HN Explorer

Please help me find better blogs to read

59 points by iwatog ↗ HN
Sick and tired of standard narratives about DeepSeek or some asinine political theater. I just wanna enjoy the things I read.

Recommend blogs to read along: Computer Science Design (Art, typography, anything) Philosophy (more along the lines of what Aeon.co does) Space (I want to study astronomy and astrophysics, but any blogs around space travel, or alien theory is greatly appreciated) History (especially how it influences daily culture, such as Nasi Goreng being a staple in Netherlands owing to colonialism. No WW2 pls. I get that it was important, but there is more to history) Literature Music

Will really appreciate any reccos

71 comments

[ 277 ms ] story [ 3297 ms ] thread
j45
Check out Substack to discover writers who have blogs.
elicksaur
Since substack came out with their alternative to tweets, the website looks a lot less interesting.

How does one find new, interesting authors these days (not just people with lots of activity on their short form notes)?

j45
I don’t go on the side of the tweets

It’s just easy to topically find authors, read their Substack which is usually more newsletter style, which in turn can link to their blog

smokel
Have you tried reading books instead? Shaping thoughts typically takes a lot of time, and blogs may not be the best medium to find interesting information.
boringg
Agree with this - you lose maybe some of the moment in a book but you normally make up for it in depth if the writer is talented. Too much of the blog world is driven by current events as they constantly have to product to maintain readership.
iwatog
I was hoping for more content that is not time constrained, like say eyeondesign, aeon.co, etc
iwatog
I read 40-50 pages on a daily basis. This was to stop scrolling LinkedIn and X. Thank you for the suggestion, I absolutely agree with this
sitkack
I'd recommend going to a library or bookstore. Esp one with literary magazines.
seumars
This is the only correct suggestion
ziddoap
Libraries and books are great.

They are not the only "correct" way to read about topics you enjoy, though. (Whatever "correct" even means when it comes to personal enjoyment.)

iwatog
Looks like I actually do need to do this
jmclnx
There is a whole world out there, gemini and gopher, that has all kind of information.

lynx works well with gopher and amfora for gemini. Plus on cell phones deedum also for gemini.

some links:

gopher://sdf.org/1/

gemini://sdf.org

gemini://gem.sdf.org

elicksaur
A counter perspective by the maker of amfora (which appears to be in maintenance mode)

> After a lot of thinking, I’ve realized there is one main reason I don’t keep coming back to Gemini: it offers no advantage over how I already use the Web.

https://www.makeworld.space/2023/08/bye_gemini.html

dnel
That may be true if you routinely use a text mode web browser and get all your content from RSS feeds, I've certainly moved more in that direction to avoid the sensory overload of the modern web.

I still find Gemini great for reading long-form content though, I appreciate Gemtext is the important factor in this and if web browsers would render it over HTTPS then great, but I'm not aware of any that do.

I also like to use Gemini on vintage hardware that really struggle on the modern web, some of that hardware isn't even that old anymore, low-end devices from just 10 years ago with 2-4GB RAM will have a hard time nowadays.

lawn
It's almost like you're asking for self-promotion, so I'll try. Here's a few entry points:

How to build a tree-sitter grammar: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/03/19/lets_create_a_tr...

How I built a custom keyboard with a trackball: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/11/26/building_my_ulti...

How I designed a custom keyboard layout: https://www.jonashietala.se/series/t-34/

A long series on how I built my first 3D printer: https://www.jonashietala.se/series/voron_trident/

I've been blogging with varying levels of quality for 15 years about random things.

vigneshesan
There are enormous amount of aggregators who compile blogs and articles across the web. As a person who looks for new things to read, this is how I get my fresh feeds.

1. Mozilla Firefox Start Page - Shows blogs and articles from Pocket

2. Google Chrome Discover [Mobile] - Tuned to my interest and search result

3. HackerNews - Of-course not to be missed

4. daily.dev - using it for 450+ days, its fresh and aggregates various format contents

5. RSS Reader - I have subscribed to few RSS feeds based on my exploration and areas of interest

6. News Letters - Find some interesting newsletters from individuals and companies that align with you

Though these are not direct recommendation of blogs to read but a diverse medium to help you pull in more distributed and fresh content to keep you up to date

May The Force Be With You :)

diggan
> 4. daily.dev - using it for 450+ days, its fresh and aggregates various format contents

Strange signup form they have. Never been asked for "Original Language" before, not sure what it means. Shouldn't it be just "Language"? Why does the first language you spoke matter?

The form validation is also broken, saying there is a incorrect character in the username when the actual error is that it's too short. The error messages aren't clearly errors (looks like normal text) and finally if you have a form validation error and already passed the Cloudflare captcha, you can never pass the form and need to reload to be able to submit again.

I get that forms are hard, I've struggled with them myself a lot as well. But a little more care could have gone into it, or at least reacting to seeing people struggling at that page, if it now been running for more than a year. It gives kind of a poor impression when it's a community specifically for engineers/developers, that they don't really have any attention to details.

52-6F-62
Read books not blogs. Start with the classics and poetry and feel it out. Then seek further analysis. Linguistics will help you there and its a huge subject of study but one of the best direct analytical tools in your belt.
mickeyp
My blog on emacs [1] is perhaps a bit too niche if you dislike emacs? I do write a lot about tree sitter, structured editing and movement in programming languages on it also.

[1] www.masteringemacs.org

skydhash
Thanks for the blog. Your book was an excellent starting point for me getting into emacs (vim for 7 years before) and your articles contains solid tips. I usually reread some of the articles as my understanding of emacs deepens.
mickeyp
Thanks for your kind words!
iwatog
One day, I will finally understand emacs, and then we can probably get a cup of virtual coffee
aa-jv
Some obvious ones:

Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/ TwoStopBits: http://twostopbits.com Slashdot: https://slashdot.org (Yes, really...) Hackaday: https://hackaday.com

elicksaur
Not really blogs. More like HN alternatives.
zerkten
If someone scraped those for the sites that are posted and arranged based on number of submissions, comments, upvotes etc. and layer on a bit of ML to classify then you'd have a reasonable blog directory. OP would probably benefit if people posted their OPML files but that does feel a bit personal.
iwatog
Even if not based on popularity, I do think HN would be a great source to find URLs, from where we can continue crawling

Do you have any web crawling specialists I could speak with? Happy to write the code, just don't want to overload any servers

popcar2
You may enjoy sites like Minifeed[1], Kagi's SmallWeb[2] and Wiby[3]. These are some neat sites that let you discover random blogs and personal sites and are very fun to sift through and read something interesting.

Since we're self-promoting, feel free to check out my blog too :) https://popcar.bearblog.dev/

[1]: https://minifeed.net/

[2]: https://kagi.com/smallweb

[3]: https://wiby.me/

abruno3860
Minifeed is great but without some sort of sort by popularity there's just too much noise.
xrd
(See my comment about using RSS in another thread...)

I think filtering by HN front page, and then filtering out the items you want in an RSS feed is a good combination that makes it easier to filter out the noise.

freetonik
Minifeed author here: I'm cautiously working on some popularity/quality sorting.
Gooblebrai
Is a sad loss that webrings are not popular anymore. They were amazing for things like these
kradeelav
just a sampling of my rss reader this morning:

marginalia's blog for interesting tech problems building a search engine "specifically" for indie/small/old-web sites. (the search engine itself is a gold mine for exactly what you're looking for). https://www.marginalia.nu/log/

feuilleton for thoughtful posts on recent niche art history - http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/feed/

the spatial heritage review for advances in 3D models from an educational context https://nebulousflynn.substack.com/

gautier
https://astrobites.org/ is great for astronomy and astrophysics. You'll be thrown out in the deep end but if you stick to it for a few weeks you'll get a good idea of where astronomy/astrophysics research is at.
bell-cot
Serious history - mostly Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, and related:

https://acoup.blog/

Prof. Devereaux's day job is as an (untenured) ancient & military historian. With a taste for history- and fantasy-based TV/movies and games. A passable fraction of his older stuff is "how close is this to historical reality?" reviews.

profghost
to answer somehow 'heretically': reduce reading of internetsites of any kind at all, but focus more on real books. in the long term you'll enjoy it way more. for several reasons i don't want to stress all here.
michaelmior
It seems like an Ask HN prefix in the title would be appropriate.