Ask HN: Good magazines or journals about CS and software engineering | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good magazines or journals about CS and software engineering

5 pointshintymad1 comment

Or are journals not that relevant any more nowadays?

I subscribe to CACAM, ACM Queue, and used to read Software Practice and Experience (because Donald Knuth and other luminaries used to publish really fun yet practical articles there). Unfortunately CACM has been talking more and more about social issues, identity this and fairness that and climate and etc, which I couldn't care less about. I just want to get deep and practical technical discussion, so I canceled CACM, which leaves me only ACM Queue.

BTW, by software engineering I meant practices by engineers in the trench, not theoretical or research topics taught in college.

I used to be an ACM member but quit because they are too interested in the problems CS professors have but not enough in the problems practitioners have.

They never draw the connection between the chronic problem of roller-coaster undergraduate admissions and potential students hearing “my job sucks” from practitioners and don’t seem to get that that goes double for women, bipoc and other underrepresented minorities.

I used to like Dr. Dobb’s Journal back in the day (e.g. so many legendary articles like Mike Abrash on graphics or the guy who wrote a FORTRAN interpreter for the i860 that beat Intel’s compiler.). I think things like that were killed off by tech blogs.

I don’t like that the ACM has always had a pro-H1B position and prefer the IEEE Computer Society position of “no position.”. I am all for immigration but H1B is so unfair for the people who get it as well as the rest of us including people taking other paths to the green card. They say startups need it but a startup can’t wait for the red tape and accept the risk of a key employee not winning the lottery. But the likes of Google, IBM and Wipro can spam 1000s of applications and game the system. There has to be a better way.

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