I would say this is because the software world is too big now. We genuinely are looking at a new form of literacy that is changing all aspects of human
communication, organisation and decision making.
It's hard to cram that in any one magazine.
So I suspect that there is a sub-genre of magazine - the Byte for education software and the Byte for legal software and ...
As a technology this big matures it becomes so embedded in each industry that the questions that matter stop being software questions and start being industry questions - it's important that Walmart uses good concrete and steel on its shops, but walmart does not succeed or fail based on construction skills.
(Basically cribbed from Ben Evans)
But AI/ML is still young enough that it's possible to follow the field (JMLR perhaps but I am not an expert)
Finally a sillier question -
If HN started an in-house magazine, what would it look like?
> I would say this is because the software world is too big now. We genuinely are looking at a new form of literacy that is changing all aspects of human communication, organisation and decision making. It's hard to cram that in any one magazine.
Au contraire, I think that with the increase in output, we need something like that now more than ever. Not everybody needs to know everything, but there's plenty of topics _most_ engineers would benefit from. In my mind it would like something like the (now defunct?) O'Reilly Technology Radar but more technically-oriented.
> Finally a sillier question - If HN started an in-house magazine, what would it look like?
I don't see it as silly. The average discussion on HN is leaps and bounds above the global internet average, and I believe, given enough editorial supervision, plenty of HN users could publish at least one banger article. And on the other side, I believe most of us would be willing to pay 5 or 10 dollars a month for a magazine with like 3-4 excellent long-form pieces and another 4-5 (forgive the pun) bite-sized articles.
It's hard to cram that in any one magazine.
So I suspect that there is a sub-genre of magazine - the Byte for education software and the Byte for legal software and ...
As a technology this big matures it becomes so embedded in each industry that the questions that matter stop being software questions and start being industry questions - it's important that Walmart uses good concrete and steel on its shops, but walmart does not succeed or fail based on construction skills.
(Basically cribbed from Ben Evans)
But AI/ML is still young enough that it's possible to follow the field (JMLR perhaps but I am not an expert)
Finally a sillier question -
If HN started an in-house magazine, what would it look like?