Good technology news sources – Antique Geek Notes
Good technology news sources

Staying up-to-date with the latest technology trends and news can be quite beneficial, not only to our ability to bring up awesome and insightful analysis to the conversation in the pub that no one wants to hear, but sometimes also to our career ambition as well. What would be the top choices for technology news sources.

Mainstream media

Newspapers for general public nowadays often have dedicated section for technology, thanks to the ubiquitous and increasingly invasive technology has become in our daily life.

I'm quite sure this must be a rather unusual suggestion. We normally don't think about general newspapers as a worthy source of technology news and most definitely don't put them to the top of the list. They are often regarded as not specialized and technical enough, hence missing lots of news of narrower and deeper interests. You probably won't find news about Linux kernel like this article on mainstream media for sure.

There are several benefits of reading "normal" news. Those news articles provide not only the technical side of things, which is often only a small part of the news, but also the background, history, motivation of the technology, social and business impact, trends, potential and future development, etc. We will get a broader view of the technology, understand the big picture and potentially find new ideas and applications of existing technology.

It also allows us to easily get exposure to technologies that are far beyond the reach of our current area of expertise and interests, and motivates us to explore "the outside world" more often. But hang on, I'm a full stack developer, do I really need to know whether bias can be banished from AI hiring or tech gadgets for bicycles? Yes, a thousand times yes. You would know roughly how AI works in hiring process (which is actually happening in some degrees right now), how the "general public" sees the potential of this technology (if yes, that might be a perfectly good market to jump to, if no, great, there might be something we can do about it and eat the whole market), how mature the market is, etc.

The good thing about reading news is that, it is what the general public consumes and these things represent the opinion of the masses, and the opinion of other groups. It trains us spending more them away from technology and looks at technology as part of the society. Don't think it is important? Try to discuss something with your product manager, or other teams who collaborate or use your product, or propose new technology to the upper leadership, or pitch your ideas with potential investor. You will soon find out most of the time you will need to use "general public" non-techie approach to present, convince and negotiate with other people. It's not that simple to refrain from jumping too deeply and care too much about the underlining technology if we don't prepare and train ourselves regularly.

So, don't be afraid of not being worthy of a nerd. Be brave and read what the humankind consumes.

Reddit

Reddit is the website that contains virtually anything and everything. The social space consists of countless of communities called "subreddit", each has its own topic and rules. If you think of something, you can probably find a subreddit for it, including a subreddit to help you find the subreddit you need. And believe it or not, my spellchecker doesn't flag the word subreddit.

Reddit seems to be a good source of technology news for sure. It has a huge catch-all subreddit for technology and thousands of subreddit for each one of the technology existed on Earth. You can find any programming language you fancy there, from the almighty C++ to the rustic hot young boy Rust. Or maybe you care less about the language and more about the applications, you can find Android, iOS web development subreddit useful with lots of interesting news and also lots of not so interesting posts.

It'll take days and maybe months to list all the great subreddit and nobody can join all of them (unless you're a bot). But why Reddit is so special? The answer is the people. Think of Reddit as the comment section in online newspaper, but at top quality. That's the most valuable source of information Reddit provides that nowhere else in the internet space can offer with such high quality, high contribution rate and such wide range of interests. You will find a lot of juicy pieces of information floating around on Reddit. If you have hundred of millions of people, chances are someone has been designing the wheel of an airliner, or developing chemical that can potentially wipe out the entire civilization.

So, use Reddit as the news aggregation website, and the best comment sections. Or just look at photos of cats - it's the equally excellent choice.

The other option is Hacker News. You might find it a bit more technically mature compared to Reddit, but it is a lot more limited in term of topics and members.

Others

It's highly unlikely there are other technology news sources that can be used on regular basis by everything. Technology is vast and diverse and the good ones are normally narrow and focused. If you use the "universal" sources above effectively, you will very quickly find other good websites that fit your need. I can probably list some of the high quality sites such as LWN, but I don't think it will be terribly useful.

The key here is, approach technology like how the general public does by using vanilla news sources and interactive community like Reddit. That will get you the widest range of news, more broader view, and you will find your favorite in no time.

Copyright © 2023 Antique Geek Notes.