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Ask HN: What are some good tech magazines?
237 points by basisword on Feb 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 148 comments
I spend so much of my work and leisure time on devices and have been trying to reduce this. For example, I've recently switched to an iPod Classic for a lot of my music listening which has been quite nice.

I also spend a lot of time browsing and reading interesting articles, particularly on HN and want to replace some of that with 'offline' alternatives. When it comes to other hobbies (sports, music) I have found some great magazines still in circulation that can work as alternatives to browsing online.

I'd love to hear your suggestions for tech related magazines, ideally things I can subscribe to and get monthly/quarterly. These should be varied enough to cover the kind of topics we see here on HN daily as opposed to super general tech news type magazines.



My current subscription list includes;

Wired -- has slipped a bit, I worry they have lost the will to cover cutting edge.

Smithsonian -- a wide variety of topics, some tech, some archeologh etc.

Smithsonian Air & Space -- (now quarterly :-() which has good space technology as well as interesting stories of both military and civilian aircraft.

Science News -- which culls from a lot of journals and finds interesting papers to highlight (I will often follow up on an article by writing to the researchers for copies of their papers)

Popular Science, Popular Mechanics -- These have become remarkably similar in their content focus, that said they keep me up to date on a lot of commercial gizmos that I might otherwise miss in the noise.

QST (part of the ARRL membership) -- Which is all about Amateur Radio and so it hits a lot of interesting topics as I continue to explore software defined radios both in theory and in practice.

I use Scansnap scanner and paper guillotine to save articles that I find either particularly interesting, or I am curious if they will go anywhere. There are many interesting "over night" revolutions that appear years earlier as some sort of "wouldn't it be cool if ..." article. Indexing them is a pain, my indexing foo is weak :-).


I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks WIRED has gone down hill a bit recently.


I absolutely miss the Wired of the 1990's. When it was a magazine, no THE magazine, to read about the intersection of culture and tech. In this day and age, I find it hard to pickup a copy of Wired at the airport because it has content for about 5 minutes. One of my favs is still Monocle, but it doesn't have much tech. Unfortunately.


By recently, do you mean 2005?


No kidding on 2005. I now only associate this magazine for mostly wannabe managers who want to read some entry-level article (likely while on an airplane), who go into their next monthly meeting spouting off what they passively read with little real understanding of the subject.


I once owned most of the Wired magazines from 1995-1999. I stupidly sold them on eBay.


I had a subscription for a long time, I think I cancelled in 2008 after being unhappy for a while.

The worst one was Scientific American, I loved that one, and it dove worse.


Around that time I bought two or three issues (of the italian edition) due to it being often cited. I wasn't thrilled at all.

It honestly seemed like it was written by some recently-graduated (so like a twenty-something) tech enthusiast. A lot of willingness to spend moneys on the latest gizmos, a lot of advertising, very little interesting pieces (and none of them went any deep on the topic).


I’m still pissed that they cheapened the cover material. Used to be that amazing thick rugged cover. Plus, I’m much less excited to read it in the last year or two than previous 20 years.


I also can't be bothered with Wired anymore. I used to love it, but the writing has just gone downhill.


Curious as to what you consider "recently"?


Not the parent, but Wired has been terrible for the past 15-20 years. Previous commenters are correct that the quality took a dive in the 2000's. The real glory days for the publication were the 1990s before the Internet was a household word and technology was more obscure.


For me the last straw was when they became strangely obsessed with cameras and lenses. I never thought I would say this but I miss the 90s.


I've started subscribing Wired in 2011 and I pretty much liked it for couple of years. For me it seems once Conde Nast purchased the magazine the quality has dropped.


Wired had an unsuccessful IPO attempt in 1996. Condé Nast bought the print magazine in 1998. Lycos owned the digital properties until 2006 when they were sold back to CN.


Wired’s willingness to cover quack ideas was part of the intrigue for me. Sure, flying cars, jetpacks, and underwater breathing aren’t near but it’s fun to see the progress we’ve made on those fronts every now and then.


Now they feel like they want to fit in with their peers, and it makes them much less interesting to me.


OT but i find myself unimpressed by their news website. Arstechnica is a bit better. It seems to be enormously popular on HN is these a good reason for this?


Didn't Ars get bought by same corporate parent (Conde Naste) as Wired? While Ars hasn't sunk quite as quickly, its still not nearly as good as it was pre-acquisition for me.

It's popularity stems from its early significance; Ars is an old, old website by standards of peers like The Verge and it did used to have much more frequent high quality technical writing. Since Conde acquisition it's definitely veered more mainstream (exactly like Wired did too) IMO. I certainly don't think the original Ars crowd imagined they'd one day be a Conde Naste "brand".

> https://www.condenast.com/brands/ars-technica

> https://www.condenast.com/brands/wired


arstechnica states that their parent is Wired. I suspected that their success on HN is mainly for historical reasons. It looks like even HN can fall behind the times a bit...


"Acquired in 2008 by Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast, Ars Technica has offices in Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Today, Ars Technica operates as Condé Nast's only 100% digitally native editorial publication."

> https://arstechnica.com/about-us/


In my experience, arstechnica writers can include content that is genuine and not sensational. Not always but often. I skip the comments, too much noise there, but they do have a very engaged audience.


I suspect that a HN poll would reveal that most think it has gone down hill.


> Indexing them is a pain, my indexing foo is weak

OCR them, then `grep`


Sadly this is not nearly as effective as one might like, even with soundex hacks (or Levenshtein distance hacks). When I joined Google they had a class/project for new hires that taught the map reduce system which was to process the complete works of Shakespeare (it is an easy corpus to get online) and come up with an index to extract interesting information or find specific quotes etc. It was a good way to develop an intuition for some of the challenges. Some things that bite you are of course spelling errors and OCR errors and sometimes formatting things (like where a line break ended up). There are strategies for overcoming those (some more effective than others) but as you dig into the problem you can develop a good feel for the complexity.


Interesting, Wired has a Pinterest channel, but no Telegram channel. Thankfully, they still have an RSS feed, so added it to Telegram through rss bot.


I find this quite interesting - is it common for publications/websites to have Telegram channels now? Is this to use it as an RSS reader?


It's common in countries where Telegram is popular.


What bot are you using? The ones I tried quickly became unbearable because of annoying ads.


I've recently written a basic telegram bot. It really is quite trivial; could be easily done via a bash script calling cURL and installed as a cron job.


@rss2tg_bot


IEEE Spectrum[1] is really wonderful in the both the breadth and depth of content. It's free with an IEEE membership or $75/yr on it's own.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/


Seconding IEEE Spectrum, it covers a broad number of fun technical topics. Off the top of my head, some articles over the past year included supersonic transportation, satellite transmissions, crowdfunded space travel, COVID detection mechanisms, software failures, and data compression.

Communications of the ACM is also a good print magazine if you are interested in computer science. It has more of an academic bent, but is meant to be of general interest to computer scientists (disclosure: I'm on the Editorial Board of CACM). Again, off the top of my head, some recent articles include K-12 computer science education, a survey of word embedding techniques, software-defined cooking using a programmable microwave (I'm a co-author of this), differential privacy, a survey of AI bias issues, and Green AI.


While the initial subscription rate is high, the annual renewal, including this year, has been $19.95. However, given I receive this offer over e-mail it is unclear if this other accounts get the same offer.


IEEE's publications, while usually not cheap, are great. I'd also add "Computer" and "Software" to the mix.

And, since I am a retrocomputing enthusiast, "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing" is endless fun.


Thanks, this looks good as do their other publications. Looks like you need to become a member as non-member prices are high ($50 vs $600 unless I'm mistaken).


and a student membership is only $37.00 and that includes Spectrum in both electronic and print!


https://2600.com still has thought provoking articles, and Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric Corley) has done a lot to advance the hacker community. The HOPE that went online in 2020 was amazing, and was really pushed through by him. The magazine is a bargain, and you can still purchase lifetime subscriptions which will give you every back issue.


Ha, was just going through some papers recently and happened to find a physical issue of 2600, v10 #2 Summer 1993, 4 bucks. Selected articles, "A Guide to the 5ESS", "British Credit Holes", "High School Hacking", "DTMF Decoder Review" and "Toll Fraud Device". It really took me back, I hadn't seen a paper copy in a long time.


This looks interesting, thanks.


I liked Stripe's magazine (RIP), though I never bought the dead tree edition: https://store.increment.com/

From a pop science perspective, I've always enjoyed The Economist; they have a technology quarterly as well as a section in every issue.


I didn't know this existed until clicking your link.

Looking through a few of the issues, there's whole bunch of really interesting articles.

It's a shame it's not still going.


Looks like you can give feedback on the next version: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScuQ2x8BNNwOZ2NE35e...


Increment by Stripe was really nice and the paper version was really good quality. Shame they've killed it.


Popular Mechanics (and Science in 2nd place) were the best and most impactful tech magazines ever. Every issue answered your already existing questions about how a, b, or c works. It inspired and drove me to learn anything and everything I could about engineering, science, computers, logic, physics, etc. Not all of which I use on a daily basis, but it taught me to understand that tools, widgets and inventions are really the secret to making big and valuable things happen. It taught me to live and believe perhaps to a fault the Einstein quote "Strive not to be a success, rather strive to be of value." The feelings of receiving the latest PM magazine (and saving it until a Saturday morning to read and absorb from cover to cover, then again, and again to happy exhaustion) is an excitement and enthusiasm I doubt I'll ever experience again. Understanding how the rear differential worked originally, and then the limited slip differential upgrade, not only makes My Cousin Vinny one of the best movies of all time one of the best movies of all time, it makes you understand how awesome it is to understand. How is a torque converter different from a clutch? What is the difference bt super-charged and turbo? Why is super-charged better than turbo? Why is cool air better than warmer air in an internal combustion engine in the first place? What is lift? What are the three axes of rotation in flight? What happens to airflow and the airfoil surfaces when the speed of sound is achieved? If you aren't curious and need to know these things, you will probably never be an expert in your chosen sphere. Everything has an analogy, relationships, life, death, business, family. It all starts by understanding how things and people work.

Anyway, Pop Mec was the best ever. Miss it more than I can say.


Wired: https://www.wired.com/

2600: https://www.2600.com/


2600 is always fun. I let my subscription lapse, but miss it so will renew! Thanks for the reminder.


Maximum PC is decent, although for some reason they don't have a website. You can preview it and subscribe here: https://www.magazinesdirect.com

If you speak Polish, "Programista" is a pretty good programming magazine: https://programistamag.pl


I currently subscribe to MIT Technology Review and IEEE Spectrum. Used to subscribe to 2600 and Wired but haven't renewed my subscriptions as I felt like the quality of the content has just been getting lower and lower. And I miss CPU (Computer Power User).


I’m sure, this wasn’t your intended arena, however, I write for Beanz, a kids coding magazine for the 8-12 year old age group [0]. It’s the best I’ve found for learning the basics of computing.

I was a subscriber before I wrote for them, and it’s articles are far and away more information dense than almost all other kids magazines.

[0] - https://beanzmag.com/


I don't know of good tech magazines in English. There used to be some, e.g. Dr. Dobb's Journal (.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal ), but perhaps that market has imploded.

Wired and other leftovers aren't technical, but there's occasionally good material about computing & society in it (not enough in an average issue to buy it, IMHO). The magazines listed in the other comments that are okay are generally more hardware project focused rather than software technology focused.

If you read other languages, in German there is c't and iX, which are still okay (but were also better in the past, things seem to get dumbed down more and more in general).


https://increment.com/


I was so sad when increment sent its last issue in November


Oh, I didn't realize it ended. Bummer, I enjoyed keeping those on my desk to read occasionally.


https://logicmag.io/


Make magazine

https://makezine.com/


Hackaday is also great for folks interested in hardware hacking or electronics in general.

https://hackaday.com/


How many articles does one need to read on 3D printers?


Offscreen is a lovely print magazine for technology, design and society:

https://www.offscreenmag.com/


I like the look of this. I'll have to pick one up and try it. My only concern reading the description is that it could get a bit preachy ("We’ve taken off the rose-coloured goggles to lay bare Big Tech’s lack of ethics, proposing a more sustainable and humane way forward."). I'm not against this but trying to keep things light.


Low Tech Magazine: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com


This looks great, thank you.


https://circuitcellar.com/


This was the best "advanced" electronics magazine I found so far. They're taking the hobbyist level magazines up a notch.


https://www.nutsvolts.com/


https://www.servomagazine.com/subscribe-to-servo


DIYODE Magazine is good - variety of projects with full details:

https://diyodemag.com/


You can download all of these magazines for free from the publisher's website. Also "Hello World", "MagPi" & "HackSpace" (raspberrypi.org).


Some magazines I've really liked:

Quanta Magazine has excellent content for the math/science inclined : https://www.quantamagazine.org/

Same with nature.com

ScientificAmerican or Science

Makezine for those who like building

For print-only, I would recommend books like:

* Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire which is Quanta's book

* Best American Science Writing

All of these can probably be found for free at your local library


+1 for https://www.quantamagazine.org/

nature can be a little heavy

I also enjoy https://www.sciencedaily.com/


https://www.nutsvolts.com


Hmm, there were only a few editions, but

https://pagedout.institute/

>Paged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.


HackSpace

https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/issues


Depending on where you live it'll have a different name, but I've been enjoying LinuxPro Magazine (outside of USA it's just called Linux Magazine). There's also Admin Magazine.


https://pocorgtfo.hacke.rs/

they also sell on Amazon.


ACM membership gives you access to all of oreilly catalog for free, plus access to ACM journals (although TBH I got it mostly because it’s cheaper than getting oreilly directly).


Communications of the ACM is a great magazine-like journal. They do a great job of making some of the deepest and newest technologies accessible to a typical smart software developer. Everything in it is written assuming the reader is generally a computer expert but not an expert in the niche that is being covered.


https://8bitnews.io/ is pretty cool, although they cover the retro side of tech.


Let's say "the all-time classics" instead. ;-)


Indeed. I'm currently leafing through a book about Atari 800 assembly language, and recently had a go at some 8bit generative art code on a C64 emulator (using magazine code from the 80s and such). There is something to be said about the simplicity of those times.


By the way (after looking at your profile here); I was once a collector of the all time classics as well, but foolishly donated my sizeable collection to a museum. I still regret it.


Not much harm if you can visit the museum's workshop. In my hometown (São Paulo, Brazil) there are two groups in the local big state uni that talk about building a computer museum, but that talk, from both engineering and computing groups, has been going on for decade after decade with not a single room being dedicated. Such an endeavor would require constant funding for years and the space to match and I'm absolutely sure they'll be stuck in this duck measurement contest until the cold death of the universe.

I would gladly donate part of my collection if I could be sure the machines would be preserved and available to the public to see. It's more likely I'll bring it to Ireland and help a local college start a museum than wait for those duckheads to make up their minds.

Edit: I blame the autocorrect. And HN not dealing well with asterisks.


The museum is back in Israel where I'm originally from, but I live in the UK. Transporting this collection was not trivial and at the time it was easier to donate. I can only hope they made good use of them. At least I got some photos: https://imgur.com/a/qSIR5


Very nice collection. I really love the QL keycaps. People say the keyboard wasn't nearly as nice to type as it was to look at. Also wish more computers would allow me to slide the keyboard under the computer.


Where’s Byte Magazine when you need it? Dr. Dobb’s Journal? C/C++ User’s Journal?


Originally "Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia".

This leads to something that upsets me - Amazon is now charging $180 for just one volume of the back issues.

In one of the early issues, Bill Gates complained about hobbyists copying software, and somebody responded that it was his problem to come up with a viable business model, perhaps selling software with hardware. The rest is history.


Please check http://6502.org/documents/publications/dr_dobbs_journal for first volumes.


:( There was such a good run there between DDJ and Game Developer Magazine, twas a golden era for endless toilet reading.


Those are back in the good ole days, never to return.


Code Magazine for .NET: https://codemag.com/Magazine


+1


logic https://logicmag.io/


It’s been gone for many years but I feel obliged to give a shout-out to hacker news magazine. It was fantastic.

Someone collected the most interesting stories and printed it and shipped it out. I think in the end it wasn’t sustainable, sadly.

I don’t find much about it online but I still have many copies.


Really enjoying Low Tech Magazine (bought the hard copy which is basically a printout of the blog)


I've always enjoyed reading MIT Technology Review.


New scientist is great. I enjoy MIT technology review. But you have to ignore the naive and overhyped "this is gonna save the world" tone they tend to have also they have a lot of promoted articles that can be rather annoying.


I used to sub to New Scientist for a very long time, exclusively for the delivered print magazine. However they started this habit of pre releasing some of each issues content to syndicated websites BEFORE the print issue hits my doormat, which made me question what I was paying for.


I grab Nuts and Volts, Servo, or Circuit Cellar every once in a while at Micro Center.


I used to like Electronics World, and even subscribed for a while, but I haven't seen an issue for years and it doesn't look like they are really set up for US subscriptions any more. They used to do a nice job of straddling the line betweeen a high-end hobbyist magazine and a trade rag. Better technical content than Circuit Cellar.

For audio, the US-based audioXpress is similar. Hobby articles with a bit of a trade magazine slant to the ads and editorial content.

QEX is the best of the ham radio magazines still standing.

Elektor is fair, on par with Circuit Cellar and Nuts and Volts. Weren't they publishing in the US for a while?


Communications of the ACM


Off-topic as it's neither a paper magazine, nor particularly varied, but I recommend Carbon Brief [1]. This is how they define themselves: "Carbon Brief is a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy".

The content is really of very high quality, on a subject that is often butchered in mainstream media.

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/


Is there anything like Naitilus or Quanta Magazine in print?


Nautilus has a print subscription :)


Mopar Action magazine. It's full of tech articles. I'm a happy subscriber. The advertisements alone are worth the subscription cost


People still pay $10-50 per month to buy physical magazines that still contain advertisements on more than 60% of the pages?


Yes, because even with ads on paper, the reading experience is vastly superior to a screen. And unlike websites, my print magazines aren't trying to profile me in order to peddle irrelevant crap. They're also easier to archive, easier to thumb through, and quite frankly more fun to read. The only down side is the lack of a search function, but the ToC is usually good enough.


Just wait until you pick up a fashion magazine.

(Seriously though: for many types of magazine the ads are the larger point, and the editorial content insofar as it’s not itself a sophisticated ad — cf. Vogue — is there to stimulate your mind while you contemplate the ads. Which are, very often, really good.)


It's not a tech magazine, but that is one of the things i enjoy about The Economist. They usually have only ~6-10 pages pages with advertisements, out of ~75-80 pages in total.

Makes you feel respected as a reader, not being constantly bombarded with ads.


Most subscriptions I've looked at are around $70 per year (so a lot cheaper than you suggest) and the amount of advertising in them seems to be less than it was years ago.


Also, let's note we used to learn about new products in ads well before they appeared in editorial content.


It beats browsing rubbish websites where the advertising is indistinguishable from the articles.


Whatever village you are from they miss you.


While it may not be directly related to the nuts and bolts content of HN, I think The New Atlantis is a great journal for anyone who enjoys thinking about science and technology and their cultural effects.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/


Wireframe. Yeah, it is games focused. But worth the price of only for the regular cussing section to make classic games


Wow... Too late for me to edit. But coding. Not cussing.


I worry about the learned words in your phone's auto complete :)


You won't find new things there, but you'll learn a lot of history and perspective in the computer magazines sections of archive.org.

The Internet Archive is one of the most valuable resources in existence, and not only for tech magazines and websites.


For years Wired was the answer to this question. I don’t know how they are these days though.


MIT Tech Review - mainstream and great

Wired - same

2600 - hacky vibe

Low Tech Magazine - name tells everything

Social Studies of Science - STS academic journal


Somewhat related: What are y’all’s favorite tech sites/blogs with an RSS feed?


If you are in additive manufacturing, specifically metal additive, I highly recommend: https://www.metal-am.com/


I recently re-subscribed to the ACM and I'm now being delivered "Communications of ACM" and XRDS issues (albeit with one month average shipping delay). I must say:

About CACM:

I wasn't sure what I was expecting, however "Communcations of the ACM" is utterly disappointing as a magazines. A lot of opinions, outdated "news", litte to no technology at all.

It's also politically inconsistent: there still are statements about mr Ullman receiving some award despite having issued some discriminatory statements (about Iranin people IIRC) yet the ACM is very happy to publish a whopping FIFTY (!!!) pages marketing stunt about China (November 2021 issue) while staying absolutely silent about the uyghur genocide currently going on and the total lack of press freedom and LGBTQI+ rights.

About XRDS:

I only received one issue so far, and albeit very disconnected from technology at least had articles posing interesting questions ("has computing become a toxic endeavour?").


More science than tech, but I find Nautilus Magazine excellent!


New Scientist


Been reading it since 1985ish. It has changed somewhat since then, although nuclear fusion is still 25-50 years off.

Somehow it has avoided some of the pitfalls of the last 20 years that have reduced editorial independence that has beset other titles. I have no idea who even owns it today but I consider it pretty unbiased except when that is justified, given what it is.

Not cheap but you get what you pay for.


Back in the 90s I subscribed to New Scentist but I let it lapse as I didn't seem to have time to read it. I started buying it again during the pandemic and have been enjoying it.

I think it was recently bought by the publisher of the Daily Mail (UK populist newspaper) but this does not seem to have affected the content (yet).


Tribune Mag.


Tribune is a democratic socialist political magazine founded in 1937

Mkay.


also Jacobin and magazine.scienceforthepeople.org


https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/


NewScientist is pretty good, I think! I subscribe.


MIT tech review

C&EN


Not sure if it's just me, I just feel MIT tech review has too many sponsored and political stuffs...


it's not just you. I stopped reading MIT tech review because of how they like to bring their personal political views into everything.


Assuming you mean to include online 'magazines', the FreeBSD Journal seems consistently good. [0] Just be sure to view the PDFs rather than use their web viewer.

The Jan/Feb 2021 edition has an interesting article on Netflix's use of FreeBSD. [2]

(Not to be confused with the BSD Magazine which is paywalled. [1] I can't comment on its quality as I've not read any.)

[0] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based...

[1] https://bsdmag.org/

[2] (PDF) Page 21 of https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/jan...


Admin Magazine if you are into devops.


as mentioned by 2 other people, Logic Magazine

It's quarterly i think? The format is "150 page book of essays around a theme"

https://logicmag.io/


Linux Format. Has a nice mix of informative and in-depth content.


Whole Earth Catalog


COMPUTE!

Computer Shopper

The Industry Standard

MSDN Magazine


All of these magazines are defunct.


Seinfeld ended more than 20 years ago, plenty of people still watch it every day. Same with The Office.


From the OP: “I'd love to hear your suggestions for tech related magazines, ideally things I can subscribe to and get monthly/quarterly.”


Order one issue a month/quarter from an eBay seller. Problem solved.

Where are your suggestions, hotshot?


You can also get all of them at once from archive.org.

We don't say often enough how much The Internet Archive is a modern Library of Alexandria and a treasure of inestimable value.


Communications of the ACM.


R/science


That's neither a magazine, nor particularly tech-focused, nor even particularly good.




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