I loved that one, and it dove worse.

znpy
Around that time I bought two or three issues (of the italian edition) due to it being often cited. I wasn't thrilled at all.

It honestly seemed like it was written by some recently-graduated (so like a twenty-something) tech enthusiast. A lot of willingness to spend moneys on the latest gizmos, a lot of advertising, very little interesting pieces (and none of them went any deep on the topic).

gompertz
No kidding on 2005. I now only associate this magazine for mostly wannabe managers who want to read some entry-level article (likely while on an airplane), who go into their next monthly meeting spouting off what they passively read with little real understanding of the subject.
ryeguy_24
I’m still pissed that they cheapened the cover material. Used to be that amazing thick rugged cover. Plus, I’m much less excited to read it in the last year or two than previous 20 years.
PrancingPony
I also can't be bothered with Wired anymore. I used to love it, but the writing has just gone downhill.
jsemrau
I absolutely miss the Wired of the 1990's. When it was a magazine, no THE magazine, to read about the intersection of culture and tech. In this day and age, I find it hard to pickup a copy of Wired at the airport because it has content for about 5 minutes. One of my favs is still Monocle, but it doesn't have much tech. Unfortunately.
joshspankit
I suspect that a HN poll would reveal that most think it has gone down hill.
WalterBright
> Indexing them is a pain, my indexing foo is weak

OCR them, then `grep`

ChuckMcM
Sadly this is not nearly as effective as one might like, even with soundex hacks (or Levenshtein distance hacks). When I joined Google they had a class/project for new hires that taught the map reduce system which was to process the complete works of Shakespeare (it is an easy corpus to get online) and come up with an index to extract interesting information or find specific quotes etc. It was a good way to develop an intuition for some of the challenges. Some things that bite you are of course spelling errors and OCR errors and sometimes formatting things (like where a line break ended up). There are strategies for overcoming those (some more effective than others) but as you dig into the problem you can develop a good feel for the complexity.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
Interesting, Wired has a Pinterest channel, but no Telegram channel. Thankfully, they still have an RSS feed, so added it to Telegram through rss bot.
ComodoHacker
What bot are you using? The ones I tried quickly became unbearable because of annoying ads.
Jaruzel
I've recently written a basic telegram bot. It really is quite trivial; could be easily done via a bash script calling cURL and installed as a cron job.
basisword
I find this quite interesting - is it common for publications/websites to have Telegram channels now? Is this to use it as an RSS reader?
ComodoHacker
It's common in countries where Telegram is popular.
jjmellon
New Scientist
gerdesj
Been reading it since 1985ish. It has changed somewhat since then, although nuclear fusion is still 25-50 years off.

Somehow it has avoided some of the pitfalls of the last 20 years that have reduced editorial independence that has beset other titles. I have no idea who even owns it today but I consider it pretty unbiased except when that is justified, given what it is.

Not cheap but you get what you pay for.

julian55
Back in the 90s I subscribed to New Scentist but I let it lapse as I didn't seem to have time to read it. I started buying it again during the pandemic and have been enjoying it.

I think it was recently bought by the publisher of the Daily Mail (UK populist newspaper) but this does not seem to have affected the content (yet).

brightball
For years Wired was the answer to this question. I don’t know how they are these days though.
beckman466
Tribune Mag.
tpmx
Tribune is a democratic socialist political magazine founded in 1937

Mkay.

beckman466
also Jacobin and magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
jll29
I don't know of good tech magazines in English. There used to be some, e.g. Dr. Dobb's Journal (.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal ), but perhaps that market has imploded.

Wired and other leftovers aren't technical, but there's occasionally good material about computing & society in it (not enough in an average issue to buy it, IMHO). The magazines listed in the other comments that are okay are generally more hardware project focused rather than software technology focused.

If you read other languages, in German there is c't and iX, which are still okay (but were also better in the past, things seem to get dumbed down more and more in general).

sbisker
Offscreen is a lovely print magazine for technology, design and society:

https://www.offscreenmag.com/

basisword
I like the look of this. I'll have to pick one up and try it. My only concern reading the description is that it could get a bit preachy ("We’ve taken off the rose-coloured goggles to lay bare Big Tech’s lack of ethics, proposing a more sustainable and humane way forward."). I'm not against this but trying to keep things light.
Projectiboga
R/science
flyingfences
That's neither a magazine, nor particularly tech-focused, nor even particularly good.