I don't really view these any more, but they were formative in my high school years (when I actually used bookmarks), and somewhat my college years.
read more- Damn Interesting
- Without a doubt, my favorite website ever. I first discovered them in 2009. The writing style is eloquent and often very gripping, but about science, history, and psychology.
- engineerguy
- Even to people who understand complex physics, math, and computer science, real devices (like a microwave) still can feel like magic. You need someone like this professor to explain the engineering and what physics princples are being used to make a device work, because it's often not obvious (at least to me).
- Better Explained
- Without a doubt one of my favorite websites during high school, Kalid appears to understand the world the same way I do: simply and visually. Knowing that someone else was out there who had to approach things the way I did was helpful; everyone else around me seemed ok with memorization rather than building intuition.
- /.
- Slashdot is basically just news for nerds; it was a good way to keep up with science and technology news that was geared toward a very technical audience (the science / math isn't dumbed down, so you could get a lot more out of it without having to leave the site to find like the Ars Technica link or something).
- xkcd
- The only comic I've ever liked (many jokes based in science/math/programming).
- Bret Victor's personal website
- After watching his "Inventing on Principle" talk, I fell in love with Bret Victor. I poured through his website and it just felt familiar. Wrote him an email back when I was a junior in high school.
- Phrack
- Ever since I took computer security at UNC, I've been pretty interested in hacking. In part because I think in order to break a system, you have to really understand it, and so learning how to hack a system is really just a way of getting to consummately understand it.
- Server Stack
- The top questions of the month of the server fault stack sometimes had stuff that I thought would one day be useful for debugging a production server issue, but also just because I'm genuinely intersted in understanding how things work. It's also just interesting to know what kind of issues people experience in the wild.
- Super Stack
- I'd sometimes visit the top questions of the month of the super user stack because it would covered questions I'd sometimes ask myself when doing day-to-day computer stuff, rather than things that were in-depth technical (programming). I think it's important to be well rounded in this regard: no point in knowing how to optimize a MySQL server if you can't fix grandpa's slow PC.
- Security Stack
- Just like with hacking, I think it's important to know the existing methods of protection and how they're protective, so that (convenience) improvements can be made. I don't think I would have been able to design Loginless had I not felt very familiar with the current methods for data security.