Decision. For software-broad signal: Hacker News (sort by score). For curated technical-only posts: Lobsters (invite-only). For frontier open-model practice: r/LocalLLaMA. For papers with discussion: alphaXiv. Subscribe to one daily digest (TLDR AI) plus one weekly deep-read (Import AI or The Batch). Skip everything else — it duplicates these.
Aggregators
| Source | What it is | Why it earns the slot |
|---|---|---|
| Hacker News | YC-run social filter; full-spectrum (AI, infra, indie, business) | Largest dev/founder readership; score correlates strongly with quality among social aggregators, and “front page” is still the default tech triage [1] |
| Lobsters (lobsters/lobsters ⭐ 4.7k) | Invite-only, tag-scoped technical posts | Transparent moderation, no politics, smaller volume → higher signal-to-noise than HN; off-topic stories visibly downvoted [2] |
| r/LocalLLaMA | ~686k members; running open models on local hardware | New families (Gemma, Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek, MiniMax) gain traction here before mainstream coverage — practical consensus forms before the market catches up [3] |
| alphaXiv | arXiv front-end with per-paper threaded discussion + author-follow | Replaces Karpathy’s arxiv-sanity-lite ⭐ 1.6k for most users; the trending list is a usable daily glance over ML papers [4] |
Meta-feeds (newsletters)
Pick one daily + one weekly. Stacking more is duplication.
| Newsletter | Cadence | Subs | Pitch |
|---|---|---|---|
| TLDR AI | Daily | 1.25M+ | 5-min engineer/data-science briefing — the default morning skim [5] |
| Import AI | Weekly | 96k+ | Policy, safety, frontier research — Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) [5] |
| The Batch | Weekly | — | Andrew Ng’s roundup — researcher/learner framing [5] |
| AlphaSignal | Weekly | 180k+ | “By researchers for researchers” — hardware, ML, trending GitHub [5] |
What to skip
- Generic “AI news” portals (TechCrunch AI, AI Magazine) — lag HN by hours and ship without the discussion thread that’s half the value.
- Twitter/X without curation. Breaking news still lands there first, but signal is unusable without a tight follow list — that belongs in a different artifact.
- Multi-source dashboards (Particle, Ground News, Feedly) — built for general news; oversized for engineers already reading HN + Lobsters [6].