HN Explorer

Ask HN: Which mailing lists would you recommend to subscribe to?

108 points by jakobdabo ↗ HN
I am interested in genuinely interesting lists covering any and all topics, be it post-quantum cryptography or vegan cooking.

Please include at least a brief description alongside your suggested lists.

44 comments

[ 135 ms ] story [ 1839 ms ] thread
jen729w
Sentiers.

“Understand the world, imagine better futures

Each issue features a carefully curated selection of articles with thoughtful commentary on technology, society, culture, and potential futures.”

https://sentiers.media/

idrios
ByteByteGo https://blog.bytebytego.com/

A ton of explanations of various software design patterns, architectures, deep explanations of things a lot of developers will only understand at a higher level like HTTPS, proxies, SQL, how live streaming works, how credit card payments work. It's a fountain of knowledge.

xwowsersx
Enjoying this, thanks for the suggestion. I like the quick and to the point posts on relevant topics.
dewey
Are you asking about newsletters or mailing lists? It seems that most people are posting their favorite newsletters.

Newsletter: 1 to many

Mailing list: many to many

jakobdabo
I was asking about mailing lists, but even so, people who are posting interesting newsletters are also very welcome.

BTW, thank you everyone who posted (or is going to post) an answer. There are many great suggestions!

alexwasserman
I know you asked specifically about mailing lists, then most answers, including mine below, are more newsletters, but if you want a mailing-list type feel, there are also Patreon, Reddit, individual blogs, and other communities that communicate in much the same way and have the same sort of interesting mailing-list feel, with similar volumes. Not sure how much you'd considered those, but a lot of the Reddits I'm in would have been mailing lists/usenet topics pre-Reddit,

Even some public Slack and Discord servers have the same mailing-list feel. eg. I'm in the monitoring.love Slack with a monitoring/SRE focus, and the r9y.dev Discord which is Reliability/SRE/Monitoring focused, and both have the same mailing list type feel.

abnercoimbre
Consider the Handmade conference newsletter [0]. We're an indie conference focused on low-level programming (nuts and bolts kind of thing) and we occasionally send interesting emails on these topics. Of course we also announce ticket sales and all that, but sparingly :)

[0] https://handmade-seattle.com/newsletter

Tomte
We've already had so many newsletter Ask HNs, I'd really like to see more about mailing lists today.

Alas, people are already posting blogs in this thread (so they haven't fallen for the newsletter/mailing list confusion, but are just posting whatever they'd like to push).

dewey
Indeed, that's mostly why I was asking. Mailing lists would be a bit more novel topic.
elpakal
I like the Daily Dad - to the point, fun and helpful. I grew up without a father and every little bit helps with 2 young kids during these times.
alexwasserman
I use Feedly / NetNewsFire for feeds, rather than newsletters, but in reality they're the same, just different consumption methods. Just interesting to see NNW was in HN recently. These are the most interesting things I keep in Feedly.

acoup.blog - A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - frequently linked to HN already. He's a great history writer, covering everything from Roman logistics, to analysis of current games and movies - eg. LotR battles.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC364qOwWXAzgRruHhhFMhVg - Croker vs Rover. A New Zealand guy restoring a 70s Land Rover. It's a Youtube channel, but both hilarious and informative. Infrequent too, so easy to cruise through at leisure.

Atlas Obscura - https://www.atlasobscura.com/ - interesting history/geography mix.

https://www.numberphile.com/ - Mathy easy-access but complex topics - mostly videos on Youtube. Very accessible, but interesting for a mostly non-math person to see real math at work.

https://waynehale.wordpress.com/ - Wayne Hale - NASA flight controller. Interesting views and analysis of current space / incident management topics vs how it was done for the shuttle, along with some other commentary. Infrequent and interesting.

https://computer.rip/ - Deeply geekly telco / 50s-70s computer history with some cold-war fun. Pretty in-depth, and a fun read.

https://www.cringely.com/ - Cringley - weekly-monthly tech posts on bigger tech strategy with an Appleish focus. He's been around SV for years. Was early at Apple then made documentaries, was a journalist, and blogged for years,

https://mondaynote.com/ - Jean-Louie Gassee's monday musings on tech, mostly Apple. Originally Apple, then founded Be, then chairman of Palm. Been around the block in tech.

https://www.techdirt.com/ - legal analysis in a similar style to Matt Levine (who's also a must-read for finance). Funny and informative.

https://usesthis.com/ - The setup - weekly post on someone's tech setup and tools they use. "Uses This is a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done."

Matt Levine - Bloomberg Money Stuff - already mentioned, but here as a second vote for him. Hilarious financial industry commentary.

https://monitoring.love/ - weekly tech newsletter with a focus on Monitoring/SRE type topics. Also a good Slack server if you like SRE/Monitoring stuff

BOFH - https://www.theregister.com/Author/Simon-Travaglia - the original author's currently (and for the last 20 years or so), been on The Register. Not as good as it once was, but funny, and worth the weeklyish read.

dfc
NANOG North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) a mailing list for discussion of large scale network operations. There are other regional lists that may be more appropriate for people (APOPS, AfNOG, SANOG, PacNOG, SAFNOG TZNOG, MENOG, BJNOG, SDNOG, CMNOG, LACNOG)

https://archive.nanog.org/list/archives

TZdb -- Time Zone database list: "discusses proposals for updates to the Time Zone Database and associated code (Internet RFC 6557). Common topics include news of changes to daylight saving time rules or to time zone boundaries."

It sounds kind of dry but it's an interesting combination of technical and social problem solving.

https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/tz

openfuture
Since no one has mentioned it yet: Net Interest has some good insight into finance industry.
zora_goron
This is a newsletter as opposed to a mailing list, but I came across it recently and found it interesting -- https://tldr.tech -- it's a daily email with small blurbs and links to sources covering latest science, AI/ML, programming, tech industry, etc. news!
barbariangrunge
I run a free weekly writing newsletter that I would recommend!

There is some short fiction, but most of the issues are about writing itself. Eg, a series of posts on “rhythm” in fiction.

If anyone is studying writing and would find that interesting, here’s a link to a sample!

https://barbariangrunge.substack.com/p/the-use-of-language-i...

Extra super full disclosure: it’s my newsletter.

abinaya_rl
I'm working on a paid newsletter called Remote Leaf[1], on which we are curating a good number of remote jobs from 60+ sources and sending you a personalised list that matches based on your location and skills.

[1] - https://remoteleaf.com

Full disclosure: I'm the founder of this newsletter.

wcerfgba
Thanks jakobdabo, I asked the same question a couple months back but it didn't get any traction. :)

* nettime <https://nettime.org/info.html> -- discussing the intersections of art, technology, and politics

* SIMSOC <https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=simsoc> -- an academic list focused on social simulation, agent-based models, etc. There are loads more great academic lists on JISCmail as well :)

* ukdemocracyforum <https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/ukdemocracyforum> -- run by the UK Centre for Democracy, where the weekly UK Democracy Bulletin is also posted