Aside from our beloved SN of course, what sites do you visit to get your daily fix of tech news and commentary?
I used to have Ars, SN, Verge, and WSJ on my daily rotation. But after deciding to drop Verge, on account of lowering quality of articles and always low quality of comments, I'm looking to fill that gap with a few new sites.
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Ask Soylent: What News Sites Do You Frequent?
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(Score: 2, Funny) by Horse With Stripes on Friday June 20 2014, @11:54AM
Rather than list them all for you I'll just say *porn*.*
If DNS supported RegEx I could give you a better list ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @12:37PM
Porn*|xnxx|big*boobs
Step 1: Host a DNS root server and add regex support that will return matching records and their A records
Step 2: SoylentNews contest for best regex porn search
Step 3: ??? (recognize our heritage and independence??)
Step 4: Profit! (?)
(Score: 1) by khakipuce on Friday June 20 2014, @12:02PM
Well, this one for starters...
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Friday June 20 2014, @12:05PM
Are there any other sites worth visiting after a good dose of Soylent?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Buck Feta on Friday June 20 2014, @12:42PM
No, usually I just smoke a cigarette and lay there in bliss for a while.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2, Informative) by PReDiToR on Friday June 20 2014, @12:04PM
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger.
(Score: 1) by Max Hyre on Friday June 20 2014, @12:22PM
They style themselves as ``Biting the Hand that Feeds IT'', and while some of the coverage is indeed tabloidish, they're an excellent tech site, with coverage of the business end that you don't find many places.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday June 20 2014, @05:57PM
Agreed. They also cover a lot of stuff first, before many other sites even get around to putting up a story.
And they are more accurate than most sites, in spite of their often humorous approach to stories. They seldom make first year journalism student mistakes when writing up stories.
There seem to be some lurking on SN who simply don't get The Register's brand of humor and immediately dismiss el Reg as a joke site. That, imho, is a serious tactical error.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @09:27PM
before many other sites
Yup.
their often humorous approach
Even reading their headlines can be fun.
They have Creative Caption Composers who are Authors And Architects of An Avalanche of Alliterative Announcements.
Their! headlines! about! Yahoo! are! quite! silly!.
.
For regular old news and commentary while staying away from the steno pool (presstitutes) for the 1 Percent:
http://dissidentvoice.org/ [dissidentvoice.org]
http://www.counterpunch.org/ [counterpunch.org]
http://thinkprogress.org/ [thinkprogress.org]
http://www.commondreams.org/ [commondreams.org]
To debunk "news" you might overhear from lamestream media outlets:
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. http://fair.org/ [fair.org]
For "intellectual property" topics and some other tech issues:
https://www.techdirt.com/ [techdirt.com]
These folks put up a very large quasi-daily digest of teasers/links [google.com] to articles about FOSS, open hardware, software freedom-related news, and human rights-related items:
http://techrights.org/ [techrights.org]
That ends up taking me to places like Linux.com, OpenSource.org, Ars, or Phoronix.
They also have their own articles about current examples of anti-FOSS, FUD, openwashing, opinions-for-sale authors/pundits, and such.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 20 2014, @01:10PM
The Daily WTF [thedailywtf.com] is also a fun read, and frequently contains actual code examples in their stories, so you can laugh and also learn what not to do.
(Score: 3, Informative) by geb on Friday June 20 2014, @01:34PM
Daily WTF used to be a fun read, but they started going downhill a couple of years ago, and never stopped descending. They've perfected the art of telling the non-story.
(Score: 1) by MrNemesis on Friday June 20 2014, @03:47PM
Also don't forget The Daily Mash [thedailymash.co.uk], pretty much the only reliable sauce of UK news and also the only news outlet to report from the various findings of The Institute for Studies.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Friday June 20 2014, @12:07PM
IEEE Spectrum [ieee.org] is a magazine. The articles are less up-to-the-minute and more in-depth than you find in Ars Technica, for example. I'm a member of IEEE but I don't have to sign in to read the articles. So I don't think it's paywalled.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @12:15PM
Good call, mate! I've added that to my list. Much appreciated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22 2014, @10:39AM
IEEE?? Why don't you cut out the middle man and go straight to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @12:11PM
My bookmarks toolbar has a sequence of buttons I middle-click every morning: /b/ (4chan), Slashdot, SN, Cryptogon, Ars Technica, Zero Hedge, TorrentFreak, Hackaday.
I don't really give much of a crap about anything anywhere else. Stuff I care about or find interesting to read ends up on at least one of these sites.
(Score: 2) by RaffArundel on Friday June 20 2014, @12:41PM
This made me think about my toolbar, on the work laptop and at home (three devices that are regularly used to browse) and I just realized very few things get toolbar status. At work, I have my three online email account, Soylent and Netvibe (my Google RSS homepage replacement) not including all the quick links to stuff like monitoring pages, time/project tools, etc.
On Netvibe, I got the World News RSS feed from Yahoo and Google (which includes the BBC articles, otherwise I would have that feed also), /., and local news/weather. I have a few that aren't really news or are very specialized - like dev blogs for software I use.
If someone swings by and sees this - I am not a fan of Netvibe, anybody have suggestions for flexible (able to configure each feed the way I want) and portable (I run several desktops/laptops/mobile and use at least three different browser) RSS aggregator? Primarily I would be interested in a "set up once, use everywhere".
(Score: 1) by eliphas_levy on Saturday June 21 2014, @12:11AM
> I am not a fan of Netvibe, anybody have suggestions for flexible (able to configure each feed the way I want) and portable (I run several desktops/laptops/mobile and use at least three different browser) RSS aggregator?
I don't know about Netvibe, but inoreader.com is my favorite RSS reader on desktop and mobile browser since google gave up reader. If you didn't, check it out.
This is a sigh.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 20 2014, @02:56PM
4chan has a terrible reputation, and /b/ is pretty shit, but its other niche boards have a lot of excellent discussions with very knowledgeable posters.
/pol/ is my favorite of the bunch, I like to think of it as being the last honest (fairly mainstream) news discussion board on the internet -- especially because nobody can discredit posters or silence discussion by crying "racism," like they try to do everywhere else. And the safe-for-work boards like /sci/ and /k/ are usually very civilized.
Of course, with all of 4chan's boards, you have to wade through some garbage to find the good discussions, but that's true of all places other than 4chan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @06:19PM
The main reason I frequent /b/ (and /f/) is that they provide much-needed random distractions. One can easily get lost in the tedium of reading news and posting comments; 4chan /b/ is so ridiculous that it breaks up the monotony. I consider it a daily dose of much-needed schadenfreude: I can stare at /b/ and realize how much more awesome I am than everyone else I see there. ;)
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday June 20 2014, @08:06PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @08:28PM
No, although I got banned from Slashdot because I used it as my own personal /b/.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday June 20 2014, @06:23PM
Have you never heard about RSS?
Plowing through site after site is a huge waste of time.
Look into a good rss reader, preferably one that syncs between your various platforms
and you can cover a dozen sites in a quarter of the time, and still link directly to
the stories if needed.
I use Feedly.com (free account) because it has multiple different reading modes, (headlines, Cards,, Magazine, full articles), and it syncs my computer reading with my phone and tablet. They have an android app but it is less configurable than gReader which I prefer. [google.com]
I always run through my feeds as headlines only, (or headlines + snippet), suppressing the downloading of images which take up too much space, are too distracting, and seldom necessary to understand the story.
I read 22 different sites via RSS before before breakfast, flagging for later those that interest me. I can read on my phone in any spare minutes, and if I mark something read on one device it gets synced to all devices.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @08:55PM
I dislike RSS for this because it lets me read the headlines but no content. I would skip so much interesting stuff if I only saw the headlines. Better to middle-click all the buttons and look around. RSS hinders the discovery aspect.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 21 2014, @01:04AM
Not true. You really do need to try out a good RSS reader. Good one are very configurable, they can show you just the headlines, or headlines + snippet, or entire articles.
Don't confuse what the sites feed via RSS with what you can get via RSS.
With a good RSS reader, you can individually configure to make up for those sites that only send the title (the rss reader will go fetch either a snippet, or the full article). Other sites, that feed more than just the title don't need that special treatment.
Some rss readers like gReader (a replacement for google's "sun-setted" Google Reader), will also pass the full article through Google's "Mobilizer" which strips all the crazy fonts out, and renders the page as straight text while preserving paragraphs, links, etc.
Really, go try Feedly free account. You are not limited to what the feed sends.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by demonlapin on Saturday June 21 2014, @02:16AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @12:23PM
Any important story is covered by the echo chamber, so it doesn't really matter.
There are a precious few sources left that report actual news, and the echo chamber reports on their news, so it's almost impossible to miss anything important if you read a few tech sites and link sites (like this one!).
Over the years, I've cut back on the number of RSS feeds I read, because they're mostly all covering the same news. I don't miss anything.
As an exercise, start paying attention to how many news articles simply report on news articles at other sites. You'll find that a lot of articles either report directly on or duplicate stories from behind the WSJ paywall (I don't know why anyone pays for it, since anything they report is echoed immediately), or TorrentFreak, or one of the few other sites that has original reporting.
Most of what passes as tech news isn't worth reading. It's speculation, rumor, and opinion. Much easier to generate filler for the 24/7 news cycle with that than it is to report something substantive.
Every now and then, an interesting article appears on a blog or obscure site, but it usually gets picked up by a link site.
As a free bonus, I find this site picks up a lot of tech articles no other site does:
http://www.topix.com/science/computer-science [topix.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @01:51PM
It's speculation, rumor, and opinion.
oooh for some insightful mod points...
(Score: 2) by Oligonicella on Friday June 20 2014, @12:34PM
Why is it necessary to tie someone's moniker to the sites they frequent? Prurient or else? Seems like a good way to pigeon hole someone.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 20 2014, @01:13PM
Uh, yeah, I don't read Infowars either. What kind of, heh, paranoid fool would read that drivel? I r-read CNN for all my n-news needs, all the news that's fit to print! Hehheh hehheh. *Cough*
(Score: 2) by lubricus on Friday June 20 2014, @12:38PM
Aside from RSS feed from SN and Ars, my favorite source of news is newsmap:
http://newsmap.jp/ [newsmap.jp]
It's quick and easy to find the important stories, and it's also interesting to compare the headlines from different countries.
... sorry about the typos
(Score: 2) by mrclisdue on Friday June 20 2014, @01:19PM
...learn something new everyday.
My sphincter tightened and I could feel a gag forming in my throat when I saw it required flash..., but this *could* be one of those rare sites able to do it well.
Thanks for the tip.
My home page is the pipedot rss feed page, with SN, /., pipedot, sqlite, HN, a couple of local news and sports feeds. I rarely land on any page other than SN.
cheers,
(Score: 2) by mrclisdue on Friday June 20 2014, @01:23PM
...and, in case it's not apparent, *sqlite* should be s'qute...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Aiwendil on Friday June 20 2014, @01:26PM
at least twice a week:
http://techreview.com/ [techreview.com] (eng, tech/politics)
http://mit.edu/news [mit.edu] (eng, tech/politics)
http://neimagazine.com/ [neimagazine.com] (eng, nuclear)
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ [world-nuclear-news.org] (eng, nuclear)
http://di.se/ [di.se] (swe, economy)
http://thelocal.se/ [thelocal.se] (eng, non-tech (for ex-pats, great if you want to know what's up in sweden))
http://tomshardware.com/ [tomshardware.com] (eng, tech)
http://dailytech.com/ [dailytech.com] (eng, tech)
http://idg.se/ [idg.se] (swe, tech/politics)
occasionally:
http://bbc.co.uk/ [bbc.co.uk] (eng, general)
http://guardian.co.uk/ [guardian.co.uk] (eng, general)
http://wsj.com/ [wsj.com] (eng, economy)
http://wired.com/ [wired.com] (eng, tech/politics/"lifestyle")
http://wired.co.uk/ [wired.co.uk] (eng, tech/politics/"lifestyle")
Increasingly but still rarely:
http://squte.com/ [squte.com] (eng, tech)
http://phoronix.com/ [phoronix.com] (eng, tech)
and then also a few dozen companies newletters.
But quite frankly I still get the majority of the important stuff from IRC and USENET
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @01:34PM
SN, Ars, DSLReports, 538, NPR, BBC, Al Jazera, Verge, Slate, Atlantic, Pro Publica.
(Score: 4, Informative) by cosurgi on Friday June 20 2014, @01:59PM
it's not that I "frequent" them. I just keep those few tabs opened:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/ [sciencedaily.com]
http://physicsworld.com/ [physicsworld.com]
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/ [skyandtelescope.com]
http://wavewatching.net/ [wavewatching.net]
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ [columbia.edu]
and for relax:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ [rockpapershotgun.com]
#
#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
#
(Score: 2) by Rune of Doom on Friday June 20 2014, @02:07PM
Regularly? Naked Capitalism [nakedcapitalism.com] (for their daily links) and ycombinator [ycombinator.com].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 20 2014, @02:23PM
Don't bother with Naked Capitalism, it's a fraud. I went there with high hopes and didn't find anything naked. wetriffs' much better
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Friday June 20 2014, @02:10PM
For tech/gaming news:
Ars Technica and The Register for general tech news
Anandtech for hardware reviews
/. and Soylent for the comments
Gamasutra for game industry news
And a bunch of gaming news sites, most of which are actually pretty horrible.
I don't specifically listen to general world news, because so much of it is filler. Whenever I hear of a real-world news story that I want to know more about, I hit up several sites:
BBC usually has better reporting than any American news source, but still has bias (especially if it's a UK story)
Xinhua is surprisingly unbiased at stories that have nothing to do with China. They don't spin things. But if it does touch on China in any way, yeah, it's going to have so much spin on it you could separate uranium isotopes. RT does the same, except replace "China" with "Russia".
Wikinews is usually good at pure fact-based stuff. They're spotty and inconsistent, but when they do report they're a good neutral fact source.
After I've gotten the bare facts, if it's political I go to Fox and CNN. Not for any actual reporting, of course - you can tell how the politicians are going to play it based on how those two are reporting it.
Slate usually has some decent analysis and opinion pieces, and if they're biased they're at least biased in a way that I like. They're bad at primary reporting but that's what I have everyone else for.
And of course, I often dig until I find the primary sources. Those usually have something worth reading that the reporters missed.
(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Friday June 20 2014, @02:16PM
Tech-related: SN, The Register, Hacker News, occasionally Ars Technica, plus a number of USENET groups
General news: Google News, twitter (took me ages to realise its best use is as a news aggregator; I never post anything). Also Bloomberg (though less often since they redesigned their website last year as it's now much harder to read), and very occasionally BBC News
The stuff which I actually really enjoy reading though are the magazines: The Atlantic, The Economist, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and occasionally Foreign Policy (although their website design makes it pretty difficult to read online).
Also a few publications which are more directly related to my work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @02:19PM
but I still enjoy the comments on Slashdot. I don't visit it, but I do check out http://alterslash.org/ [alterslash.org] once a day for a digest of the top comments. And Dice doesn't get page views.
(Score: 1) by dentonj on Friday June 20 2014, @03:05PM
www.fark.com
It has a wide variety of links to other news sites. The comments can be entertaining. Don't bother if you have thin skin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @03:09PM
I parasite off of https://pipedot.org/feed/ [pipedot.org]
(Score: 1) by Valkor on Friday June 20 2014, @08:12PM
Holy shit I wish I had known about this before now.
(Score: 1) by Hawkwind on Friday June 20 2014, @09:30PM
That is a nice setup. I'm going to have to start using it.
Another one for statistics minded folk who like politics and can stomach sports content: http://fivethirtyeight.com/ [fivethirtyeight.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22 2014, @10:05PM
I love that any user can create their own pipedot feed. Brian rocks. This has replaced my browser rsd feeder (Sage)
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Friday June 20 2014, @04:45PM
That's it, just those two things. That's the main reason why I only have about 6 submissions under my belt. With half of them coming from things I was told by friends and did research on. Good thing too because it used to be Slashdot and word of mouth because I got tired of the bullshit that comes from other sites and liked seeing discussion there that called that bullshit when needed. Then I got tired of slashdot's bullshit and now here we are. So yeah. Besides SN just word of mouth pretty much. It helps having friends that work in the same field you do, keeps things more interesting than you'd think.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 20 2014, @05:03PM
"your daily fix of tech news and commentary?"
isn't that a bit too much? why would I read news every day?
for what its worth.. I visit this and osnews, but never more than 3 times in a week.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday June 20 2014, @07:01PM
Namely Fresh News [freshnews.org] and Daily Rotation [dailyrotation.com]. Between those two I get just about every tech oriented site's headlines in a nice and neat easy to use format. As far as which sites do I comment on? Ars and OSNews.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by Valkor on Friday June 20 2014, @09:54PM
I use the everloving crap out of Google Plus for news. It's a great stream to ride once you get a few thousand people circled, and only gets better as you hit your max (you can only hoop 5,000 people).
Folks say it's a ghost town because they don't use it AND because they follow people that don't use it. It's only good if you use it AND have people in your circles that are active and interesting.
Follow everyone and everything that interests you there. Start with communities. The various generic astronomy & EE communities are a good source of people to follow. If someone leaves a good comment, follow them. If someone hoops you, hoop them back. If you see stuff you don't want to, just remove that person/page/community from your circles and there's no need to be a dick about it, either; it doesn't send a notification that you've uncircled.
G+ is not without its issues and it isn't for everybody. I absolutely hate the current layout and lack of comment threading, for example. Also the incredible annoyance of composing a reply from the notification bar, and losing the comment-in-progress if you click anything.
News sites all tend to post their stories to their social media (G+ included) shortly after posting it to their main site. This is how I mostly get /. nowadays. There's absolutely no interaction from most of them, though. AT&T is one company that knows how to use G+ well, and there's a few other companies that know what's up. If you +mention them, you'll most likely get a response of some sort.
(Score: 1) by rudolph on Saturday June 21 2014, @12:01AM
I still like Hackaday [hackaday.com] and visit it daily. I'm not yet sold on their new project hosting sub thingie...
Less-than-daily I hit up the former BotJunkie, which is now a blog off of IEEE Spectrum [ieee.org]. Sadly their comments are run via Disqus, which I let Ghostery block, so I miss out on any commentary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @05:18AM
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit:
http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74 [start64.com]
(Details of benefits in link)
Summary:
---
A.) Hosts do more than:
1.) AdBlock ("souled-out" 2 Google/Crippled by default)
2.) Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse"
3.) Request Policy -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4127345&cid=44701775 [slashdot.org]
B.) Hosts add reliability vs. downed/redirected dns (& overcome redirects on sites, /. beta as an example).
C.) Hosts secure vs. malicious domains too -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3985079&cid=44310431 [slashdot.org] w/ less added "moving parts" complexity/room 4 breakdown,
D.) Hosts files yield more:
1.) Speed (adblock & hardcodes fav sites - faster than remote dns)
2.) Security (vs. malicious domains serving malcontent + block spam/phish & trackers)
3.) Reliability (vs. downed or Kaminsky redirect vulnerable dns, 99% = unpatched vs. it & worst @ isp level + weak vs Fastflux + dynamic dns botnets)
4.) Anonymity (vs. dns request logs + dnsbl's).
---
* Hosts do more w/ less (1 file) @ faster levels (ring 0) vs redundant inefficient addons (slowing slower ring 3 browsers) via filtering 4 the IP stack (coded in C, loads w/ os, & 1st net resolver queried w\ 45++ yrs.of optimization).
* Addons = more complex + slow browsers in message passing (use a few concurrently & see) & are nullified by native browser methods - It's how Clarityray is destroying Adblock.
* Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption too + hugely excessive cpu use (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/ [mozilla.org])
Work w/ a native kernelmode part - hosts files (An integrated part of the ip stack)
APK
P.S.=> "The premise is quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen: "I am legend"...apk
(Score: 1) by That_Dude on Saturday June 21 2014, @07:45AM
I usually read news sites from the porcelain throne. Perhaps it is an old habit from where I used to read the morning paper that transferred to my smart phone. I take solace in knowing that if anyone has activated my camera or microphone that this is what they contend with as sacred marketing data or juicy surveillance tid-bits. Anyway, that's where I flush away all the mass media excretions. However, for more refined oddities I sit in front of the screen where I might be inclined to spend a few extra moments researching a story or such - Soylent News, Cryptome and peer reviewed journals. Other than that, I am pretty boring unless you are in my field of research.