Ask HN: Where do you go for cutting-edge dev news and info?
Between roughly 2002 and 2017 certain blogs, websites, and publishers were constantly on the cutting edge: Ajaxian, Jesse James Garett, Dion Almaer, Douglas Crockford, PragProg, Martin Fowler, Dave Thomas, DHH, Andy Hunt, John Resig, 37signals, etc.
These days, HN itself is decent enough, but the majority of posts aren't about cutting-edge software development.
Where do you go these days for cutting-edge news and info focused on the vanguard of software development?
There's this niche website that you've probably not heard of called Hacker News were you can get all the cutting edge tech news you want
I've been using https://foorilla.com/ and it's pretty solid.
It’s basically a big list of online news sources pulled straight from allainews.com, and it gives you links, article summaries, etc, plus RSS feeds. You can set up your feed by topic, which is super helpful, and it pulls in trending and real-time news too.
I disagree. The majority of HN posts are indeed about the vanguard of software development and those reflect developers' common interests at the moment.
You're already here.
I see a ton of AI and LLM-related posts, but to me that's a bit meta with regard to software development itself -- new tools, patterns, projects, and/or ideas.
Is it, though? Those new tools and techniques are the future of software development. Those of us who are trying to push those boundaries are writing all the time about our discoveries.
AI has already changed everything about how I write code, think about code, budget for code, debug and refactor code, etc. If you're doing that, too, I know the HN audience would welcome hearing from you.
My stuff is niche on my personal blog[0] (indie game dev), but I write about bigger AI topics on Medium[1]. All of this stuff has got to eventually filter down to individual use cases, but perhaps the philosophy of software is changing?
Is it too soon to call out some early victims? I don't think we need any more new languages or data formats. Ever. Text is going to be MD so there go proprietary text markup formats. Data is JSON, full stop. (Speaking for web apps here).
Also going away are endless tweaks to UI frameworks as customers (dev and non-dev) will be "drawing" and defining their own dynamic UIs through the prompts they write. On the backside, those prompts will turn into multiple tool calls to perhaps unexplored APIs via MCP -- a complete inversion of the client-server control model we're used to.
If there's a better place to write or read about this stuff, I'd love to hear about it, too!
[0] https://davidbethune.com/blog
[1] https://medium.com/@mimixco/list/ai-library-e2fcb2e18159
Thanks for the links. Your content on how LLMs are built is excellent.
> Those new tools and techniques are the future of software development.
If that's the case, you may have to count me out. I'm glad to use LLMs to automate the easy/boring parts out, but I'm not outsourcing my technical creativity -- that's a significant part of who I am as a human. If that means I'm out of a job, so be it. My body is slowing down in middle age, but if I had to choose, I'd rather finish my working years breaking my back in the trades serving people in ways that are meaningful to both me and my customers.
This is a sort of alternative hack, but I run the Hacker News newest items through a filter that turns all the developer related ones into an RSS file, then I subscribe to that. Gives me a few hundred titles a day to quickly skim through but it works for me.
This is neat, do you have the code posted somewhere?
Not at this stage, but it's relatively simple. You can see the feed in question at https://heap2.com/hn-newest.rss
The basic process is fetching https://hnrss.org/newest then piping each item through gpt-4.1-mini with just the URL and title (I think fetching each actual page is overkill and a bit greedy) and asking it to figure out if something is likely to be development related. If it's a confident yes, that item then gets into the final feed. It cuts the firehose down quite a bit just with that simple approach.
Honestly X is still pretty good for this if you follow the right people. The AI/ML research community is super active there - Andrej Karpathy, François Chollet, Yann LeCun, etc. Plus a lot of the good startups announce stuff there first.
For more traditional dev stuff, I've been getting good signal from newsletters like Changelog, TLDR, and Morning Brew's tech section. Not as real-time as the old blog days but decent curation.
Reddit's r/MachineLearning and r/programming can be hit or miss but sometimes catch things early. GitHub trending is also underrated for spotting new tools.