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Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?

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Re: Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?

#34
For tech I'm honestly trying to keep up less, I want more time in my life to read shitty fiction etc (and you know, spend time with humans I guess); I've spent the better part of a 15 years keeping up _too_ much IMO.

On nothing to do with tech: I'm desperately trying to find something that covers general world news without too much of a US slant, in a nice concise way. Next Draft (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) is pretty good, but is very US heavy.

When I trialled subscribing to The Economist their Espresso app-- which is essentially a daily curated newsletter-- was pretty decent, so if you sub to them you should definitely check it out.

These days I'm trying the qz daily digest, which I think is working out OK: they talk about what to expect in the next day, what happened while you were asleep etc. If anyone has any better suggestions I'd love to hear them: I like how the economist actually talks about other parts of the world apart from the states, but I don't love it enough to pay their standard sub rate.

In terms of general flowery writing I get emails from Medium based on what I've read, emails from Pocket based on what I read, and longform.org's newsletter. Depending on how snowed under I feel at any given time I either just delete them without opening them, of potentially skim them to see if anything is interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?

#37
post #34

For tech I'm honestly trying to keep up less, I want more time in my life to read shitty fiction etc (and you know, spend time with humans I guess); I've spent the better part of a 15 years keeping up _too_ much IMO. On nothing to do with tech: I'm desperately trying to find something that covers general world news without too much of a US slant, in a nice concise way. Next Draft (mentioned elsewhere in this thread)…

"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." – Bruce Lee

Re: Ask HN: Best curated newsletters?

#39
It's quite hard to build up a following these days. In the last 5-6 years, I made such newsletters for the coffee world, airports, plus cultural items and tech news out of Brazil. For all of them, I made use of my knowledge/familiarity of Romance languages and would thus translate foreign news to add to my newsletters. Essentially, I learned they were "nice-to-have" but not necessary in order to operate in these fields (the latter being what I was aiming for).

- For coffee, I learned people in the know are after 24/7 changes in the commodities market.

- For worldwide airport news, well, I don't think there is much of a market there (though I would regularly capture 30-50 pertinent articles per day).

- For Brazil news, cultural awareness is nice to have but in order for something like that to be needed, I would think the focus would have to be Business, and very specific (in fact, I played around with making newsletters like this).

- For Brazil tech, I think it was too early on in its development because there were only around 10-15 items per day.

There's a final component I failed to consider with the first two newsletters above, I had no product dev, no one on the inside to say "hey, focus on this aspect, that's what people need."

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