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Ask YC: Favorite blogs?
40 points by unalone on Jan 30, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 40 comments
I checked searchyc - doesn't look like there's ever been a discussion about this! What blogs do you love? Not even what blogs do you think are best, what ones do you love reading?

My favorites: The Big Contrarian (http://www.bigcontrarian.com/), which has incredible essays (one of the best is on something like the third-to-last page), All of Andy Baio's blog posts and links (http://waxy.org/), Daring Fireball (http://daringfireball.net) - which I started reading before I was a Mac user, and which got me into both Apple stuff and typography, so perhaps there's a bias - and Shawn Blanc writes excellent reviews of software he loves (http://shawnblanc.net/).

What about you? Which blogs really get you going?



Here are a few previous discussions:

Who would you pay to read? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166607

The Best Blogs You're Not Reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128762


La Tartine Gourmande http://www.latartinegourmande.com One of the best food blogs ever with awesome photography. It helps to have non-tech stuff sometimes :)


Beautiful, beautiful blog. The photography, the writing. The author's humanity -- her soul, if you will -- comes across and that makes it entirely win.


What an absolutely lovely blog! Thanks so much for pointing this one out.


The photography is just amazing, its like food porn. Apparently she's making a cookbook, which should be pretty sweet. I can't wait to make some of the more involved stuff when I get out of my tiny NYC apartment.


Thank you for this, what a great find.


Seth Godin's Blog - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Mark Cuban - http://BlogMaverick.com

Paul Graham - http://PaulGraham.com

Gary Vee - http://garyvaynerchuk.com/

538 - http://FiveThirtyEight.com fascinating

Freakonomics - http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/ as above

ZenHabits - http://zenhabits.net I met him in person and Leo is as genuine as they come

My Life In A Cube - http://www.mylifeinacube.com/ Great comic

And like, hundreds more ;)

Also the best place to find stuff I like is my StumbleUpon RSS feed at http://tr.im/sidsu

I think it is all pretty spiffy stuff myself. And of course, my blog is at http://sidsavara.com


I like the following:

Hack a day - hackaday.com

Overcomig Bias - overcomingbias.com

3quarksdaily - 3quarksdaily.com

make magazine - makezine.com

developing intelligence - http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/

schneier on security - schneier.com/blog/

... and a few other ones that are slipping my mind. Will update if I remember.


hey, thanks for the plug of DI...


The only blog I really read: http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/ (interesting discussion of game theory that is accessible to non-game-theorests)

I also check http://startupnorth.ca/ from time to time to keep up on what's happening in Canada.


http://stackoverflow.com/questions/195689/what-developer-blo...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78955/what-are-the-best-p...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/188991/which-programming-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/151974/c-blogs-that-you-r...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/249044/best-non-microsoft...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380236


http://www.makezine.com

http://www.deutsche-startups.de - German Techcrunch

http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/ - for creative inspiration

http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/ - watch a new startup in the making

http://www.codinghorror.com

http://www.hackaday.com

http://www.lifehacker.com

http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com and http://www.getrichslowly.com - for personal finance

Other than that I pretty much rely on HN to filter interesting stuff ;)


Linus Torvald's Blog: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/

Paul Graham Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/

Coding Horror: http://www.codinghorror.com

JoelOnSoftware: http://www.joelonsoftware.com

Bryan Cantrill's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/

Rich Burridge's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/richb/


Merlin Mann - http://43folders.com - creativity, productivity A List Apart - http://www.alistapart.com/ - html, css, webdesign Kottke - http://kottke.org - cool links Subtraction - http://www.substraction.com - print design, web design

Some things that aren't blog but I Think provide great things and have rss feeds

http://delicious.com/network/tikva http://delicious.com/cshirky http://ffffound.com/

I read over 100 blogs, not all are in the super duper cool level, but I share what I think is the best stuff using my google reader @

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/06434253323852871046


www.terrytao.wordpress.com is a blog I like to follow, really nice research level expositional writing on a wide variety of fascinating and nontrivial math. Whats especial impressive (aside from the field's medal) is that the first two years of his blog are being converted into expositional texts to be published by the American Mathematical Society.


Harder the me just listing them, but you can take a look through my Google Reader shared items:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/10530692481246922106

The most frequent ones are:

* Schneier on Security ( http://www.schneier.com/blog/ )

* Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science ( http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/ )

I also follow a bunch of significant python people and the artima weblogs.


Most of my favorites are startup related or at least in the tech industry.

http://mashable.com http://centernetworks.com http://scalableintimacy.com/ http://chrisbrogan.com http://xconomy.com http://dondodge.typepad.com/


I was sat on the bus this morning thinking of asking this exact question. I have a big list of blogs I read but they're mostly personal, and I need to expand my geeky reading list.

Anyway, as I am looking for geek/code/software blogs I have none of those to share, but think there's quite a few of you here would enjoy Chairman Bill's blog ( http://ttocb.blogspot.com/ ) - strong British humour throughout.


I'm in college so I really like Cal Newport's blog. He writes about time management, and to succeed at college without stressing yourself out. For instance, he mentions that you should ignore your g.p.a. . He talks about finding a bunch of citations from his professors his senior year, because he never looked at the letter with his g.p.a. Link: http://calnewport.com/blog


Here are a few that I don't think have been mentioned yet:

The Cooper Journal http://www.cooper.com/journal/

Google Testing Blog http://googletesting.blogspot.com/

Knowing and Doing http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/


I put together a list of hundreds of blogs written by successful entrepreneurs, executives, investors, venture capitalists and other top people:

http://www.bigwinner.org/successful-people/

I don't read them all regularly, but I love getting advice and information from successful people.


I enjoy random blogs (yay for link agregation sites), but MJD and Steve Yegge continually write content worth reading:

MJD: http://blog.plover.com/

Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/


I have these guys's blogs posted under "Software Development A-list" in my RSS reader:

Steve Yegge, Joel Spolsky,Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), Martin Fowler, Ted Neward, Andy Hunt, Steve McConnell (10x Software Development), Michael Feathers,Paul Graham


The Last Psychiatrist - http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ Yegge - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/


Unqualified Reservations.

There are plenty of political crackpots on the internet, but how many condemn the American Revolution and support the Jacobite cause? How many go back to actually read Tory papers from the 18th century and Confederate papers from the 19th? Have you ever read the Tories' side? Chances are you haven't. Chances are you've been taught that America is wholesome and awesome and good and apple pie.

That's why UR is awesome. I love writing that changes my perspective on the world.

Edit: Here's a nice fisking of the Declaration of Independence from 1776:

http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&...

Some quotes with Moldbug's commentary:

" The last time I had the honour of being in your Lordship's company, you observed that you were utterly at a loss as to what facts many parts of the Declaration of Independence published by the Philadelphia Congress referred..."

Moldbug: In other words: these Congress people are so whack-a-doodle-doo, half the time your Lordship can't even tell what they're talking about. Presumably "your Lordship" is Lord Germain. Dear reader, how does your own knowledge of the Declaration compare to Lord Germain's? Weren't you amused, for instance, to learn that

" I know of no new offices erected in America in the present reign, except those of the Commissioners of the Customs and their dependents. Five Commissioners were appointed, and four Surveyors General dismissed; perhaps fifteen to twenty clerks and under officers were necessary for this board more than the Surveyors had occasion for before: Land and tide waiters, weighers, &c. were known officers before; the Surveyors used to encrease or lessen the number as the King’s service required, and the Commissioners have done no more. Thirty or forty additional officers in the whole Continent, are the Swarms which eat out the substance of the boasted number of three millions of people."

Moldbug: or, most intriguingly, that

" The first in order, He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good; is of so general a nature, that it is not possible to conjecture to what laws or to what Colonies it refers. I remember no laws which any Colony has been restrained from passing, so as to cause any complaint of grievance, except those for issuing a fraudulent paper currency, and making it a legal tender; but this is a restraint which for many years past has been laid on Assemblies by an act of Parliament, since which such laws cannot have been offered to the King for his allowance. I therefore believe this to be a general charge, without any particulars to support it; fit enough to be placed at the head of a list of imaginary grievances."


My first stop of the day is non-tech: Glen Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer turned political pundit.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/


The French Laundry at home http://carolcookskeller.blogspot.com/

She finished up in October, but it is still one of my favorite blogs.


http://www.barstoolsports.com, besides the usual techcrunch, gigaom, readwriteweb, go2web20, etc.


makezine.com

codinghorror.com

iwillteachyoutoberich.com

joestump.net

freelanceswitch.com

zenhabits.net


I'll second iwillteachyoutoberich, I've been reading that blog for a few years now and Ramit has a style that is very accessible to a lot of people. Great blog.


i recommend it too, but only cause ramit's my brother :)


Wow -- this is so cool. Thanks, guys. (I'm the author of http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com.)


I agree - great tips on iwillteachyoutoberich.com. For more in depth and targeted tips check out his other project scroogestrategy.com too.


Carl Zimmer, biology: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/


I use a slinkset as my RSS reader. It's at http://andrew.slinkset.com/


http://friendfeed.com/brlewis/likes?service=blog


joelonsoftware http://www.joelonsoftware.com/


gapingvoid.com, especially "How to be creative" bill clementson's lispy blog


good coding music: http://www.dancefloormayhem.com/; http://noiseporn.com


No FlowingData love?




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