Scott Aaronson's blog is so awesome. I would be reading it now if I still had room in my head for the whole 'rationalist' thing (along with Overcoming Bias, etc.) Check out his "Favorite Posts" in the right-hand column.
Lambda the Ultimate is also a rare gem of a community on the internet and likewise I'd still be reading it if I wasn't trying to care less about design and more about hustle right now. I'm really interested in dataflow programming and I've learned a lot by searching through previous discussions on the concept at LtU.
By following the links and discussions, you can get pretty deep into it; down to the published papers in respectable journals and granted patents. But be warned, there are a lot of crack pots that pollute the matters (as expected for this category). So you have to take what's good, and throw away what's bad. But it does give you a different perspective on things.
Probably the most unknown area I read and/or hear about today are private G+ circles. For example, much pre-publication PL/compilers work is mentioned in "limited" posts. I've heard similar things are happening in ML areas, though I have no personal insight into them.
May I suggest my friend Tim's blog? I'm pretty sure it's unknown, it seems he writes it mostly for himself. But there are some great technical articles on it:
Reading the top blog entry, looks like a very useful blog to me. No big fancy talking about how he scaled up to 4 million users, but a down-to-earth story about FTP and versioning that I can relate to. Thanks for the link :)
Edit: I forgot to mention another thing: It made a positive impression by being a dark blog with a good design. I don't entirely like my own blog's design, and I thought white-on-black just wasn't a good setup. This shows it can be great. I also like the lack of "recommended articles" and pop-ups (javascript ones) to keep me on the site.
I try to keep my subscription to an absolute minimum since I like to leave some time for reading books. After a lot of culling, I'm currently subscribed to some popular feeds:
http://worrydream.com/feed.xml (not really a blog, but Bret Victor writes some of the best long-form articles on interaction design around – read all of them)
http://www.loper-os.org/ (awesome / hilarious posts by a software heretic on the general terrible state of things in technology – keeps me in touch with Alan Kay-esque thinking)
All of these feeds have been selected for a very high signal to noise ratio and most of them are updated only occasionally (which I prefer), with the exception of Smashing and DailyJS.
To be fair, most of those are < 1 post per day, but still you point accurately a major issue of mine which is wanting to stay abreast of too many fields at a time. I hope I will be able to whittle-down my field of focus further in the coming years.
I think of Venkat Rao as a combination of that sort of scientific rationalism with the sort of old-school intellectualism that can only come from reading an epic quantity of literature and taking a truly skeptical attitude toward everything. Keeps the fanaticism in check and results in a much more subtle and interesting point of view.
Well, I've been enjoying Joey Hess' build log of git-annex assistant [1], and I like Julien Danjou's [2] too, even though he writes more about Emacs, while I'm a VIM user.
Then there's Old New Thing, LtU and John Resig's blog, but those are less obscure.
It's not a blog, but a collection of weekly email newsletters.
At the risk of sounding like a shill (because I'm pretty sure Mr Cooper posts to HN), I have to say these are each brilliantly done. There are separate newsletters for JavaScript, Ruby, HTML5, and Dart (but sadly no Python).
Great way to keep up with changes in these areas once a week, and pretty much the only third-party emails I not only look forward to receiving, but actually open and read.
I do! :-) Thanks for the mention, you would be a great shill to hire if I were looking.
With regards to Python, I believe http://www.pythonweekly.com/ was inspired by my newsletters. I don't run it but have seen a few issues. There is also http://pycoders.com/ and I know those guys too. Both have a similar structure and approach to mine. Hopefully I can buy/partner with one of them someday rather than launch my own ;-)
81 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadhttp://nosql.mypopescu.com/
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
http://eli.thegreenplace.net/
http://www.stefankrause.net/wp/
http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/
http://www.cowtowncoder.com/blog/blog.html
http://highlyscalable.wordpress.com/
http://hunch.net/
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
http://www.softwarebyrob.com/
http://blog.mikemccandless.com/
Lambda the Ultimate is also a rare gem of a community on the internet and likewise I'd still be reading it if I wasn't trying to care less about design and more about hustle right now. I'm really interested in dataflow programming and I've learned a lot by searching through previous discussions on the concept at LtU.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page
http://pesn.com/
By following the links and discussions, you can get pretty deep into it; down to the published papers in respectable journals and granted patents. But be warned, there are a lot of crack pots that pollute the matters (as expected for this category). So you have to take what's good, and throw away what's bad. But it does give you a different perspective on things.
Nice to see some people from EPITA doing cool stuff :-)
I have both technical AI type posts and also a bit of religion.
http://www.pixelastic.com/
Edit: I forgot to mention another thing: It made a positive impression by being a dark blog with a good design. I don't entirely like my own blog's design, and I thought white-on-black just wasn't a good setup. This shows it can be great. I also like the lack of "recommended articles" and pop-ups (javascript ones) to keep me on the site.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ (general web design / dev)
http://www.alistapart.com/ (long form web design / front-end)
http://dailyjs.com/ (Javascript / node.js)
http://createdigitalmusic.com/ (digital music / software)
http://www.creativeapplications.net/ (new-media art)
And a handful of unpopular ones:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/ (absolutely my favorite blog in the world – self-describes as "refactored perception)
http://www.tempobook.com/blog/ (same author as above, posts related to his last book)
http://worrydream.com/feed.xml (not really a blog, but Bret Victor writes some of the best long-form articles on interaction design around – read all of them)
http://www2.technologyreview.com/rss/video_rss.aspx (Tech Review videos, sparsely updated – mainly because the editor's interviews are awesome/hilarious)
http://idlewords.com/ (breathtaking travel blog from the founder of Pinboard)
http://www.loper-os.org/ (awesome / hilarious posts by a software heretic on the general terrible state of things in technology – keeps me in touch with Alan Kay-esque thinking)
http://we-make-money-not-art.com/ (the only contemporary art blog I like from a very dedicated Italian writer)
http://vagueterrain.net/ (occasionally published digital art magazine, themed topics, guest curated)
http://theixdlibrary.com/ (occasional classic UX articles)
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/ (occasional forward-thinking posts on web design, focus on layout and grids)
http://informationarchitects.net/ (same as above, but focus on typography)
All of these feeds have been selected for a very high signal to noise ratio and most of them are updated only occasionally (which I prefer), with the exception of Smashing and DailyJS.
I also like http://lesswrong.com/ but I think its pretty well known.
I think of Venkat Rao as a combination of that sort of scientific rationalism with the sort of old-school intellectualism that can only come from reading an epic quantity of literature and taking a truly skeptical attitude toward everything. Keeps the fanaticism in check and results in a much more subtle and interesting point of view.
Heck, keep in touch with Alan Kay and his minions: vpri.org/writings/
http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/
https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/
http://j00ru.vexillium.org/?lang=en
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/
Then there's Old New Thing, LtU and John Resig's blog, but those are less obscure.
[1]: http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/
[2]: http://julien.danjou.info/blog/
It's not a blog, but a collection of weekly email newsletters.
At the risk of sounding like a shill (because I'm pretty sure Mr Cooper posts to HN), I have to say these are each brilliantly done. There are separate newsletters for JavaScript, Ruby, HTML5, and Dart (but sadly no Python).
Great way to keep up with changes in these areas once a week, and pretty much the only third-party emails I not only look forward to receiving, but actually open and read.
With regards to Python, I believe http://www.pythonweekly.com/ was inspired by my newsletters. I don't run it but have seen a few issues. There is also http://pycoders.com/ and I know those guys too. Both have a similar structure and approach to mine. Hopefully I can buy/partner with one of them someday rather than launch my own ;-)
http://publicintelligence.net
http://landonf.bikemonkey.org
http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com
http://smathermather.wordpress.com/
http://www.obscureanalytics.com/
http://ogleearth.com/
http://blogs.esri.com/esri/
http://mapbox.com/blog/
http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps
Slava always has great live presentations and has a great blog.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
http://ericlippert.com/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/ and http://stackoverflow.com/users/88656/eric-lippert
http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/Default.aspx
http://blog.databigbang.com
http://blog.nektra.com
http://www.yosefk.com/blog
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/
http://blogs.southworks.net
http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/
I frequently see an interesting project posted on hackaday, then a few days later it has gone 'viral' on engadget, lifehacker, hn, ars etc...
http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/
http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/