Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

248 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by nishilpatel

Item id: 46363921

74 Comments

pella

7 hours ago

i_k

7 hours ago

I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.

But thank you!

embedding-shape

6 hours ago

> I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.

I think it's on purpose. It is to signal that these (those without RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all, they're marketing websites aimed to help with recruiting and making the organization seem "engineering-like".

zbentley

5 hours ago

What? That makes no sense. RSS is beloved and known among engineers. Marketers? Not so much.

embedding-shape

5 hours ago

Exactly, so if the blog doesn't have RSS, you know they're probably made from marketers with no input from engineering, otherwise they'd have RSS on the blogs.

Edit: Ah, noticed I made a without/with typo, fixed that, should make about 2% more sense now for the ones who the original meaning was unclear :)

zbentley

5 hours ago

Oh, I read your post backwards (thought you said RSS == more likely fluff). My fault, sorry!

embedding-shape

5 hours ago

To be fair to you, my original comment did say:

> It is to signal that these (those with RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all

So now when I corrected that with/without typo, it looks like your previous comment doesn't make sense, but it kind of did, at the time. Sorry about that and thanks for making me realize the typo!

iancmceachern

an hour ago

It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.

jvanderbot

an hour ago

I would love more blogs on mechanical, hardware, and especially industrial engineering, but the demographics in those areas skew stereo-typically older and also likely less blog-oriented, right?

georgeburdell

39 minutes ago

Blogs are almost 30 years old at this point, but yes, I do associate a nearly compulsive need to show off one's work in meticulously-crafted blog posts with younger people.

sateesh

3 hours ago

https://jvns.ca/ Not a tech. company blog. Explains technical concepts clearly and top notch technical posts. Fits 1,2, 3 criteria of what you ask, though not the 4th one.

skywhopper

12 minutes ago

Yes! Julia is fantastic at explaining concepts, and creating ways to learn about them. She produces a great series of “zines” summarizing a bunch of technical topics, her blog archives are really fascinating, and she’s created really useful tools like Mess With DNS (https://messwithdns.net) which gives you your own DNS subdomain and the means to update records so you can try things out in an easy, harmless way.

yrand

7 hours ago

Encountered one specific example about a month ago here on HackerNews - All about automotive lidar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395

Blog posts where I find quality really shows are usually about something I know next to nothing about how it works. A badly written article usually either goes really shallow or skips some facts when going into depth and requires catchup elsewhere to actually understand it. The lidar article from Main Street Autonomy goes beyond basics and explained everything from the ground up in such a connected way that it was a real pleasure reading it.

qznc

7 hours ago

Sounds like you look for an intersection of academic papers (1.), tech blogs (2.), text books (3.), and confidential business strategies (4.)? A very high ambition.

nchmy

7 hours ago

You're probably looking for something that is more focused on specific software decisions/implementations, but https://infrequently.org is the best web development blog out there.

It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts themselves).

NickJLange

2 hours ago

A lot of great links here to the firehose (or at least for working parents). Unless someone has built it - anything that aggregates and shows beyond the first click of the by-line. (i.e. a first paragraph, or LLM-summary of the content)?

Otherwise... coming soon from a vibe-coding session near you...

soulofmischief

an hour ago

A friend and I worked on a startup together that did this back when only the GPT-3 API was available. Sucked up everything we could think of, including HN and traditionally opaque sources such as Telegram

SleepySteve_sk

an hour ago

We're currently building something to solve this problem.

https://joinheader.com/

We'll filter an RSS feed based on the topic and description that you provide. Feel free to reach out to me at s.kufuor@<domain> if you have any questions or feedback.

alzamos

5 hours ago

Francesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.

ludicity

6 hours ago

I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author, Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a very short period of time from him.

corbet

an hour ago

I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to.

GeoAtreides

4 hours ago

Seems to me you're describing books.

Agingcoder

7 hours ago

Cloudflare, google project zero.

mitjam

7 hours ago

Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.

x187463

4 hours ago

Some people act like the use of an LLM immediately invalidates or lowers the value of a piece of content. But the case of a question or simple post, especially by somebody for whom English is second language, using an LLM to rephrase or clean-up some text seems like an innocent and practical use case for LLMs.

runlaszlorun

6 hours ago

I'm not beating up on OP but I chuckled when I read the question. Literally the only place I see the phrase "no fluff" with any frequency is with Deepseek lol.

Nothing wrong with the phrase itself of course, other than the fact that it's like literally in every other reply for me lol.

atoav

6 hours ago

Had the same thought. ChatGPT often tells me things like: "This is the hard truth" or "I am telling it to you as it is (no fluff)" or whatever. Just because my initial prompt contains a line about it not making things up and telling me how things are instead of what would please me to hear. I added a line to specifically tell it to not phrase out these things, but it appears to be surprisingly hard to get rid of those phrases.

rramadass

4 hours ago

Not a blog, but books detailing real-world experiences from Indian Engineers/Scientists/Researchers; Quite inspiring to see how people strive unceasingly towards a goal in spite of all the limitations and hurdles (viz. Political/Financial/Material etc.) imposed on them.

There is much to learn, in these books.

The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2

The Mind of an Engineer: Volume 2 by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-1330-5

snvzz

5 hours ago

For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0].

0. https://microkerneldude.org/

vibesareoff

6 hours ago

Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!

voxleone

an hour ago

No judgement here whatsoever, but i think LLM would be "the" tool for this job. I also wonder if there's any point to "Ask" sections in websites after LLM's.

bell-cot

5 hours ago

OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.

vibesareoff

5 hours ago

"OP" couldn't even be bothered to reformat the numbered list to run on separate fucking lines.

But sure, cheer on the homogenization of online spaces into beige slop staccato bullshit!

˙ ͜ʟ˙

loloquwowndueo

an hour ago

How do you reformat a list so it runs on separate fucking lines?

Always happens to me (and I don’t use fucking LLMs) so I’d really like to know.

fnordlord

4 hours ago

I will always cheer on anyone who shares their curiosity.

It was a great question and now I have a ton of new things on my reading list.

bell-cot

5 hours ago

You seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily excluding people who you a priori despise. :(

sieste

6 hours ago

The LLM instructed him to gather training data.

ozim

6 hours ago

So prompt injection on humans

sieste

6 hours ago

Polluting the internet with meat slop.

themafia

6 hours ago

"What if we used more energy and got worse results?"

Sort of makes you miss "move fast and break things."

asupkay

3 hours ago

Maybe the LLM is the one asking

Joel_Mckay

5 hours ago

These should be read at least once in your life if interested in building industrial grade electrical, mechanical, and or software.

1. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/

2. https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394

3. https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards

4. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship

5. https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

7. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-metrology/metrology-...

8. https://www.mitutoyo.com/training-education/

9. "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm )

The artifacts are usually beautiful from good Workmanship Standards, Design For Manufacturability, and systematic Metrology. Dragging us all into the future one project at a time.

Note that training an ML model with such data would be pointless, as statistical saliency forms a paradox with consumer product design compromises. Note, there are _always_ tradeoffs in every problem domain.

'What it actually means to be "AI Generated"' ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU

Have a nice day, and note >52% of the web is LLM slop now. YMMV =3

gethly

7 hours ago

There are no such blogs. Usually companies, or individuals, will write these after they implement some feature into their products. Which makes them inherently little pieces of information scattered all over the internet and there is no one blog that is just about this.