Ask HN: What websites do you use to find cutting edge information?

In all my wishes that it weren't so, the best answer is Twitter. A lot of academics, practitioners, politicans, journalists are there. If you want to read something in depth, Twitter I find is also best to find sources there.

Really cutting edge information of the specialized or proprietary kind is pretty tricky. I find a lot of it through things like specialty conferences and YouTube interviews.<p>But for that you really have to know who the various luminaries of the relevant fields of interest are, and kind of track their world a bit. A lot of them don&#x27;t post online much because for one, they have recognized that the platform we all have here in general is designed for grosso modo memetic &quot;learning&quot; which happens in a native self-reinforcing projection-style loop as opposed to more fluid, open learning and knowledge production by design.<p>So maybe what you&#x27;d be more likely to find that&#x27;s useful and cutting edge here on the web, and in more readily consumable form, is more like public project updates and data.<p>For this I would offer GitHub, phys.org and your locale&#x27;s weather service, e.g. weather.gov. You could probably lift the world with those sites if you can readily metabolize what they&#x27;ve got going on.

I read the entire Internet at once using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sumi.news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sumi.news</a>

Arxiv papers, and follow the authors on twitter. 2 minute papers is nice to discover new things: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;twominutepapers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;twominutepapers</a><p>For example, if you dig quadruped robots (I do) follow <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;leggedrobotics&#x2F;status&#x2F;1483876916381638657" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;leggedrobotics&#x2F;status&#x2F;14838769163...</a>

The people doing the real cutting edge stuff have historically been ostracized and unpopular for one reason or another (Tesla, Alan Turing, Galileo). Once it&#x27;s within the zeitgeist of the influencers it&#x27;s already old news. Talk to the people who are clearly smart but not being listened to.

My information is not so cutting edge, I&#x27;d say my most up-to-date information comes from HN.. Some times it&#x27;s days ahead of mainstream media.

If you really want the cutting edge, I think it&#x27;s probably academic conferences in the area you&#x27;re interested in.<p>But I don&#x27;t think most people really do, because that&#x27;s far too much noise to parse. Most people probably want it to have passed the bullshit test (so many academic papers make fake claims now), been tested, and been wrapped up and demonstrated in a neat Python library or similar. Somewhere like this is probably the best place for that.

I mean Google to start with and Wikipedia for some sources. I like tech blogs when they talk about new things. Kinsta has a fun blog, and so do most of the database providers (Singlestore etc.)<p>So, I get cutting edge information from blogs operated by tech companies. Stackoverflow also has a really good blog.

Slack, Twitter, Mastodon.<p>Reddit, to some extent.<p>Mailing lists for various open source projects.<p>And HN of course

Subscribe to the RSS feeds of interesting sites. You&#x27;ll be able to read every new from several fields in one place together.<p>In your RSS client you could tag your RSS subscriptions and create feeds like &quot;Technology&quot;, &quot; Politics&quot;, &quot;Philosophy&quot;, etc.

For security stuff it&#x27;s 100% twitter

This one primarily, word of mouth second

Twitter following informative accounts

GitHub.com, NPMjs.org

Recently signed up to alerts on Google scholar for things of interest. Only problem is a lot of works are paywalled.

bloomberg and reuters