7 ms·

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

59 points by minute_forest 5y ago

Hi everyone and bots! Title says it all. What websites do you use to find cutting edge information for anything that you are interested in?

egfx 5y ago
GitHub.com, NPMjs.org
smarri 5y ago
Recently signed up to alerts on Google scholar for things of interest. Only problem is a lot of works are paywalled.
themodelplumber 5y ago
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. 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'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 "learning" which happens in a native self-reinforcing projection-style loop as opposed to more fluid, open learning and knowledge production by design. So maybe what you'd be more likely to find that's useful and cutting edge here on the web, and in more readily consumable form, is more like public project updates and data. For this I would offer GitHub, phys.org and your locale's weather service, e.g. weather.gov. You could probably lift the world with those sites if you can readily metabolize what they've got going on.
nikolqy 5y ago
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.) So, I get cutting edge information from blogs operated by tech companies. Stackoverflow also has a really good blog.
erwincoumans 5y ago
Arxiv papers, and follow the authors on twitter. 2 minute papers is nice to discover new things: https://mobile.twitter.com/twominutepapers https://mobile.twitter.com/twominutepapers For example, if you dig quadruped robots (I do) follow https://mobile.twitter.com/leggedrobotics/status/1483876916381638657 https://mobile.twitter.com/leggedrobotics/status/14838769163...
zeepzeep 5y ago
For security stuff it's 100% twitter
- dynamohk 5y ago
  Any specific accounts to follow?
  - nitn 5y ago
    There was a website with a large collection of security blogs. I cannot seem to find it now.
    - lormayna 5y ago
      If you find it again, please post it, I am very interested on it.
      - mdrzn 5y ago
        This seems like a very good curated list: https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/top-cyber-security-blogs-websites/ https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/top-cyber-security-blogs-...
  - zeepzeep 5y ago
    Really depends on what you do, I mostly follow some researchers and bug bounty hunters. Portswigger and related people are a good starting point, terjanq is crazy, people around mario heiderich are insane. I mostly look through replies and everyone that interacts with the ones I know might get a follow.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  > For security stuff it's 100% twitter It saddens me that this is the case. Security types are techies, so should be all over RSS feeds. For example I follow the usual suspects on RSS: * https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/ https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/ * https://gru.gq/feed/ https://gru.gq/feed/ * https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/rss_en.php https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/rss_en.php Ideally please post on Twitter AND an RSS feed.
verdverm 5y ago
This one primarily, word of mouth second
cpach 5y ago
Slack, Twitter, Mastodon. Reddit, to some extent. Mailing lists for various open source projects. And HN of course
- infotropy 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, who and what on Slack, Twitter and Mastodon?
  - cpach 5y ago
    The Slack instance I use the most is a private one. The other is a Swedish one for programmers. My accounts on Twitter and Mastodon are public though! See my profile for links, and feel free to reach out if you also have Twitter/Mastodon :) I also have some curated lists on Twitter: https://twitter.com/giffengrabber/lists https://twitter.com/giffengrabber/lists (that was on my old account so unfortunately I can no longer update those lists)
mccorrinall 5y ago
bloomberg and reuters
- pcdoodle 5y ago
  Fact checkers confirm, this is FALSE.
dusted 5y ago
My information is not so cutting edge, I'd say my most up-to-date information comes from HN.. Some times it's days ahead of mainstream media.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  Same, although I learned about Bitcoin here before it had any value, and most recently, I heard about Wordle before there were news articles. I imagine HN is what kickstarted Wordle's popularity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alexmingoia 5y ago
I read the entire Internet at once using https://sumi.news https://sumi.news
- martzy13 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing!
- CallMeMarc 5y ago
  Nice work, Alex! Really like the simple design, but do I need to directly pay to sign up and check how it works or is there a trial?
  - alexmingoia 5y ago
    If you’re not satisfied I offer a full refund, no questions asked. What you see is what you get. If you go to the sources page, adding or reordering sources is disabled - which is unlocked if you pay for an account.
- beenHot400 5y ago
  I hate to nitpick but when you click the button "yesterday", It seems like there's no other way to get back to the "Latest" news without clicking the icon in the header. I think having a permanent "Latest" button when navigating to previous days would be more intuitive.
  - alexmingoia 5y ago
    Great suggestion. I’ll add that.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Interesting! The sparse, Craigslist-esque text-heavy design is refreshing.
- IcyHordr 5y ago
  Solid, love this. Bookmarked into my favorites. Thanks!
qnsi 5y ago
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.
someoneelse9 5y ago
Subscribe to the RSS feeds of interesting sites. You'll be able to read every new from several fields in one place together. In your RSS client you could tag your RSS subscriptions and create feeds like "Technology", " Politics", "Philosophy", etc.
- pitched 5y ago
  What are some sites you use for this? Curious for myself to check out, I don’t mean to be mean with the question. I haven’t seen RSS feeds being advertised like this in a long time. I think people mostly use email newsletters instead now. Email is also easy to filter into groups like that though.
bluehuman 5y ago
Twitter following informative accounts
willcipriano 5y ago
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's within the zeitgeist of the influencers it's already old news. Talk to the people who are clearly smart but not being listened to.
- champagnois 5y ago
  Such people would be banned from nearly any platform for posting controversial or unpopular content. Snopes and politico would fact check them with a mostly false rating. Etc. The collective masses are always a bit arrogant in their praise of existing dogma.
- tommydoesntknow 5y ago
  “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” —Jonathan Swift
- starwind 5y ago
  Not sure these are the best examples. Tesla did some amazing engineering but had some crank beliefs (he thought special and general relativity were nonsense and didn't believe in electrons) and if he was personally unpopular it was probably due more to his seclusion than anything else Alan Turning was very well respected in his day and prosecuted because he was gay like many men in mid-century Britain. Galileo antagonized his opponents and got on the wrong side of the Pope. Copernicus avoided persecution without compromising his beliefs https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-and-the-Church-What-the-history-books-don-t-say https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-an...
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    That's my point, people who change the world are going to be eccentric. Ideas that are ahead of their time will seem really weird, you need weird people to create and champion weird ideas. Not all of them will be good mind you, but to have a chance of being on the cutting edge you sort of also have to position yourself on the periphery of society.
drdunce 5y ago
If you really want the cutting edge, I think it's probably academic conferences in the area you're interested in. But I don't think most people really do, because that'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.
OpFour 5y ago
[dead]

59 points by minute_forest 5y ago

Hi everyone and bots! Title says it all. What websites do you use to find cutting edge information for anything that you are interested in?

egfx 5y ago

GitHub.com, NPMjs.org

smarri 5y ago

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

themodelplumber 5y ago

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. 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'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 "learning" which happens in a native self-reinforcing projection-style loop as opposed to more fluid, open learning and knowledge production by design. So maybe what you'd be more likely to find that's useful and cutting edge here on the web, and in more readily consumable form, is more like public project updates and data. For this I would offer GitHub, phys.org and your locale's weather service, e.g. weather.gov. You could probably lift the world with those sites if you can readily metabolize what they've got going on.

nikolqy 5y ago

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.) So, I get cutting edge information from blogs operated by tech companies. Stackoverflow also has a really good blog.

erwincoumans 5y ago

Arxiv papers, and follow the authors on twitter. 2 minute papers is nice to discover new things: https://mobile.twitter.com/twominutepapers https://mobile.twitter.com/twominutepapers For example, if you dig quadruped robots (I do) follow https://mobile.twitter.com/leggedrobotics/status/1483876916381638657 https://mobile.twitter.com/leggedrobotics/status/14838769163...

zeepzeep 5y ago

For security stuff it's 100% twitter

dynamohk 5y ago
Any specific accounts to follow?
- nitn 5y ago
  There was a website with a large collection of security blogs. I cannot seem to find it now.
  - lormayna 5y ago
    If you find it again, please post it, I am very interested on it.
    - mdrzn 5y ago
      This seems like a very good curated list: https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/top-cyber-security-blogs-websites/ https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/top-cyber-security-blogs-...
- zeepzeep 5y ago
  Really depends on what you do, I mostly follow some researchers and bug bounty hunters. Portswigger and related people are a good starting point, terjanq is crazy, people around mario heiderich are insane. I mostly look through replies and everyone that interacts with the ones I know might get a follow.
CodeGlitch 5y ago
> For security stuff it's 100% twitter It saddens me that this is the case. Security types are techies, so should be all over RSS feeds. For example I follow the usual suspects on RSS: * https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/ https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/ * https://gru.gq/feed/ https://gru.gq/feed/ * https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/rss_en.php https://gynvael.coldwind.pl/rss_en.php Ideally please post on Twitter AND an RSS feed.

verdverm 5y ago

This one primarily, word of mouth second

cpach 5y ago

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

infotropy 5y ago
Out of curiosity, who and what on Slack, Twitter and Mastodon?
- cpach 5y ago
  The Slack instance I use the most is a private one. The other is a Swedish one for programmers. My accounts on Twitter and Mastodon are public though! See my profile for links, and feel free to reach out if you also have Twitter/Mastodon :) I also have some curated lists on Twitter: https://twitter.com/giffengrabber/lists https://twitter.com/giffengrabber/lists (that was on my old account so unfortunately I can no longer update those lists)

mccorrinall 5y ago

bloomberg and reuters

pcdoodle 5y ago
Fact checkers confirm, this is FALSE.

dusted 5y ago

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

MerelyMortal 5y ago
Same, although I learned about Bitcoin here before it had any value, and most recently, I heard about Wordle before there were news articles. I imagine HN is what kickstarted Wordle's popularity.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

alexmingoia 5y ago

I read the entire Internet at once using https://sumi.news https://sumi.news

martzy13 5y ago
Thanks for sharing!
CallMeMarc 5y ago
Nice work, Alex! Really like the simple design, but do I need to directly pay to sign up and check how it works or is there a trial?
- alexmingoia 5y ago
  If you’re not satisfied I offer a full refund, no questions asked. What you see is what you get. If you go to the sources page, adding or reordering sources is disabled - which is unlocked if you pay for an account.
beenHot400 5y ago
I hate to nitpick but when you click the button "yesterday", It seems like there's no other way to get back to the "Latest" news without clicking the icon in the header. I think having a permanent "Latest" button when navigating to previous days would be more intuitive.
- alexmingoia 5y ago
  Great suggestion. I’ll add that.
rchaud 5y ago
Interesting! The sparse, Craigslist-esque text-heavy design is refreshing.
IcyHordr 5y ago
Solid, love this. Bookmarked into my favorites. Thanks!

qnsi 5y ago

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.

someoneelse9 5y ago

Subscribe to the RSS feeds of interesting sites. You'll be able to read every new from several fields in one place together. In your RSS client you could tag your RSS subscriptions and create feeds like "Technology", " Politics", "Philosophy", etc.

pitched 5y ago
What are some sites you use for this? Curious for myself to check out, I don’t mean to be mean with the question. I haven’t seen RSS feeds being advertised like this in a long time. I think people mostly use email newsletters instead now. Email is also easy to filter into groups like that though.

bluehuman 5y ago

Twitter following informative accounts

willcipriano 5y ago

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's within the zeitgeist of the influencers it's already old news. Talk to the people who are clearly smart but not being listened to.

champagnois 5y ago
Such people would be banned from nearly any platform for posting controversial or unpopular content. Snopes and politico would fact check them with a mostly false rating. Etc. The collective masses are always a bit arrogant in their praise of existing dogma.
tommydoesntknow 5y ago
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” —Jonathan Swift
starwind 5y ago
Not sure these are the best examples. Tesla did some amazing engineering but had some crank beliefs (he thought special and general relativity were nonsense and didn't believe in electrons) and if he was personally unpopular it was probably due more to his seclusion than anything else Alan Turning was very well respected in his day and prosecuted because he was gay like many men in mid-century Britain. Galileo antagonized his opponents and got on the wrong side of the Pope. Copernicus avoided persecution without compromising his beliefs https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-and-the-Church-What-the-history-books-don-t-say https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-an...
- willcipriano 5y ago
  That's my point, people who change the world are going to be eccentric. Ideas that are ahead of their time will seem really weird, you need weird people to create and champion weird ideas. Not all of them will be good mind you, but to have a chance of being on the cutting edge you sort of also have to position yourself on the periphery of society.

drdunce 5y ago

If you really want the cutting edge, I think it's probably academic conferences in the area you're interested in. But I don't think most people really do, because that'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.

OpFour 5y ago

[dead]