LWN is one of the, if not the single, highest signal tech publications around. I hope they're able to maintain a stable subscription service. Being user funded, and avoiding having to maintain allegiance to advertisers, is likely part of why their quality is so high.
Not only that but lwn is one of the main sites that gets submitted to HN all year round (not daily, but maybe nearish to daily). So the audience here on HN has been exposed to it over the years. I'm not sure what more they could do to get new subscribers, I certainly hope they figure that out or how to get new ways to earn revenue without having to go the ad route.
Crab-bucket mentality aside, what they do is extremely important and hard to do.
I can't write an occasional blog post without wrestling with my ideas and words, and they constantly churn out this high quality material, without ever slowing down. They deserve what they earn.
OTOH, thanks for nudging me towards subscribing to LWN a bit more.
That's such a weird take away, you're comparing Mozilla which has a diverse set of employees, versus an organization whose sole purpose is to hire high quality technical writers, which is already pretty niche.
They lock down new articles for about a week I think, so subscribers get the first one, though if you're a subscriber I think they let you SHARE the article with others, so here on HN sometimes a brand new article will be shared by a subscriber with a code so anyone without a subscription can see it.
Super happy subscriber for years... One of those magazines that I open on a Sunday morning with a good cup of coffee and sleeping cats next to me before the family wakes up.
If you enjoy well-written technical content, please subscribe and support them. I hope they continue making the great articles.
Seems like only yesterday when they last increased their prices but it was, in fact, back in January 2022 - time flies!
I'll have been an LWN subscriber for 22 years as of next week, and am very happy to continue to be one. It's easily the most worthwhile subscription I currently have.
LWN, probably about to discover people are paying high prices for all manner of things and will find that LWN is, sadly, a disposable entity to pay for.
You could also see if it's something your employer allows to to expense. It's still cheap enough that it's something most managers can just approve directly, depending on organizational structures.
I suspect everybody likely to do so has already done so. Anybody who thinks $6 a month is a lot of money will also think $5 a month is a lot of money for something that they can get for free by waiting a week.
5 to 6 dollars is not much in terms of a donation. In terms of a subscription, though...One thing is voluntary if you find value, the other is mandatory to get to the value unless you are willing to wait.
I would subscribe if they were more critical of the open source incumbents. Often everything some project bigwig posts on a mailing list is gospel that goes uncontradicted.
The comments are also getting more and more aligned with industry opinions.
EDIT: Go and downvote, 80% of comments in the Debian pro-AI resolution (masked as neutral!) were positive and partly from has-beens who no longer want to code but make a bureaucrat career at FAANG or Canonical.
LWN is one of the cornerstones of my very successful career.
Starting from the beginning, I have (at least) read through every story and every article, every week, since 1998. Especially in the beginning, there was a lot in each article I didn't understand. I would try to do some digging into those topics.
One way or another, just the weekly exposure to absolutely top notch technical writing was foundational to me.
When newer folk would ask me how to really get good with Linux, I would always point them to LWN.net.
I've been a subscriber since the beginning. That small investment is the least I can do given the incalculable value LWN has brought to me.
Sorry to be that guy, but... Please consider donating a significant amount to them, given that they have been a cornerstone of your very successful career.
I did something similar in the past, in relation to Ubuntu, and I never regretted it, even if that money would have been very useful if spent in other ways.
I couldn't find anything about donation on the site. Just in case I'm blind, is there one or is subscribing or getting a gift certificate the only way? I should also definitely put lwn on my "charity list".
I know the editors visit these discussions: please, next time use a more descriptive title! I nearly had a fit when I saw that, really thought LWN is going down like it almost did 20 years ago.
Happy to pay the new price, even though I can only afford the cheapest tier.
Tried making an account but seems to take quite a while (forever?) getting the corresponding email. I guess their server is taking a beating due to this article.
The server was fine, but we have a throttle that kicks in if we get a flood of new account creations at once to ward off spammers and scammers. We're keeping an eye on the queue now to ensure that these are waved through quickly. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Good. Increase the subscription prices against what the users think. There are no ads at all. But of course not everyone will agree and want it for free.
Many know they want it for free. If you don't pay at all then it will force LWN to begin to place ads on their newsletter to cover the costs.
There is no realistic in-between other than actually paying for your services.
Speaking of high quality publications, I wish we could get AnandTech back :( On some older blogs, I still stumble on dead links, and very few of them are on internet archive..
Also, if you have any sort of buying power: make sure you company pays for a group subscription, and maintains it over the years. I try do that here. Nudge your colleagues to use the subscription and send them the occasional article!
This reminded me that I'd let my LWN subscription lapse after a credit card expired. Just renewed for a year and turned on automatic renewals (at least until the next credit card expiration).
This is literally the first I've ever heard of LWN (in over 20 years of being a professional engineer) so clearly they could be doing better marketing.
Depends on what you're looking for. In a previous life we subscribed to some semiconductor analysis pubs that we're insanely deep dives into the industry. But they weren't so much technical deep dives as stuff a industry sector trader wants to know. And AFAIK they were very, very expensive.
People kept asking if they could pay for AnandTech, and they said “we'll think about it” for years until they shut down instead because it was financially unsustainable.
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, more scrapers. They're trying to keep things accessible without JavaScript, which mostly rules out the typical proof of work solutions like Anubis (which they're definitely aware of, as they had an article on it).
LWN is a poster child for something that could be entirely static pre-generated HTML for literally all unauthenticated requests at a server cost lower than serving and verifying anti-bot checks. If Anubis provides any benefit at all then they are really doing something wrong like fetching a bunch of comments from a database and generating the resulting HTML for each visitor.
> There are few things we like less than raising prices, which is why we have done it so rarely. It would be far better to keep LWN as inexpensive as possible and make it up in volume. Subscriber growth has stalled, though, in recent years, making that strategy unworkable for now. We are working on schemes to bring in more subscribers again, but that is a long-term process; getting there requires some short-term help.
I can see why they’d want to keep bumping prices occasionally (to keep up with inflation). Why do they need plans to increase subscriber growth, though, are they not currently profitable? It seems like they must have hit a steady-state by now.
Inflation means that hosting costs increase. On the site they also mention being under heavy scraper load which also isn’t free.
Then the writers probably also need compensation increase, at the very least to be a responsible employer so that the employees can deal with inflation.
Inflation happens regularly, normally, or when world leaders emit another chaos bomb, and they do not raise prices immediately causing a lower income/costs ratio. In order to keep up with that without raising the prices in between you need more income and that comes from more payers.
If we can grow the number of subscribers, we don't need to raise prices for the ones that have supported us all this time; I would find that preferable. Besides, who doesn't want a broader reach?
Anyone who does something for the love of it. At some point, more reach can only be gained by making compromises and that point is usually earlier rather than later.
> The LWN site has been improved in a number of ways, with features like articles in EPUB format,
This is the single biggest feature that makes me keep my subscription going. The convenience to read longer form offline on my ebook reader makes me wish all other long form content websites would have the same.
Do they offer a facility for automatically mailing the epub file to a specified e-mail address (I'm thinking the Amazon Kindle conversion e-mail) --- that might push me over into a subscription.
Not a PDF, the ePub --- each Amazon Kindle has associated with it an e-mail address, which when a file is e-mailed to it, will be automatically converted and loaded (once the sender is white-listed) --- that way, each new issue would just automagically appear.
It's normal for it to appear denser vertically. Your example of increased line height looks suitable for subheadings, but in no way represents the typographic tradition of its use.
134 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 61.0 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lwn.net
Crab-bucket mentality aside, what they do is extremely important and hard to do.
I can't write an occasional blog post without wrestling with my ideas and words, and they constantly churn out this high quality material, without ever slowing down. They deserve what they earn.
OTOH, thanks for nudging me towards subscribing to LWN a bit more.
Edit: Just subscribed. Thank you.
Classy.
When I saw that title, I thought the note would be about their "incredible journey", fortunately that is not the case.
(As someone pointed out in the comments, the title of this specific post could have been less heart-attack-inducing, but still... :) )
If you enjoy well-written technical content, please subscribe and support them. I hope they continue making the great articles.
I forgot to renew my subscription a while back and it has been a bit busy, will renew now.
I'll have been an LWN subscriber for 22 years as of next week, and am very happy to continue to be one. It's easily the most worthwhile subscription I currently have.
This account, `thataccount` has only negative comments that contribute naught.
The comments are also getting more and more aligned with industry opinions.
EDIT: Go and downvote, 80% of comments in the Debian pro-AI resolution (masked as neutral!) were positive and partly from has-beens who no longer want to code but make a bureaucrat career at FAANG or Canonical.
Starting from the beginning, I have (at least) read through every story and every article, every week, since 1998. Especially in the beginning, there was a lot in each article I didn't understand. I would try to do some digging into those topics.
One way or another, just the weekly exposure to absolutely top notch technical writing was foundational to me.
When newer folk would ask me how to really get good with Linux, I would always point them to LWN.net.
I've been a subscriber since the beginning. That small investment is the least I can do given the incalculable value LWN has brought to me.
I did something similar in the past, in relation to Ubuntu, and I never regretted it, even if that money would have been very useful if spent in other ways.
Happy to pay the new price, even though I can only afford the cheapest tier.
Their pricing is at US levels not world levels.
I don't think there news articles are even worthy enough to be paywalled at all this days.
Many know they want it for free. If you don't pay at all then it will force LWN to begin to place ads on their newsletter to cover the costs.
There is no realistic in-between other than actually paying for your services.
I enjoy spaces that are at least semi-moderated.
Why are we even arguing about this?
Just a reminder that may be relevant to your gripe: allowing free speech is perfectly compatible with forbidding abuse and hate speech.
People kept asking if they could pay for AnandTech, and they said “we'll think about it” for years until they shut down instead because it was financially unsustainable.
Pretty sure there are many Oktoberfest travel bloggers, at least some of them must be "high quality".
I'm not doubting it, but I wonder what costs have changed for them?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864252
better late than never, and especially good now that every single day most of us are reading so many words that don't mean anything
I can see why they’d want to keep bumping prices occasionally (to keep up with inflation). Why do they need plans to increase subscriber growth, though, are they not currently profitable? It seems like they must have hit a steady-state by now.
Then the writers probably also need compensation increase, at the very least to be a responsible employer so that the employees can deal with inflation.
Inflation happens regularly, normally, or when world leaders emit another chaos bomb, and they do not raise prices immediately causing a lower income/costs ratio. In order to keep up with that without raising the prices in between you need more income and that comes from more payers.
The costs of the writers is what makes journalism expensive.
Anyone who does something for the love of it. At some point, more reach can only be gained by making compromises and that point is usually earlier rather than later.
This is the single biggest feature that makes me keep my subscription going. The convenience to read longer form offline on my ebook reader makes me wish all other long form content websites would have the same.
Do they offer a facility for automatically mailing the epub file to a specified e-mail address (I'm thinking the Amazon Kindle conversion e-mail) --- that might push me over into a subscription.
If nothing else, we can easily add a customization option for that.
Existing line-height:
https://i.ibb.co/dJc14J7G/Screenshot-2026-09-02-at-08-35-06....
With "line-height: 1.25" on <p> tags:
https://i.ibb.co/RkGBQF0D/Screenshot-2026-09-02-at-08-36-17....
on this article:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1092229/
It's normal for it to appear denser vertically. Your example of increased line height looks suitable for subheadings, but in no way represents the typographic tradition of its use.
I was guessing Linux World News, but TIL it was Linux Weekly News. But currently, they say it's just LWN, a tech news site, etc.