this stuff never seems to be highly upvoted on HN anymore, and if it gets to +30 there's only a few comments, i speculate because new-school HNers don't understand or care. so i track them myself.
best two advanced swegr blogs ever:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/ -- swegr, fp theory
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/ -- swegr, fp theory
other advanced swegr blogs. we're not talking atwood and joel, here, that stuff is for college kids.
http://www.jasonshen.com/ -- "Art of Ass Kicking" (life)
http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/ -- "Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory." (life)
http://dilbert.com/blog -- politics & life
fwiw, after having digested much of this material, I've moved on to reading all the interesting whitepapers I can find, mostly via my social networks. That's the really advanced stuff. I've been meaning to collect them and summarize many to post to HN. nag me.
Using random characters you're lucky you didn't use the first, third, fifth and tenth character as a "descriptive" term. ;)
And a bit on topic even though it's not a blog. How about "The Bug of the Month" of the makers of lint?
http://www.gimpel.com/html/bugs.htm
A bit obscure but definately broadens the pool of error behavior concepts.
Hi. I'm Sebastian, and I don't lie very often, certainly not about ridiculous stuff. You're conflating two stories:
1. I had a mugging attempt in a bad part of Saigon (by the slums by the river after exploring) and I kicked one of the muggers in the stomach and shouted at the other.
2. I got into a shouting match with a gangster in a McDonald's who had been yelling at the employees and spat on the floor, and was otherwise being a jackass. I told him to knock it off, a shouting match ensued, and later two police officers came, one with riot gear.
The closest I ever came to jumpkicking was when I got into a fight in a brothel when they tried to shake me down for extra cash afterwards. I kicked one of the guys after he grabbed me roughly. But even then, I didn't jumpkick - that's more of a movies thing than a real life thing.
Anyways, I can understand your skepticism, though the rudeness is unnecessary - you could just ask if you wanted details.
Well, that's a shame. You're a smart commentor on here and seem like a decent guy, so I'd enjoy you reading my site if there was value in it for you.
Alas though, I can't take random delete requests because a point was controversial. I certainly overstepped my bounds with that post and publicly apologized, and also offered to Patrick - and him alone - that I'd take it down if he preferred. He didn't ask me to, so I didn't.
I wrote a long reply here with my thoughts and lessons -
And, of course I can't just delete a post because someone is offended, or we'd never discuss anything controversial.
I respect you taking a principled stand, and it's a kind of a bummer that a smart guy doesn't read my site any more. But life goes on. Can please some of the people some of the time, and all that...
> and also offered to Patrick - and him alone - that I'd take it down if he preferred. He didn't ask me to, so I didn't.
You can read that in many different ways. The way I read it does not make you look very good.
Of course he didn't ask you to. Try putting yourself in his position. He has to ask (beg?) you to remove something that should have never happened in the first place?
Does it make you good when people whose name and reputation you use to raise your own visibility then have to come crawling to you to please remove the stuff you write?
When you wrote that piece you were just being silly. After truly grokking why it was a stupid piece leaving it up is malicious, not accidental.
So, don't be a jerk, take it down. Leaving it up doesn't diminish Patrick in any way, but it sure diminishes you.
I appreciate that you're sharing your perspective here, but we see this about 180 degrees differently. This, for instance -
> When you wrote that piece you were just being silly. After truly grokking why it was a stupid piece
Actually, I stand by every point I wrote in that piece and the followup - the problem was in involving another person without clearing it with them, which was out of line.
But all the points stand and no malice was intended. Beyond that, I explicitly asked by email if he wanted it deleted - no asking or begging required.
> So, don't be a jerk, take it down. Leaving it up doesn't diminish Patrick in any way, but it sure diminishes you.
Reasonable minds can disagree. I stand by all the points in that post, apologized for the impoliteness of involving someone else before it clearing it with them, but if you're trying to honestly explore controversial ideas, you simply can't just delete things you stand by because an unrelated third party thinks it should be done.
In any event, cheers for sharing your perspective - we're in about 180 degree philosophical disagreement here, but you did make some good points worth thinking about.
Really smart people are capable of admitting they are wrong and acting upon it.
If you already realize you were out of line then why can't you act on it?
Is being the third hit for 'Patrick McKenzie' in google worth the continued damage to your reputation?
The only controversial bit in your posting was the fact that you used a well known HN'er with an extremely good reputation and a nice guy to boot and attempted to use his reputation for your own gain, in the process turning what would have been a possibly interesting piece into the low point of HN over the time of its existence.
That blight will soil your reputation forever more and it will cause me and people like me (no idea how many of those there are, maybe they'e a minority, maybe not) to remember as long as that piece is up. Its continued presence on the web shows that you have not learned yet.
You go on and on about philosophy and appreciation, if you really had some class you'd realize how silly this discussion is and that it should have never gotten this far. You can't build your reputation by kicking others or dragging their personal life in to the spotlight. Your points should stand on their own without reference to other people.
You could have made your points just as effectively without naming Patrick, but then that would not have gotten you the eyeballs that it did.
Cheap, cynical.
Standing by that is just dumb.
But keep at it, time will tell if you're right or not in persisting in doing this.
> If you already realize you were out of line then why can't you act on it?
I did.
> That blight will soil your reputation forever more
Okay dude, now you're being silly. This is why people can't have reasonable discussions on the internet - I take a moment to respectfully acknowledge your points, think through them, and explain why I disagree, and you keep melodramatic ranting.
You don't like how I handled it? Okay, noted. But this is why people just ignore criticism - I respond with my thinking to you in good faith, and you keep ranting about "dumb" "blight will soil your reputation forever more", "Cheap, cynical", "dumb" - and you're attributing malicious intent where it isn't there.
Before you reply, stop and reflect - I've addressed all of your points and then some, and I disagree with you, but I've tried to be reasonable and respectful. If you want to insult people that do that, you won't get anyone responding to your discussions any more. Indeed, that's what happens on most internet forums eventually - people who do things publicly just stop responding to anonymous critics, because they don't tend to lead to reasonable discussions.
Because putting the onus for removal on Patrick is a dick thing to do.
After all, Patrick owes Sebastian exactly nothing, Sebastian writing this piece does not oblige Patrick to ask for a removal or even to communicate with him on the subject.
It basically says "I will create a clever little boundary that I know will never be met so I get my way".
From Sebastian's account, he made it very easy for Patrick to have it taken down. Since it was Patrick who he hurt, he wanted Patrick to have the choice whether it stayed up or down. That seems fair and right to me.
Sebastian strongly believes that Patrick should use his genius (as he put it) to make a lot more money for himself. He wrote a post explaining that in great detail. What's wrong with that?
I've followed Sebastian's blog for quite a while now, and have no idea what you are talking about. Perhaps I missed some crucial post? Just doesn't seem like a fitting description of his blog.
Anyway, I recommend everyone to take a look at his writing and to judge it yourselves. I think it's good stuff, and has inspired me to push myself harder.
http://catonmat.net -- He doesn't update much anymore since he's working on his startup but the archives are still good. Mostly unix tools and CompSci stuff IIRC.
http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/ -- Curates unix and plan9 articles and some lower level/systems programming stuff with a few other peculiarities sprinkled in.
http://www.foldl.org/ -- Curated programming/compsci stuff from certain subreddits. Didn't last long, archives still have some gems.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ -- I actually don't read the articles that often anymore but I scan the titles as if it were a ticker of what's going on in the programming world.
If someone could point me to more curated sources like foldl, I'd appreciate it.
I use to have a very big list that I would consume via RSS. I kept making the list smaller and smaller as I wasn't checking it very often and thought that was the reason. Then I realized why: for the most part I was seeing the best of those articles on HN. So now, for my daily reads, it is 100% HN + some curated newsletters I'm subscribed too.
This is where I'm trying to get some advice from you ;-)
Each newsletter is focused on a topic or natural collection of topics. What source is more focused on, say, Ruby than Ruby Weekly? I would find this useful advice! :)
Or are you saying you'd rather see, say, 3 or 4 links a week related to a topic.. and it's a problem with the volume rather than subject "focus"?
I am the author of "Practicing Ruby" ( http://practicingruby.com ). It's a paid newsletter but I offer it for free for anyone who can't pay for it, and try to release back issues relatively frequently.
Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing), is still my go-to site for any WinAPI discussion - and he's got plenty to say on the subject of developer & user behavior as well. Come for the brilliance, stay for the snark.
dadgum has been mentioned a few times in this thread .. could someone please explain why that is a good blog, maybe a link to an article that is insightful?
If you are looking for something that is more front-end specific Paul Irish has put together a really great list of blogs, and made a google reader bundle out of them.
Some standout blogs that I always read about programming are:
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/ - Was writing about JS before it was cool, now it just has some of the most detailed coverage you can get of new things happening in js.
http://sheddingbikes.com/ - pretty much everything that zed shaw does is fucking awesome. Take it with a grain of salt though.
UPDATE:
Oh, I almost forgot steve yegge, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ - In a few essays from steve my programming world opened into one of ideas, and not just syntax.
Seconded with enthusiasm. Eric writes at great length about the detailed decisions that go into programming language design, especially revision of an existing language. Even though I should know better, I have been guilty at times of "how hard could it be" syndrome. Reading what Eric says has cured me of that disease. (for programming languages at least)
I agree with this. At first glance the problems he presents are simple, then you realise all the design decisions they've made and the pros and cons of each approach they were aware of when writing C#.
On a footnote I also recommend Jon Skeet: Coding Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/
He's known in the .Net community. He's the guy behind Tony the Pony. He's a Google staffer who has written some C# books. He goes into great depth about C# stuff.
Curious that I'm not following any of the blogs listed below ... I suspect that there are so many that we could each read quality content and have very little overlap. Of course, there are theory blogs that would apply to the whole group, but many of the blogs are also language/domain specific and so only a subset of us would be interested.
I used to frequent Slashdot and DZone but all I have time for these days is HN. This place is fairly good at promoting good stories and the comments are usually as good as Slashdot so I feel like I don't need to go anywhere else (for now).
I try to read from FolkLore.ORg as often as I can - it's not a daily read and there's not much new stuff, but it's off the beaten path and the old stories of Bill and Steve and Woz are pure win.
I read Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew, which is a .NET resource. He posts links to tons of articles every morning on 10 different topics. It's fun to read up on such a variety of different topics.
I also read the Daily WTF every day. It's great to have a chance to look at crappy code and try to re-write it in your head on how it should have been done.
This summer I really enjoyed reading the joelonsoftware archives. The last update was mid-September, but the previous posts kept me busy for quite some time.
It's not specifically a programming blog, but I find "A List Apart" (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/) to be a great resource for the design side of creating software.
Are my eyes playing tricks on me or is the title supposed to read 'What programming blogs do you read daily?' instead of 'What programming blogs your read daily?'
Both have subtle differences that poke at the perfectionist in me.
Joe Damato has a great albeit infrequently updated programming blog, http://timetobleed.com/ . I think he wrote the memprof ruby gem. Posts HN may really enjoy:
an obscure kernel feature to get more info about dying processes [1]
a presentation from some ruby conf, particularly slide set 2 which details how memprof works and talks about the abi, etc [2]
plus a bunch of discussion of profiling tools to look at exactly what gcc or your vm of choice are doing. Highly recommended.
best two advanced swegr blogs ever:
other advanced swegr blogs. we're not talking atwood and joel, here, that stuff is for college kids. life fwiw, after having digested much of this material, I've moved on to reading all the interesting whitepapers I can find, mostly via my social networks. That's the really advanced stuff. I've been meaning to collect them and summarize many to post to HN. nag me.