I am giving individual posts more weightage than a blog. You are free to mention the entire blog if you think everything there is worthwhile.<p>Mention some blog posts that you still remember for what it served to you.<p>One example may be this Mechanical Watch description: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
Almost everything <a href="https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/</a> puts out. It is all very much about pushing around in protocols, devices, networking, and playing around with things that most people don't think about. There are very few blogs that hit the mark with most of the posts, but that's one that sticks in my mind. If you want some specific ones though: <a href="https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dive-into-the-world-of-dos-viruses" rel="nofollow">https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dive-into-the-world-of-dos-v...</a>
<a href="https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/traceroute-haikus" rel="nofollow">https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/traceroute-haikus</a>
<a href="https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dell-switch-hacking" rel="nofollow">https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dell-switch-hacking</a>
<a href="https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-storage-dnsfs" rel="nofollow">https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-st...</a>
<a href="https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over" rel="nofollow">https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over</a><p>CW: gore in header image, about one page long. PgDn gets it out of view on a 1080p screen<p>Posted on HN a while back. It's slightly bleak in outlook but it was what finally pushed me to take serious steps to reduce my presence online. Got rid of all my apps that weren't strictly for comms and deleted most of my socials accounts. I already feel better for the change.
“Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future” by Tim Urban convinced me that neural laces and their development is feasible, probable and imminently worthwhile. It made it clear that visionaries like Musk seem like total lunatics unless you break problems down into their absolute atomic principles. His drawings are also really funny. He blows the brain up to the size of Madison Square Garden and shows that at this scale each cubic meter has 40,000 neurons in it, a complex system in itself that becomes near incomprehensible once you factor in the rest of the blown up cortex that would take half an hour to walk around. You get a sense for the immense difficulty and yet deterministic physics of the problem.<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html" rel="nofollow">https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html</a>
Lesswrong blog by Eliezer Yudkowsky - deep dive into biases, rational thinking and acting. "The sequences" is a series of posts that explore the topic in depth, definitely influenced me when I was younger.<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality</a>
<a href="https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram" rel="nofollow">https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minis...</a><p>Security researcher finds the Australian prime minister’s personal info. Very much a love it or hate it writing style, but as someone who’s lived in Australia for a while I found it hilarious.
<a href="https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/" rel="nofollow">https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/08/tiny-programs/</a> - makes you fired up to do some projects<p><a href="https://x.st/visual-sum-of-cubes/" rel="nofollow">https://x.st/visual-sum-of-cubes/</a> - nice visualizations<p><a href="https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/" rel="nofollow">https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/</a> - amazing presentation of porting desktop game to phone
"The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...</a><p>"My favorite Erlang program" by Joe Armstrong — <a href="https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-11-21-My-favorite-erlang-program.html" rel="nofollow">https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-11-21-My-favorite-e...</a>
Antirez, the creator of Redis, has a few great ones in his blog. One that comes to mind is "Writing system software: code comments." [0]. Previously discussed on HN [1].<p>[0] <a href="http://antirez.com/news/124" rel="nofollow">http://antirez.com/news/124</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157047" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157047</a>
<a href="https://parmanu.com/2012/10/28/family-matters/#more-4671" rel="nofollow">https://parmanu.com/2012/10/28/family-matters/#more-4671</a><p>A meditation on immigration and the opposite, "why someone would leave a good job for no other reason than to be close to family". This is a rich piece that I've always gone back to over the past decade. The rest of the blog is equally as brilliant.
<a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty" rel="nofollow">https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...</a><p>A book review winner outlining "land value tax". Once you read it it's scary how many things you start to notice that it would solve, and how many inefficient policies are put in place but not required if you solve this ultimate underlying issue.
This lovely presentation of how GPS works: <a href="https://ciechanow.ski/gps/" rel="nofollow">https://ciechanow.ski/gps/</a>
Same website has several other, equally cool, blog posts.
I'm going to hijack this post to ask for help locating a blogpost I read via an HN link a few (4ish) years ago. It was written by an academic studying infrastructure in the developing world. The subject was construction of a public transport network in a large city (Lahore? Lagos?), and his difficulties in obtaining reliable data from public sources on basic features like scale, budget, and schedule.<p>What made the post interesting was how he drily cited multiple official sources to show that none were in agreement. Something like "The new trunk line will stretch 74 km." [link 1] "It cover 89 km end to end." [link 2] "All told, the line will add 107 km of new track." [link 3] etc. etc.<p>So basically it functioned both as an account of his research and a tacit commentary on the problems that arise from dealing with unreliable official sources. If that rings a bell for anyone, I'd be very grateful for a link!
Playing to Win: <a href="https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html</a><p>A beautifully narrated real story about hacking the economy of Minecraft.
Charity Major’s posts on management, individual contribution, and the space between, are worth visiting:<p><a href="https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/" rel="nofollow">https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...</a><p><a href="https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/" rel="nofollow">https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...</a><p><a href="https://charity.wtf/2020/09/06/if-management-isnt-a-promotion-then-engineering-isnt-a-demotion/" rel="nofollow">https://charity.wtf/2020/09/06/if-management-isnt-a-promotio...</a>
Dan Luu’s Nothing Works article is a must read for every tech person <a href="https://danluu.com/nothing-works/" rel="nofollow">https://danluu.com/nothing-works/</a>
Understanding why Microsoft ploughs money into VS Code<p><a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/</a>
The 100% correct way to do CSS breakpoints <a href="https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-100-correct-way-to-do-css-breakpoints-88d6a5ba1862/" rel="nofollow">https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-100-correct-way-to-do-...</a>
Still needed 5 years later, yet ironically soon breakpoint will be gone
Nick Johnson's blog about damn cool algorithms<p><a href="http://blog.notdot.net/tag/damn-cool-algorithms" rel="nofollow">http://blog.notdot.net/tag/damn-cool-algorithms</a>
<a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/" rel="nofollow">https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...</a><p>An inspirational anecdote that demonstrates the life-changing value of keeping information accessible to everyone.
all my real oauth knowledge came from this <a href="https://labs.detectify.com/2022/07/06/account-hijacking-using-dirty-dancing-in-sign-in-oauth-flows/" rel="nofollow">https://labs.detectify.com/2022/07/06/account-hijacking-usin...</a>
<a href="https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/" rel="nofollow">https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/</a><p>>Midori was a research/incubation project to explore ways of innovating throughout Microsoft’s software stack. This spanned all aspects, including the programming language, compilers, OS, its services, applications, and the overall programming models. We had a heavy bias towards cloud, concurrency, and safety. The project included novel “cultural” approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.
Tailscale have some great posts on how aspects of our internet infrastructure work and how to work around them. They're all motivating discussions for the design of Tailscale but the background is excellent:<p>The various techniques for negotiating NAT: <a href="https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/" rel="nofollow">https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/</a><p>How DNS works and why it sometimes doesn't: <a href="https://tailscale.com/blog/magicdns-why-name" rel="nofollow">https://tailscale.com/blog/magicdns-why-name</a>
<a href="https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-broker" rel="nofollow">https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...</a> - Someone put into words my business strategy<p><a href="https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...</a> - Essential advice for anyone starting their career
I'm not sure what is the value of this post? HackerNews is literally all about sharing blog posts and upvoting the ones you enjoy.<p>You're just reinventing HN on HN here...
<a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/</a><p>Is a classic for the combination of eloquent writing and inspecting how the world works.<p><a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...</a><p>is underrated for its playful insight on governance.
Everything at <a href="http://www.minimallyminimal.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.minimallyminimal.com/</a> website - I wish Andrew Kim still maintain his blog as he used to be.<p>Also I've learned recently about <a href="https://androidarts.com/" rel="nofollow">https://androidarts.com/</a> and still browsing through it - such a great inspiration source!
whenever someone new arrives on the team and starts complaining about how terrible the codebase is, and how we should just rewrite everything: <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...</a>
A lot of articles from Josh Comeau are very good at explaining things and are quite interactive. Last one about CSS Flexbox for example: <a href="https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-flexbox/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-flexbox...</a>
Jimmy Maher's in-depth, amateur history of adventure gaming (and the various systems that they ran on), The Digital Antiquarian, can be found at <a href="https://www.filfre.net" rel="nofollow">https://www.filfre.net</a>. (Several previous posts re: The Digital Antiquarian have appeared on HN).
<a href="https://www.adanguyenx.com/blog/partial-reprogramming" rel="nofollow">https://www.adanguyenx.com/blog/partial-reprogramming</a><p>I found this to be an excellent overview of cellular rejuvenation/longevity. Does a good job of explaining the current state of the field.
Several years ago the New York Times had a really cool visualization of Hurricane Harvey’s weather pattern; turns out the author published a guide of how they did it:<p><a href="https://roadtolarissa.com/hurricane/" rel="nofollow">https://roadtolarissa.com/hurricane/</a>
A lot from Dan Slimmons, especially :<p><a href="https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/08/02/stop-apologizing-for-bugs/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/08/02/stop-apologizing-for-...</a><p><a href="https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...</a><p>or<p><a href="https://blog.danslimmon.com/2017/06/30/cap-your-ticket-backlog/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.danslimmon.com/2017/06/30/cap-your-ticket-backl...</a>
Reading this on another open tab right now: <a href="https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/" rel="nofollow">https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/</a><p>Like what I'm reading.
I think all of <a href="https://www.gwern.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/</a> is well written, interesting and unique.
<a href="https://blog.miki.it/2014/7/8/abusing-jsonp-with-rosetta-flash/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.miki.it/2014/7/8/abusing-jsonp-with-rosetta-fla...</a> (this was somewhat more exciting when Flash still existed)
Not sure if this counts as a blog, but I really liked Distill: <a href="https://distill.pub/" rel="nofollow">https://distill.pub/</a>
The articles explain machine learning concepts in a very clear and sometimes interactive way.
Matt Lakeman, Scott Alexander, Maciej Cegłowski, Wait But Why.<p>Highly recommend the Thinking About Things newsletter which sends me individually interesting blog posts. <a href="https://www.thinking-about-things.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.thinking-about-things.com</a>