> The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving.

I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them.

> many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven.

Or that. I mean, maybe Mark? Or Gruber? But can you seriously see James Hamilton or James Hague or Raymond Chen or LWN writing an article "to gain votes on these sites"? I mean, come on.

> But most of what gets posted on HN is junk.

True. But Byte published less than one article per day, and only a minority of its articles were of the high quality that we're talking about here.

> What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value.

Well, I haven't written for Byte, but my limited experience writing magazine articles falls pretty far short of what you're describing there. Byte did have some pretty good stuff, it's true. But as often as not, professional writers synthesize those perspectives with errors and FUD.

And I'd like to point out that in http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.co... there were three articles written by Ernest Lilley in, I believe, the same month. So I think "weeks" may be an overestimate of how much time was normally spent on an article. Maybe in 1998 or something they had a much larger staff?

Looking at November 1997: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19980204071948/http://www.b...

This was close to Byte's peak of the 1980s. Yet what do we find? A 20-paragraph article cluelessly claiming that autoconf "neatly eliminates this work [of porting software between Unix variants]" and that most "public-domain software packages" use autoconf; an in-depth article about classes of ATM service by a guy who writes books about ATM and TCP/IP that somehow neglects to mention how people in the TCP/IP world solve the same problems, and fails to note the degree to which ATM and TCP/IP were increasingly in competition, to the point that ATM is today a minor niche physical-layer protocol; an editorial in favor of standardizing Java; reviews of 26 new MMX laptop models; a one-paragraph article about delays in the shipment of Tillamook; a competitive review article of cryptography software that pits PGP against Netscape and Microsoft Outlook; a competitive review article of web server software that reviews Microsoft IIS and Netscape SuiteSpot, but somehow failed to include Apache (despite noting that it was the market leader); an evaluation of the new Number Nine graphics card; and so on.

The vast majority of this stuff is of essentially no lasting value. And, while competitively testing 26 models of laptop against each other may be expensive (well, I'm guessing that the vendors footed the hardware bill), it's not really in the same ballpark as http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/hybrid-in... or http://lwn.net/Articles/429086/ or http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/464 or http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html or http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/03/02/10135... — the closest current equivalent would probably be stuff like http://www.anandtech.com/show/4207/asus-g73sw-third-times-th....

> We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective…

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "lost perspective"?