Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

113 points
1/21/1970
6 days ago
by joshmarinacci

Comments


RickS

Lesswrong for both sidebars: the heading based TOC on the left, and the margin notes on the right: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bJ2haLkcGeLtTWaD5/welcome-to...

For interactive / code snippets Maxime Heckel: https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/the-study-of-shaders-wit...

Honorable mentions Maggie Applebaum https://maggieappleton.com/ai-enlightenment Marek Chotoborski https://zanlib.dev/blog/number-inputs-in-react/

Line width, sane fonts, avoiding clever shit unless very polished, gets you a long way.

6 days ago

wrentopher

Less Wrong is wrong a lot lol.

4 days ago

dieselgate

Is it sort of how stainless steel still rusts... it just rusts, less?

4 days ago

joshmarinacci

Wow. Maxime’s site is gorgeous.

Thank you

5 days ago

faizmokh

I like reading Julia Evans blog. Aside from the good writings, I think the typography and the paragraph width fits nicely.

https://jvns.ca/

5 days ago

Suppafly

commenting so i come back here at some point and read some of the blogs people are suggesting. I pretty much haven't found any text-heavy blogs that I enjoy anymore.

5 hours ago

sammygutierrez

5 days ago

hiAndrewQuinn

Gwern's website changed my life at least 12 years ago by introducing me to spaced repetition, which solved my greatest bottleneck at the time: very smart and totally unable to remember anything in the moment to actually apply those smarts to. I'm glad I got the opportunity to finally remunerate him some very small amount after he set up a Patreon or what have you around the time of that Dwarkesh podcast. There are like at least a dozen other works on there that were formative for me too, very highly recommended.

5 days ago

genericacct

Came here to say this, absolute best blog typography in the last 30 yrs

5 days ago

deckplecksetter

I like the design of https://dbushell.com/blog/

Though mainly I just like the general 50s aesthetics of it, rather than specific UI elements.

5 days ago

xref

I definitely read that as D-Bus hell

3 days ago

b00palicious

Here is a decent collection of some text heavy personal sites. Not affiliated in any way: https://mnmm.xyz/

6 days ago

zbikowski

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ - book design adapted for web

https://practicaltypography.com/ - tons of practical advice on typefaces and text-based UX

https://harmful.cat-v.org/ - more of a "website-style" layout than the above two

3 days ago

realityfactchex

Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

The simple layout/theme does not get in the way of the reading.

5 days ago

pockybum522

https://computer.rip/

One of my favorites.

4 days ago

matrix87

for some reason, stripe owns this magazine

3 days ago

nicbou

4 days ago

jonjacky

https://dfns.dyalog.com/n_sudoku.htm

Explanation of Sudoku in APL. Lots of information, absolutely no clutter. Entire page is nothing but text in a single precise sans-serif typewriter font, the same size and strength for everything: headings, explanation, code, and tables. Typewriter font includes mathematical symbols.

4 days ago

laladrik

This one looks good to me. https://matklad.github.io/. Coincidentally the author has recently posted about CSS for blogs https://matklad.github.io/2026/06/04/css-unavoidable-bad-par....

I have my own blog, but I'm unhappy with its design as well; therefore I'm not sharing it. Nevertheless, I find particularly challenging two things: 1. Make tables readable from a smartphone. There are a few tricks which allow you to make a responsive table. However, those tricks implies that you use <ul> or <div> instead of <table> which defeats the point of having a table. 2. I had an article where I needed to put a tiny mind map. Eventually I put it as a picture, because the solutions to draw a mind map with JavaScript made the page as twice as heavy.

5 days ago

tga

https://zed.dev/blog (somewhat quirkier, sidebars)

https://tailscale.com/blog (overall clean)

https://arun.is/blog (sidebar, colors)

https://www.vitsoe.com/us/voice (general feel)

https://github.com/TryGhost/Headline (interesting article header, open source)

3 days ago

bookmark99

surprised this isn't top

> https://ciechanow.ski/

4 days ago

efortis

I’ve gotten a few emails complimenting the format of this post below. It’s got fragment-links that scroll and highlight the corresponding part in the code snippet.

https://ericfortis.com/blog/freebsd-jails-network-setup

3 days ago

fabianholzer

I think the website of James Sinclair has some great typographical choices, see the colophon for details: https://jrsinclair.com/about/

3 days ago

jonjacky

https://sites.gatech.edu/alexburgin/on-self-respect-by-joan-...

Dramatic sepia photograph contrasts with understated gray text on light gray background with lots of empty space.

4 days ago

ktrnka

I like the formatting and readability of https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/28/protestware-for-coding-agents.... though I wish it loaded faster.

6 days ago

jonjacky

https://www.datagubbe.se/short/

Header, body, trailer panels with three complementary background shades that soften the large black sans-serif typography.

5 days ago

NoahZuniga

3 days ago

gustavus

Just finished a series on

acoup.blog

Must also mention

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

6 days ago