Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?
320 points
11 hours ago
| 52 comments
| HN
I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes

Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?

pella
10 hours ago
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i_k
9 hours ago
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I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.

But thank you!

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reallydoubtful
5 hours ago
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KomoD
36 minutes ago
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omgitspavel
1 hour ago
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there is a feed for stripe: https://stripe.com/blog/feed.rss
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petercooper
9 hours ago
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Not RSS exactly but this OPML has feeds for several hundred such blogs if you can filter down from there: https://peterc.org/misc/engblogs.opml
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phrotoma
5 hours ago
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Your website is a work of art. Bravo <3
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petercooper
52 minutes ago
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Thanks, I just treat it like my teenage bedroom, a trash heap with the occasional useful thing buried somewhere :-D
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spondyl
49 minutes ago
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Some of them redesign their blog layouts every 6 months, abandoning and then eventually rediscovering RSS. It's extremely annoying.
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onion2k
9 hours ago
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embedding-shape
9 hours ago
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> 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".

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zbentley
8 hours ago
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What? That makes no sense. RSS is beloved and known among engineers. Marketers? Not so much.
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embedding-shape
8 hours ago
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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 :)

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zbentley
8 hours ago
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Oh, I read your post backwards (thought you said RSS == more likely fluff). My fault, sorry!
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embedding-shape
8 hours ago
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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!

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iancmceachern
4 hours ago
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It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.
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throwaway4PP
3 hours ago
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It is funny, almost as funny as an entire cadre of people with “engineer” in their title who've never had to draw a free body diagram, learn circuit analysis, understand the basics of thermodynamics, or the mechanics of materials.
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p2detar
3 hours ago
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I hold a CS master degree from an Eastern European university and everything you listed was in our Bachelor degree program. It’s pretty funny because while studying material properties back then I always wondered how and when am I gonna use that. It kind of makes sense now that I think about it - some students preferred branching out to hardware.

edit: typo

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throwaway4PP
2 hours ago
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That’s great, unfortunately it is quite rare for CS undergrad programs in the US to require the basic engineering and science classes the other engineering/science majors require.
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zahlman
51 minutes ago
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Do you not have separate "software engineering" and "computer science" undergrad streams?
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metadope
1 hour ago
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I remember feeling sheepish when I was hired to a position titled 'Software Engineer'. To me, those two words together seemed incongruent. Not quite an oxymoron but certainly a puzzlement.

Maybe, generously, in retrospect, an aspiration?

I never considered myself an actual engineer; I was (and still am) a self-taught un-credentialed computer programmer. More art than science. They made me take the title and the stock options and the business cards.

I mostly worked for and with EEs, making software tools for test automation. I was a fanboy hardware wannabee (and still am), got some on me but was never a true engineer. I learned from those who practiced their discipline; it was plain to me the reality of real engineering versus what I was doing.

I suppose in my travels I have on occasion encountered a true Software Engineer. I suppose there's reason to hope that software development will continue to mature and evolve, and eventually the other engineering disciplines will accept software as a science.

For me, it will always be a joy to make that hardware work with my twiddly bits. Not engineering, no. But very rewarding work that often resembles engineering.

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jvanderbot
4 hours ago
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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?
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georgeburdell
4 hours ago
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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.
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wheelinsupial
2 hours ago
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Depending on what you're looking for in industrial engineering, there are a lot of blogs on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. INFORMS, may be paywalled, also publishes a lot of pretty interesting articles on applications of operations research to industry.

In general, though, my very limited experience working in manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were covered in things like white papers from hardware manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were usually some interesting articles to review.

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jupin
3 hours ago
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I thought the same. Check out this mechanical engineering channel - https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3
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sp4nner
2 hours ago
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Agreed, though I understand the YC bias. I'm in biotech and mostly follow HN just to see what the software people are interested in these days.
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tekno45
3 hours ago
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people building physical things are probably too busy to blog about it lol
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iillexial
14 minutes ago
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Hey! Check out https://devblogs.sh. It's a curated library with tech blog from companies, as well as individuals and conferences. Every blog is hand picked. There is also AI agent which you can use for quick search.
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xnorswap
10 hours ago
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You might be more interested in books than a blog.

For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications

https://aosabook.org/en/index.html

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leoh
4 minutes ago
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Absolutely fantastic, thank you!
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alhirzel
9 hours ago
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Such a great resource!
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sateesh
6 hours ago
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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.
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john-tells-all
2 hours ago
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Strong recommend! Julia's posts are always really engaging and educational.

She also publishes a number of technical topics as ZINES. I bought her "Oh Shit, Git!" zine and learned a ton of useful info, despite having decades in the industry.Zines are a great way to encourage book-allergic coworkers into learning great material.

https://wizardzines.com/

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skywhopper
3 hours ago
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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.
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simonw
6 hours ago
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This post by Jay Kreps that introduced Kafka to the world remains one of my favorite pieces of engineering blog content of all time: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...
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Swizec
2 hours ago
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While not exactly a blog, I've collected ~16 years of [startup] engineering lessons into a book and I think it came out fantastic. People are saying super nice things.

https://scalingfastbook.com

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jurakovic
1 hour ago
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I maintain list of blogs together with "RSS reader" for personal purposes, but it's publicly available here:

https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs-general

https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/

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Okkef
9 hours ago
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Armin Ronacher's blog (of flask/jinja fame) https://lucumr.pocoo.org/

Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/

Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/

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john-tells-all
2 hours ago
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Simon's blog is stellar, and he posts on many tech topics in addition to AI.

His "Today I Learned" series is an extremely useful selection of small learnings: https://til.simonwillison.net/

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yrand
10 hours ago
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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.

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aranw
5 hours ago
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https://samwho.dev has some fantastic blog posts with great visualisations
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samwho
4 hours ago
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Thank you <3
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qznc
10 hours ago
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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.
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cess11
2 hours ago
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Corporations commonly describe some of their internal processes and achievements because it builds reputation and that can be important for both sales and recruitment.

Sometimes they do it in the form of free or open source software releases.

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gchamonlive
10 hours ago
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A very high ambition?
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nsm
4 hours ago
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https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - former Chrome engineer about all things performance engineering and particularly focused on Windows.
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rcarmo
1 hour ago
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I'm grouping most of the suggestions here into my feed summarizer at https://feeds.carmo.io - there will be an "Engineering" bulletin there soon.
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jupin
3 hours ago
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To balance all of the computer engineering blogs, check out this mechanical engineering channel: https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3
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nchmy
10 hours ago
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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).

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ruraljuror
1 hour ago
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The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts.
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bretthopper
2 hours ago
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bodash
2 hours ago
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> https://lessnews.dev

A while ago I felt this "information fatigue" due to the overwhelming updates from the typical news sources (reddit, twitter, even hn).

So I built a _slow_ webdev newsfeed aggregator that doesn't overwhelm you of constant updates, so you focus on reading the actual blog contents and enjoy other things.

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ewoodrich
1 hour ago
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I bookmarked to take a closer look later, but I'm a little unclear on the premise, could you explain what you mean by "slow"/how it is filtered/curated?
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bzGoRust
9 hours ago
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tekichan
10 hours ago
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vishnuharidas
2 hours ago
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https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ is a good place listing more than 500 (and adding more) engineering blogs.
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ludicity
9 hours ago
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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.
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tester756
10 hours ago
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noam_k
9 hours ago
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avisk
8 hours ago
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mitthrowaway2
4 hours ago
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I always enjoyed Jason Sachs' blog at embedded related.

https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php

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NickJLange
5 hours ago
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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...

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soulofmischief
4 hours ago
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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
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SleepySteve_sk
4 hours ago
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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.

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jonstewart
4 hours ago
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Not corporate, but two of the best individual developer blogs are Eli Bendersky's and Rachel by the Bay. They've both been blogging prolifically for a decade+, Eli with a focus on, broadly, compilers and Rachel on SRE/debugging.

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for anyone that works with Windows.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

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thundergolfer
9 hours ago
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agumonkey
4 hours ago
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Often enjoyed article by chris wellons https://nullprogram.com/

quite diverse, often challenging, sometimes mind bending

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mkosmul
8 hours ago
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Allegro Tech Blog: https://blog.allegro.tech/
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pveierland
9 hours ago
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Tweag has many interesting entries with good technical depth:

https://www.tweag.io/blog

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alzamos
8 hours ago
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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.
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mad44
3 hours ago
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MongoDB Engineering Blog is shaping up well

https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo...

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sevazhidkov
8 hours ago
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It’s not a traditional blog, but Oxide’s RFDs cover exactly what you asked — implementation details and trade-offs: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/
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sdairs
7 hours ago
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louiechristie
9 hours ago
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robofanatic
7 hours ago
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nickmonad
8 hours ago
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GeoAtreides
7 hours ago
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Seems to me you're describing books.
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vogu66
10 hours ago
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not software engineering, but https://practical.engineering/
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Agingcoder
10 hours ago
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Cloudflare, google project zero.
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corbet
4 hours ago
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I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to.
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louiechristie
9 hours ago
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rramadass
6 hours ago
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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

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mitjam
10 hours ago
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Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.
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x187463
6 hours ago
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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.
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runlaszlorun
9 hours ago
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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.

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atoav
9 hours ago
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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.
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vibesareoff
9 hours ago
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Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!
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voxleone
4 hours ago
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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.
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bell-cot
8 hours ago
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OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.
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vibesareoff
8 hours ago
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"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˙

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loloquwowndueo
4 hours ago
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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.

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self_awareness
1 hour ago
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You seem to be new here, so you probably don't know that:

- Even if you separate each point with a new line, - HN formatter will join everything to one line anyway. - So it's not OP's fault his points are in the same line, because the source post has them in separate lines.

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fnordlord
7 hours ago
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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.

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CamperBob2
2 hours ago
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Other sites beckon.
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bell-cot
8 hours ago
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You seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily excluding people who you a priori despise. :(
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sieste
9 hours ago
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The LLM instructed him to gather training data.
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ozim
9 hours ago
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So prompt injection on humans
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sieste
9 hours ago
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Polluting the internet with meat slop.
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themafia
9 hours ago
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"What if we used more energy and got worse results?"

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

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asupkay
5 hours ago
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Maybe the LLM is the one asking
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snvzz
8 hours ago
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For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0].

0. https://microkerneldude.org/

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Joel_Mckay
8 hours ago
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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

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throw_await
10 hours ago
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oldnewthing
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gethly
10 hours ago
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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.
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