There is a word for it, which I forgot, when you look something up on Wikipedia, the article contains a link to another article, and you go, "Oooh, that sounds interesting", open it in another tab, then, when reading the second article, you come across two or three more of such links, and before you know what is going on, you have dozens of tabs open. The only limit is your patience and your computer's RAM.
Eventually you'll end up reading articles that are not even remotely related to your initial inquiry, but highly interesting nonetheless.
I built an app based on that exact concept: http://thewikigame.com which has been running for many years, and is now quite popular.
The database of the site now contains a large record of millions of game plays of players trying to go from one Wikipedia link to another. See here for some interesting academic research that has been done on the site's dataset: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jSGFRZYrJnlDUBhGbQrO9e-n...
There's also http://www.scholarpedia.org/
which is basically wikipedia but written by college professors and domain field experts. It goes very in depth on many topics.
An interesting side note: if you repeatedly click the first link at the beginning of any wikipedia article (except links in parenthesis) you will always end up at Philosophy.
But if the algorithm should ignore the already visited links then it would probably work because the pages usually describe something using the higher level concepts first. The question is how much larger the pool of "always found" pages becomes.
Test of n = 1: ("Random article") -> Yūyūki -> 1989 in video gaming -> Golden Joystick Awards -> Video game -> Electronic game -> Game -> Play (activity) -> Psychology -> Behavior -> American English -> Variety (linguistics) -> Sociolinguistics -> Society -> Social group -> Social science -> Discipline (academia) -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Verificationism -> Philosophy
https://theconversation.com/ - Great source of news and analysis of everything. Articles by academics and researchers. Claims almost always backed with evidence.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ - Articles about some of the most interesting bleeding-edge high-tech research.
Well the conversation might say their claims are backed up etc. but so do most other news outlets of scale. Eventually they still have clear, inevitable political leanings and bias there, just as every other news outlet.
http://highscalability.com/ - weekly newsletter about scalability, distributed computing, computer science, and other relevant things. I don't think it gets attention it deserves - it's really, really good and contains wealth of
(mostly) timeless information.
Also, Reddit. Not the default front-page stuff, of course, but more in-depth and smaller subreddits, such as /r/netsec, /r/financialindependence, or /r/rust - there's a multitude of nice focused communities. Occassionally even /r/programming is more interesting than Hacker News though :)
Hacker News (of course)
LWN
Ars Technica
Angry Asian Man
Climate Denial Crock of the Week
Cool Tools
Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain
ESA Top News (Euro. Space Agency)
Jewish Daily Forward
Jonesblog (retinal neuroscientist and photographer:http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/about/)
NASA Image of the Day
Physical Review Letters
Not Even Wrong
Planet Clojure
RealClimate
Retraction Watch
New York Times
WTOP (local news)
Schneier on Security
Slate Star Codex
Space Safety Magazine
CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (highly recommended)
Stories from the trauma bay
When done properly, web video/animated content can greatly enhance learning abstract, obtuse material and can be worth 1000 words per second. From Infinite Series, I finally got the gist of quantum computing.
We're subscribed to the same newsfeeds. In addition, I only look at hacker news through the weekly newsletter, in order to avoid the dopamine addiction of checking multiple times a day.
As for the The Economist, I've found that they always gives a great dose of history and context to their articles, which is what I would be searching for in reddit anyway, so I've found reddit to be a lot less useful nowadays.
Hacker News, Marginal Revolution and the Financial Times. Reddit mostly for leisure, but occasionally also for knowledge and inspiration.
Recently I've tried to make my procrastination more useful, and read random Wikipedia articles instead browsing news sites. Let's see if the habit sticks.
I tried doing the same thing, now on my laptop I've installed Redirector chrome extension[0]. Every time I try going on Reddit or HN I get a random wiki article.
I've found myself using my phone more often, or incognito(extension disabled) to browse those sites.
I mostly uses Hacker News. From there, it leads me to site such as HighScalability, then Medium engineering blog of company or individual developer. Once you like something, they suggest other thing and I go from there.
I also try to visit engineering blog of company that I like such as Github, Etsy, Segment, Stripe and learn from their blog. They usually have very good article about what really happening at a real company and what they do to solve.
Then I also use Youtube, subscirbe to Confreaks, and again, whenever I like some video, they suggest something very close to what I like.
Then sometimes ago, I started to collect links and realize I should share with the world and start this site: https://betterdev.link/
Blogs by cs profs.. mostly theory of compsci guys. Always interesting to see what they think about current events/ what latest cs theory stuff is like...although often times I can only recall a couple words in their posts from the discrete math courses all those years ago.
It's brief, unapologetic, patient explanations about specific cases in law that touch on popular topics. It really shows how non-black-and-white the world is and especially how bringing knowledge to it gives you clarity, even when you're not in total agreement.
A few years ago it was https://coursera.org - they were a powerful beacon of high-quality knowledge first-hand from world-class experts. I still try to learn as much as possible there, but my feeling of the site being intrusively optimized for business and short-term gain is increasing every day.
Edit: Forgot to add Codex 99, '...an occasionally updated website about art, design and history, except when it’s about something else altogether."
http://www.codex99.com
Daily - Mostly Tech / Science.
I love hacker news as it covers basic science as well. From discovery of planets, to Gene editing.
Hacker News :)
http://techmeme.com/https://slashdot.org/
Weekly - World
http://kottke.org/https://www.edge.org/
Youtube App on Ipad, Subscription to Joe Rogen, Tim Ferris, and many others Podcasters like these mostly point out to any random topic under the sun, and the discussion is Deep. Example - check out these podcasts and their discussion on Ethics, AI, Health, Finance and Trump :)
Random
Facebook - mostly from friends and of personal nature, but I do visit resources they point out
An aggregator composed of other news aggregators. As a concept it is great, but it will never come close to platforms like reddit. It's like newspapers, most of them just buy the news from agencies then complain about the decline of the (traditional) industry. An aggregator without curation will be so redundant and boring...
Instead look at those places that have something special and make you come back. They all have some differentiating factor. The WSJ from time to time produces high quality non-redundant content. The comments or content produced by users on HN and reddit are sometimes better than the news elsewhere.
Curation and the user base confer a site personality. This is why places like HN or reddit are so popular. Reddit offers a very high degree of segmentation to users through subreddit subscriptions. This allows users with perhaps very different personalities to get along by only focusing on things they have in common. Not only that, it incentives users to create, share and enjoy content together.
Y combinator has a true commitment to provide a simple platform to a user niche they are interested in. In contrast to the laissez faire curation approach of reddit, the strategy of HN is not as broad but for this specific niche is of higher quality. Although sometimes HN is used for Y combinator's purposes, they don't abuse it and many times the interests are aligned with most of their user base.
Google RSS Reader was my defacto, for exactly this purpose. Some were direct feeds from NYT, TechCrunch, etc but many were simply, the topic searches and RSS feed obtained from those. I miss those days.
Google News does allow you some personalization. But, I am big fan of river of news concept (Dave Winer). There are many solutions still, but I am limiting my media consumption and hacker news and couple of other sites faily satisfy the need.
Some time ago I built https://10hn.pancik.com/ to aggregate and rank interesting articles and make them easily readable on the phone. There are days when I don't read anything else, just swiping through 10HN reading few long reads.
I formatted my list with names rather than URLs, but now I see the advantage of doing it your way. At a glance I can see that three of your sites are in my browser history.
I like to read articles on medium, but a particular site I like is scotch.io I myself write on a blog. Unfortunately it is in portuguese so you may not understand. But in case you want to check you can see it here.
"Farnam Street is devoted to helping you develop an understanding of how the world really works, make better decisions, and live a better life. We address such topics as mental models, decision making, learning, reading, and the art of living."
I find books about topics that I'm interested in learning more as the best source of knowledge or inspiration. Consider the book 'Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture' as an excellent source of Japanese culture and food habits. I have learnt so much from this fascinating book and it's a great source of inspiration too.
Same here. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of crap on Youtube, but man oh man, there is SO much amazing quality content as well. So many great lectures on nearly every topic under the sun, conference talks out the yazoo, documentaries, tutorials, etc. I could pretty much just spend all day on Youtube (or videolectures.net) just soaking up knowledge, if I had nothing else to do.
Not sure why it's downvoted. That was my first thought too. There are tons of educational videos, lectures and inspiring interviews. If you keep watching this kind of stuff recommendations also get quite reasonable.
This. Especially when I realize that there is a thing the explanation for which was given to me by someone way before either of us had access to the internet and before Google existed (I am getting old I guess). Like whether eating onions helps stave off a cold. Or how a distributed in a car works. Or whether Nissans are actually reliable or not. Or if you need higher than minimum recommended octane rating in your car. Or why most of Europe uses 240V in their outlets. Or what actually happened in Chernobyl.
I find myself reading a lot more books in person though, namely educational books about topics I'm unfamiliar with or want to review. I think it's important to read about something that you don't know about but want to learn more about, e.g. for me: economics.
I visit n-gate.com weekly. I am not very well-aware of stuff outside css/js and lot of people here talk confidently about stuff they have no clue of, unopposed. n-gate reminds me how little people on this site know stuff outside of css/js/business. Rest are clueless wannabes trying to one-up each other.
My favorite comment will always be- somebody mentioned that Microsoft Band needs a realtime OS so someone proposed javascript vm. And there were 10 other people talking about it seriously.
I'm sure I'll be downvoted which will be further proof of what I'm saying. Not that I care really. I make an account a week.
Is there a secret area on HN where people worship CSS/JS with blind faith? Because whichever post related to it I visit, there's a healthy dose of skepticism, especially in Electron/ReactNative/AnyOtherJSWrapper posts.
Further down you replied to someone else complaining about how other's work is belittled, then you write this
> somebody mentioned that Microsoft Band needs a realtime OS so someone proposed javascript vm. And there were 10 other people talking about it seriously.
I am not sure if this is bait or lack of self awareness, though I'd lean towards bait, considering you are also worried about downvotes.
People on HN will rather gently point out that Electron, being convenient to you, is at the same time a horrible resource hog and exactly the opposite of what an elegantly-written, efficient and optimized application would be.
Especially for some of us who actually create native apps using Electron might just be laziness - or inability to really care about the user.
> Electron might just be laziness - or inability to really care about the user.
Or it might be that it is just good enough for the target user. My 2013 Macbook has enough power to run all the Electron apps I need without slowing down...well it did once I removed Atom and learned to love Visual Studio Code.
I think that Atom's performance woes and resource hogging tends to be a stand-in for all atom apps.
This is precisely the attitude that makes mature programmers not taking you seriously.
If you're young and feel the need to express dismissal to the people who take their work more seriously, that's fine -- hormones and stuff, we've all been through that, so meh, nobody is mad about it.
You still shouldn't forget it's a _job_ and not a fashion statement.
The fact that Electron is easy to work with, _for you_, means absolutely nothing about the end result of the work done through it. The topic has been beaten to death here in HN, you can check -- but then again, being that dismissive and arrogant probably means you'll never challenge your opinion. Oh well, still worth the shot in giving you the other perspective.
I never expressed support for electron. I merely mentioned it.
You've inferred that I'm young (nope), implied that I'm not mature, don't take my work seriously, that I have "hormones and stuff", that I consider electron a fashion statement (?), that I'm dismissive and arrogant, and that I'll never challenge my opinion. Phew!
For the record, I have dabbled with electron, and I'm on the fence about it. It's a quick path to MVP, but it has obvious performance issues and I'm not sure I wish to inflict these on my end users. I'm teaching myself react native and python/qt at the moment instead.
Thanks for proving my point so completely. Hey and look, a downvote too.
I still stand behind my statement that this is immature and disrespectful. The rest are "if"-s, you can check my comment. There are no claims, there are "if"-s.
Granted I made a few assumptions. If you don't want that, write more than one sentence. ;)
> Hacker news is an echo chamber focusing on computer posturing and self-aggrandizement.
I'll also add- it serves as a punching bag for people who can't speak up at their work- they vent their frustrations here by belittling everyone's work.
I mean this is the nature of the web. But HN is already as good as we can get. You yourself keep coming back as well, apparently. Otherwise do you have an alternative to propose?
Life and everything (non-technical): http://omswami.com
Treasure of practical knowledge right from the mouth of one who has attained enlightenment in the transcidental sense of the word.
Biweekly post – 1st and 3rd Saturday every month. Earlier (till about an year ago) for roughly 5 years, it was every Saturday so there's lot of pearls of wisdom in there with amusing tales and jokes to instill the knowledge within.
There is a word for it, which I forgot, when you look something up on Wikipedia, the article contains a link to another article, and you go, "Oooh, that sounds interesting", open it in another tab, then, when reading the second article, you come across two or three more of such links, and before you know what is going on, you have dozens of tabs open. The only limit is your patience and your computer's RAM.
Eventually you'll end up reading articles that are not even remotely related to your initial inquiry, but highly interesting nonetheless.