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Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?

127 points| neilsharma | 10 years ago | reply

Based on my experience, Google searches rarely surface high quality blog posts, articles, and insider analyses. Twitter + LinkedIn have an SNR problem. HN is great only for the (primarily US) tech/startup scene, and other similar sites often lack the community standard or size to maintain a consistent flow of worthwhile new content.

What hand-curated newsletters or websites do experts in any field find incredibly useful? A recent example I've found is Mattermark's daily email newsletter, which has a curated list of 5-10 articles and blogposts from investors and operators.

Open to lists that aren't career related too -- ie: a jazz playlist curated by professional jazz artists.

69 comments

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[+] SCdF|10 years ago|reply
For tech I'm honestly trying to keep up less, I want more time in my life to read shitty fiction etc (and you know, spend time with humans I guess); I've spent the better part of a 15 years keeping up _too_ much IMO.

On nothing to do with tech: I'm desperately trying to find something that covers general world news without too much of a US slant, in a nice concise way. Next Draft (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) is pretty good, but is very US heavy.

When I trialled subscribing to The Economist their Espresso app-- which is essentially a daily curated newsletter-- was pretty decent, so if you sub to them you should definitely check it out.

These days I'm trying the qz daily digest, which I think is working out OK: they talk about what to expect in the next day, what happened while you were asleep etc. If anyone has any better suggestions I'd love to hear them: I like how the economist actually talks about other parts of the world apart from the states, but I don't love it enough to pay their standard sub rate.

In terms of general flowery writing I get emails from Medium based on what I've read, emails from Pocket based on what I read, and longform.org's newsletter. Depending on how snowed under I feel at any given time I either just delete them without opening them, of potentially skim them to see if anything is interesting.

[+] cel1ne|10 years ago|reply
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." – Bruce Lee
[+] cJ0th|10 years ago|reply
I've subscribed the Quarz RSS feed (not the daily newsletter). I am mostly pleased with their articles. They do have a weird obsession with women's issues, though. It's not that I don't care about these but articles on this subject are often a bit fluffy for my taste.

Example: http://qz.com/599694/a-peek-inside-modern-day-elite-kitty-pa... (I read that article two times and still don't understand why "Kitty Parties" are of significance and how they differ from other social gatherings of business minded women or people in general)

@OP: Thanks for posting this questions. Looking forward to other people's answers. I find it quite reassuring that other people also long for curated newsletters.

[+] skewart|10 years ago|reply
Great question! I hope it gets traction and makes it to the front page. I'm curious to see what people come up with.

I like Dave Pell's Next Draft, which is just interesting general news stories, and also Azeem Azhar's Exponential View, which covers tech, with a slant towards AI/ML. In terms of stuff the HN crowd is less likely to already know about, I like Archinect, which covers architecture. It's not really a curated article roll-up so much as it is an architecture news site, but their weekly email is a nice way to stay on top of what's going on in the field.

[+] neilsharma|10 years ago|reply
Thanks for the suggestions -- looking into them now. Clever idea to sign up for a site's weekly email instead of skimming the site.

I used to sign up for an HN newsletter that'd only show the top posts. I thought that was an effective way of pushing only the best content to me every few days. Realized later that I enjoy reading a some articles that didn't get a lot of upvotes.

I also tried to create an open google doc where a small group of friends could share links to articles they found particularly noteworthy. Participation was 0, so I gave up and now just store interesting articles in my bookmarks folder. Messy.

[+] anuj_nm|10 years ago|reply
Next Draft is awesome! I've been reading it for almost 4 years, and its one of my primary sources of general news. He limits it to ten stories a day, and his curation is excellent. I find myself looking forward to clicking through it everyday.
[+] javierga|10 years ago|reply
Second Azeem’s EV. And if you happen to live in London you should check the periodical Exponential Dinners he organises
[+] myztic|10 years ago|reply
I second https://www.brainpickings.org/ and also would like to add http://nextdraft.com/ (though it is more "general news") - other than that I can't help, because I actually prefer to use rss-feeds over Newsletters.

Some RSS-Feeds I follow and which might be of interest: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/ - http://www.rand.org/blog.html - https://blog.codinghorror.com/ - https://bsdmag.org/

(PS: You can also get rss-updates about new entries in Youtube-Playlists (google it) and if you use Twitter and follow some interesting people, that might also be a good way to stay up to date)

[+] guftagu|10 years ago|reply
Also a gem of a blog is Joel Spolsky's joelonsoftware.com. He doesn't post much now but read the archives. You won't regret it.
[+] sareiodata|10 years ago|reply
A WordPress curated newsletter you can find at http://wpmail.me

It's sent once a week and you should find at least one or two good articles that are worth reading.

Then there is https://www.brainpickings.org where the author reads a bunch of books and sends out a newsletter with a resume of each book. I personally don't think there's anything like this out there!

[+] kiesel|10 years ago|reply
I enjoy reading

* http://softwareleadweekly.com/ - about people, culture, leadership

* http://www.devopsweekly.com/ - DevOps, by Gareth Rushgrove

Just my pick. Indeed, I've found links there that haven't popped up anywhere else (HN, Twitter), so I second the original poster's opinion that mail newsletters are a good thing - wouldn't have thought that.

[+] personlurking|10 years ago|reply
It's quite hard to build up a following these days. In the last 5-6 years, I made such newsletters for the coffee world, airports, plus cultural items and tech news out of Brazil. For all of them, I made use of my knowledge/familiarity of Romance languages and would thus translate foreign news to add to my newsletters. Essentially, I learned they were "nice-to-have" but not necessary in order to operate in these fields (the latter being what I was aiming for).

- For coffee, I learned people in the know are after 24/7 changes in the commodities market.

- For worldwide airport news, well, I don't think there is much of a market there (though I would regularly capture 30-50 pertinent articles per day).

- For Brazil news, cultural awareness is nice to have but in order for something like that to be needed, I would think the focus would have to be Business, and very specific (in fact, I played around with making newsletters like this).

- For Brazil tech, I think it was too early on in its development because there were only around 10-15 items per day.

There's a final component I failed to consider with the first two newsletters above, I had no product dev, no one on the inside to say "hey, focus on this aspect, that's what people need."

[+] toni|10 years ago|reply
Try NewsletterStash http://www.newsletterstash.com/

It's a newsletter directory where you can search and find all kinds of newsletters even with subjects outside the tech world. (I've got no affiliation with them, just found it a while back on OpenHunt and thought it's useful.)

[+] nirajrajmohan|10 years ago|reply
I personally recommend Snippets from Social+Capital (s23p). I like their pick of articles - very logical and insightful. Delivered once a week, it captures an essence of what goes on in the tech and startup world while casting aside all the hype and hoopla that most other blogs end up pushing.

Take a look at some of their past newsletters - http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=d7f0f45160075006b2...

2nd Place : Weekly Newsletter + Podcasts from Andreessen Horowitz (A16z). The podcasts are amazing - discussions with entrepreneurs working on bio-tech, AI, Fin-tech, Quantum Computing. All the people I would love to hang out with.

Preview http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=35c671b34bb40414916...

Non-tech: Brain Pickings FTW!

[+] reuven|10 years ago|reply
I run Mandarin Weekly (http://MandarinWeekly.com/), for people learning Chinese. It comes out every Monday, and I've been doing it for more than a year. It's fun to hear from other people learning Chinese, around the world!
[+] Mojah|10 years ago|reply
Fully disclaimer: I'm the one writing this newsletter.

Cron.weekly is a weekly newsletter (every Sunday) with news on Linux and open source. Focussing on the technical side mostly, featuring new tools & projects and guides & tutorials, as well as the latest news, releases, ... pretty much anything noteworthy in open source.

It's available here: http://www.cronweekly.com/

And all archives are available here: http://www.cronweekly.com/archives/

[+] jlgaddis|10 years ago|reply
I pretty much NEVER subscribe to anything like this as it seems like a given that I'll eventually get spammed.

Recently, though, I signed up for the "cron.weekly" [0] newsletter and it's actually pretty decent. I think I first saw it mentioned here.

The "archives" [1] are available as well, so you can get an idea of what it's like before you sign up.

[0]: http://www.cronweekly.com/

[1]: http://www.cronweekly.com/archives/

[+] Mojah|10 years ago|reply
Hi there,

I'm writing that mailing list, so I'm very happy to read you're enjoying it. Thanks for sharing!

Mattias