Might sound dull, but I recommend Wikipedia.<p>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.<p>Eventually you'll end up reading articles that are not even remotely related to your initial inquiry, but highly interesting nonetheless.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/" rel="nofollow">https://theconversation.com/</a> - Great source of news and analysis of everything. Articles by academics and researchers. Claims almost always backed with evidence.<p><a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kurzweilai.net/</a> - Articles about some of the most interesting bleeding-edge high-tech research.<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/</a> - Tech and tech-related news.
<a href="http://highscalability.com/" rel="nofollow">http://highscalability.com/</a> - 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.<p>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 :)
Nautilus - <a href="http://nautil.us/" rel="nofollow">http://nautil.us/</a> - Science magazine with great art<p>The Economist - <a href="https://www.economist.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/</a> - I like that they do articles about places all over the world<p>Find Lectures - <a href="https://www.findlectures.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.findlectures.com/</a> - Search engine focused on collecting talks<p>I also collect book recommendations from HN, people I follow on Twitter in an Amazon wishlist.
The Morning Paper (<a href="https://blog.acolyer.org/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.acolyer.org/</a>) is a nice way to learn about research happening outside my own little bubble.
A few sites from my newsfeed (I use Newsblur):<p><pre><code> 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</code></pre>
Google News - Love how it aggregates news across multiple sources.<p>Google Trends - To understand what people are searching for<p>Reddit - Treasure trove of opinions and insights<p>Hacker News - Quality tech news and opinions<p>For my own use, I built a simple site to browse all of these sites from one place effectively: <a href="https://newsfeed.one/" rel="nofollow">https://newsfeed.one/</a>
This is my favorite one:<p><a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quantamagazine.org/</a><p>Quanta articles are always extremely enlightening, interesting and well written.
A couple that haven't yet been mentioned:<p>American Scientist (distinct from Scientific American) [<a href="https://www.americanscientist.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.americanscientist.org/</a>] for science, engineering and technology.<p>Foreign Affairs [<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.foreignaffairs.com/</a>] for international relations and politics.<p>although I actually switched back to reading these (and others) in ink-on-paper format, which I've found helps me focus much better.<p>EDIT: Also, Philosophy Now [<a href="https://philosophynow.org/" rel="nofollow">https://philosophynow.org/</a>] for more abstract ideas.<p>These are bimonthly publications, and all worth paying money for.
I try to limit it to the following:<p>US Gamer: <a href="https://www.usgamer.net" rel="nofollow">https://www.usgamer.net</a><p>Giant Bomb: <a href="https://www.giantbomb.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.giantbomb.com</a> (I'm premium subscriber)<p>Ars Technica: <a href="https://arstechnica.com" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com</a><p>NeoGAF: <a href="https://www.neogaf.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.neogaf.com</a> (I try not to sometimes as it's a time sink, but it's fun, mindless and stressless.)<p>and<p>Hacker News of course.<p>I try to stay away from Reddit and as it's a time sink for me and I find can stress me mentally.
I like to read at least one post on <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/</a> to keep me motivated to make my side project successful.<p>I also read the daily email from <a href="http://oppsdaily.com/" rel="nofollow">http://oppsdaily.com/</a> to see if there is a problem that I can solve that someone is willing to pay for.
Not a site per say, but I check out PBS Digital Studios daily on youtube. Namely:<p>Infinite Series - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs4aHmggTfFrpkPcWSaBN9g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs4aHmggTfFrpkPcWSaBN9g</a> (I never thought I would find a math series one of my favorite channels)<p>SpaceTime - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g</a><p>Crash Course - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6b17PVsYBQ0ip5gyeme-Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6b17PVsYBQ0ip5gyeme-Q</a><p>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.
I hate newsflood. I figure if it's important enough it will either float up to<p>news.ycombinator.com<p>or to the Economist (which I order-but I tend to listen most of the articles as the audio comes free for subscribers and is of excellent quality).<p>I try to read books nowadays more than random blogposts. Makes my monkeybrain happier (and I secretly wish wiser).
<a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/" rel="nofollow">http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/</a><p>Definitively non-tech, but full of knowledge and inspiration.
Hacker News, Marginal Revolution and the Financial Times. Reddit mostly for leisure, but occasionally also for knowledge and inspiration.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>Then I also use Youtube, subscirbe to Confreaks, and again, whenever I like some video, they suggest something very close to what I like.<p>Then sometimes ago, I started to collect links and realize I should share with the world and start this site: <a href="https://betterdev.link/" rel="nofollow">https://betterdev.link/</a>
I like the curated, summarized "weekly newsletters", one of them is <a href="http://javascriptweekly.com/" rel="nofollow">http://javascriptweekly.com/</a> but there are more.
I visit Raymond Chen's blog[0] every weekday.<p>He posts content on Windows internals, Win32 APIs, and explanations for Windows behavior.<p>If you program for Win32 then reading his blog will identify bugs in your code[1].<p>[0] <a href="https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=57" rel="nofollow">http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=57</a><p>Edited for formatting and to omit needless words
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.<p><a href="http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/</a> is a pretty good one
Some of the only decent writing I ever see on the web:<p><a href="http://popehat.com" rel="nofollow">http://popehat.com</a><p>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 <a href="https://coursera.org" rel="nofollow">https://coursera.org</a> - 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.
Daily - Mostly Tech / Science.
I love hacker news as it covers basic science as well. From discovery of planets, to Gene editing.
Hacker News :)
<a href="http://techmeme.com/" rel="nofollow">http://techmeme.com/</a>
<a href="https://slashdot.org/" rel="nofollow">https://slashdot.org/</a><p>Weekly - World
<a href="http://kottke.org/" rel="nofollow">http://kottke.org/</a>
<a href="https://www.edge.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.edge.org/</a>
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 :)<p>Random
Facebook - mostly from friends and of personal nature, but I do visit resources they point out
There's of course Ars Technica, but for finance-meets-technology-meets-basic-socioeconomics nothing beats Matt Levine's Money Stuff.<p>Archive and RSS feed link here: <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/topics/money-stuff" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/view/topics/money-stuff</a>
Some time ago I built <a href="https://10hn.pancik.com/" rel="nofollow">https://10hn.pancik.com/</a> 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.
- Daily, the full episode: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour/videos</a><p>- HN<p>- A whole bunch of other site/blog/channels as feed that I look at when I have time.
<a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brainpickings.org/</a> - Great website dealing with literary works and thoughts of humanities greatest minds.
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.<p><a href="https://mestredocodigo.com.br/visualg-3-curso-introdutorio-parte-1/" rel="nofollow">https://mestredocodigo.com.br/visualg-3-curso-introdutorio-p...</a>
news.ycombinator.com though I wish it had a way to collapse uninteresting conversations.<p>Stephen Colbert: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtFAi84ehTSYSE9XoHefig/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtFAi84ehTSYSE9XoHefig/vid...</a><p>and lately I've been binge watching the Jordan Peterson lectures: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8Xc2_FtpHI&list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-OKOpQlHyR4k5h" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8Xc2_FtpHI&list=PL22J3VaeAB...</a><p>ribbonfarm: though I usually only read the articles by Venkatesh Rao: <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/admin/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/admin/</a><p>also bingewatching lessons on 2x from <a href="http://edx.org" rel="nofollow">http://edx.org</a>. It used to be <a href="http://coursera.org" rel="nofollow">http://coursera.org</a> but their servers are sluggish most of the time.
Farnam Street @ <a href="https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/</a>:<p>"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.
That might look a bit cliché, but once in a while I'll Google stuff I'm curious about and for which I have absolutely no background.<p>Reading academic reviews and looking up the vocabulary on the fly is a great way to stay humble.
You can't beat Rush Limbaugh with transcripts and audio. Premium membership is even better:
<a href="https://www.rushlimbaugh.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.rushlimbaugh.com</a>
Google Arts & Culture.
<a href="https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/</a>
<a href="https://lobste.rs" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs</a><p>similar to HN but much much more humble in every way. I quite like it. Although I don't have account so I am mostly reading.
<a href="http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/</a><p>Great tumblr, suggested by a close friend.
- HN<p>- Lobste.rs<p>- Reddit (occasionally)<p>- Google News (rarely)<p>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.
<a href="http://www.ted.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com</a>. It's pretty hit and miss, but I've gotten a ton of inspiration and knowledge from this website since 2008.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Life and everything (non-technical): <a href="http://omswami.com" rel="nofollow">http://omswami.com</a>
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.