Please help me find better blogs to read

[iwatog]

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

[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 → smokel]

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.

[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 → popcar2]

Minifeed is great but without some sort of sort by popularity there's just too much noise.

[xrd → abruno3860]

(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.

[sitkack]

I'd recommend going to a library or bookstore. Esp one with literary magazines.

[seumars → sitkack]

This is the only correct suggestion

[ziddoap → seumars]

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.)

[acaloiar]

Previous thread of HN users' personal blogs [1].

HN users are interested in very diverse topics.

Someone put together an OPML feed of all of them, but I can't seem to find it.

[edit]

Found the OPML [2]

[1.] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081

[2.] https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs

[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 → mickeyp]

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 → skydhash]

Thanks for your kind words!

[matltc]

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/about

https://www.twoscomplement.org/#podcast

The latter includes full text transcripts so I think it fits your spec

[jmmv → matltc]

Thanks for the Blog System/5 plug! This is the first time I see my own publication recommended in one of these threads without me bringing it up :)

[derbOac]

I'm curious about some of the suggestions people might have.

For art and design I subscribe to newsletters from Dezeen, Hyperallergic, and Artnet, among others, like local museums. Dezeen articles I usually like to read; the other two I don't read the articles of as often but when they do have things I'm interested in, I'm really interested in them. Smithsonian News is also good, not just for art but history as well. I regularly read that.

I should probably look into similar things from foreign museums or museums out of state.

Strangely enough, I also really like Google's Art and Culture app? I probably don't use it as much as I should, or as much as I like it. I kind of forget about it unfortunately. Sometimes it can be kind of superficial but it has a lot of content and alerts me to things I wouldn't otherwise see, and the articles can be just the right balance of length and depth.

I've found that newsletters are helpful just in terms of being reminded of blogs. I probably get too much email but it also pushes me to unsubscribe from things I don't like. Most of the noise is from retail business too and not blogs or nonprofits.

For books I should probably keep track of better but I like NY RoB, Los Angeles RoB, Paris Book Review off the top of my head. Guardian Books is a newspaper but one I track.

I also have found it really useful to pay attention to publishers and presses you like and subscribe to updates from them. They're not blogs per se but you can often get newsletters with new publications. In addition to The New York Review of Books, for instance, there's also the New York Review Books, which sends out newsletters about books they're releasing that I often find interesting.

[DamnInteresting]

Myself and a small group of curious souls have been sharing links here for years:

https://www.damninteresting.com/curated-links/

We mainly share articles on science, history, psychology, philosophy, true crime, interactives, and other such stuff. We avoid politics as much as feasible. I just checked, and we're coming up on 42,000 links in the catalog so far. Yowza.

[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 → vigneshesan]

> 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.

[xrd]

I'm trying to do less browsing and more intentional reading. RSS works great for this. There is a bit of overwhelm for me in filtering out the right things in a RSS feed. But, generally the work is filtering out posts I don't want, as opposed to filter out the spam and ads I don't want when I'm browsing without intention.

https://RSS.surf (I built this) gathers up the RSS feeds for anything that makes it to the front page of HN. It gathers up interesting blogs, lets me quickly assess if they are useful and interesting, and then easily subscribe. It's been a good transition from browsing HN to getting more intentional.

If you sign up using the login button in the top right, rss.surf will email you a summary of the RSS feeds for the prior day (you can see examples of prior summaries by clicking "see past emails").

FreshRSS is integrated (https://reader.rss.surf) so you can click to subscribe, or just use your own feed reader.

[FumblingBear]

This is pretty obscure, but I've found the more niche, the more I enjoy a blog. [0] It's a series of posts on a blog called Taskerland (written by Moreau Vazh) that do some literary analysis on classic works of horror, specifically, the works of Thomas Ligotti and H.P. Lovecraft.

If you enjoy short form horror stories, and want to read someone's interpretation of the themes and background of some horror with substantial literary merit, it might be worth a shot! It actually encouraged me to start my own blog, doing something similar—though I'm still in the early stages of writing it.

[0] - https://tasker.land/category/series/canon-fodder/

[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/

[jjude]

I collected some of the best essays I read: https://www.jjude.com/best-essays/

I also listed the blogs and newsletters I visit often (OPML available): https://www.jjude.com/consume-list/

[SorrisoAmarelo]

Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform: https://join-lemmy.org/

Oldschool bloglist: https://webring.xxiivv.com/

[s0md3v]

Plugging my own here. Philosophy and Tech.

https://s0md3v.github.io

[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.

[xena]

I blog a fair bit: https://xeiaso.net

[firefax]

Reddit does a good job surfacing quality content, especially in the domain of art and design. There's several science and space subreddits as well.

Very few ppl can blog consistently enough to warrant an RSS feed -- you need an aggregator of some kind.

[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.

[OuterVale]

I've put together a collection of some of my favourites on my site. Many of them should fit your criteria.

https://vale.rocks/links

[homebrewer]

https://mattlakeman.org is alright for long tourism stories intermixed with descriptions of history and politics of the place.

[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 → jmclnx]

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 → elicksaur]

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.

[yapyap]

Hey OP.

bearblog.dev has a great discover page IMO, it consist of people w their own blog, it could be anything tbh.

https://www.bearblog.dev

[michaelmior]

It seems like an Ask HN prefix in the title would be appropriate.

[hcaz]

https://brr.fyi/ is a really good read about a dude who worked at the south pole for a while

[OgsyedIE]

https://acoup.blog

https://www.construction-physics.com

https://fs.blog

https://metafilter.com

https://polymerist.substack.com

https://ribbonfarm.com

https://science.org/blogs/pipeline

https://what-if.xkcd.com

[xxwilli39xx]

I built a website for discovering blog posts:

https://blogdrop.io/

[2ro]

Read mine: https://ytp.me/

(work very much in progress)

[Gooblebrai]

Is a sad loss that webrings are not popular anymore. They were amazing for things like these

[SoKamil]

I wish HN had an auto-hide mode based on a certain topic polarity threshold.

[Goose42]

i'll throw my hat into the self promotion arena - i started a blog/newsletter to combat the concept of the dead internet - read for pop culture stuff as well as other cool, interesting things I find, and also music. It's a grab bag:

https://gasstationcuisine.substack.com/

[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.

[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.

[sirjonathan]

How about Stratechery?

[egonschiele]

Would illustrated blog posts interest you? I just started `Old Man Yells at Cloud` to try to cover AWS: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-mini-book-on-aws-networking-in...

[ramesh31]

The best history blog on the web: https://acoup.blog/

[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.

[j45]

Check out Substack to discover writers who have blogs.

[elicksaur → j45]

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 → elicksaur]

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

[Goose42]

yeah i'm throwing my hat into the self promotion arena but i've positioned my e-newsletter as a fight against the dead internet concept - i share pop culture findings and other interesting links:

https://gasstationcuisine.substack.com/

[aa-jv]

Some obvious ones:

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

[elicksaur → aa-jv]

Not really blogs. More like HN alternatives.

[zerkten → elicksaur]

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.