Four Years at University, and a Few of My “Little Drawers”

AI translation notice: This English version was translated from the original Chinese article with AI assistance. Some nuances may differ from the original.

I have always loved surfing the internet and collecting all kinds of strange and wonderful websites and sources of information. Sharing them back and forth with classmates brought me plenty of new ones, and over time they became a shared language among us. My four years of university were, I would say, the four years in which I grew up the fastest socially: I went through a lot and saw a lot. Everything I want to share in this article is something I have been reading all along, and they are the sources I genuinely like. If you have any of your own you would like to share, please leave a comment below! 👏

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Tech News

Ruan Yifeng's Web Log

https://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/

Teacher Ruan's blog is probably the best known and most familiar of all Chinese personal blogs, and the “Technology Enthusiast Weekly” on this site has become a Friday ritual that many people (myself included) never miss.

It is not confined to pure technology; it reads more like a general-interest magazine for the digital age. It covers the author's observations and thoughts on technology, tech news, excellent articles, new tool recommendations, digests, interesting comments, and more. Add the cover image and introduction the author carefully picks each week, and the content is remarkably rich 🤩—enough to serve as a weekly roundup of tech highlights.

My favorite part is the author's tech observations, which are full of interesting thoughts and insights and often leave me feeling as though my cerebral cortex has been swapped out for a new one. Then there is the article recommendation section: I can honestly say that it is mainly through this weekly that I have come across many excellent personal bloggers and fresh ideas (the kind that set trends!).

Chaping's WeChat Account

Updated at midnight sharp every night, Chaping is more like a “tech midnight snack.” On the many nights I was busy fixing bugs 🥱, I would open it at midnight for a bit of diversion. It skims quickly through the day's important little tech news, mostly the stuff closely tied to us users. It also runs short analysis and discussion pieces on whatever topics are currently hot.

Chaping's main distinguishing feature is the way it explains hardcore tech news and business developments in very plain language laced with internet memes. The interactions in the comments are usually full of jokes too, and it even has a Daily Joke and an interactive section that gets discussions going in the comments, loosening the nerves wound tight by the day.

Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/

This is a minimalist tech community run by Y Combinator, and an important window through which I get “raw information.” For me, what draws me in most is its ranking algorithm:

$$Score = \frac{P - 1}{(T + 2)^G}$$

where,

• $P$ is the entry's score; subtracting $1$ offsets the submitter's own vote;
• $T$ is the time elapsed since the entry was submitted, in hours; the +2 keeps the newest posts from making the denominator too small (the choice of 2 may be because it takes an average of two hours for an original article to appear elsewhere and then be reposted to Hacker News);
• $G$ is the gravity factor, which defaults to $1.8$ in the algorithm and determines how quickly a post's ranking falls, much like the idea of gravitational acceleration.

This mechanism automatically filters out content the community agrees is valuable and not yet stale, keeping high-quality technical discussion, startup insights, and cutting-edge papers afloat. It is also basically comprehensive enough. I do not actually read much of it day to day, but I am sharing it here anyway.

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Current Affairs

Then there is current affairs:

The Bedtime News Editorial Department WeChat Account

Updated every night. The Bedtime News Editorial Department account is the main business of Ma Dugong's studio. Although people on the internet have plenty of criticism for Ma Dugong, the news in the Bedtime News Editorial Department account is still in the higher tier of quality. Every item is distilled into a few key points; open it while you brush your teeth and you will have a basic grasp of what happened today.

If your way of looking at problems leans toward “seeking truth from facts” and you dislike preset positions, then his Bilibili account Ma Dugong is worth following too. His analytical framework (especially the long-form videos on Bilibili) can also offer a lot of “counterintuitive” perspectives. Almost every episode sparks discussion on Zhihu, and when you have nothing else to do you can head over to Zhihu and see the different takes on a single event—which is quite nice, actually!

Military Intelligence D7

https://space.bilibili.com/448165099

This is one of the few current-affairs creators I follow who demands a lot of his sources and is not especially emotional (no “win, win, win” 😭). His presentations are very clearly structured, usually organized by region (Iran, Russia-Ukraine, the Asia-Pacific, the United States) to sort through recent developments. When things were busy he posted almost daily; the frequency has slowed recently, but the content still keeps up high information density and objectivity, avoiding the inflammatory language common to military content—which suits my taste rather well.

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Technical Deep Dives

There are, in fact, a great many sources that lean toward specific technologies. But with the development of AI, going straight to a large model with a specific tech-stack question seems like a faster and more comprehensive option 😅—especially since, if you already have a particular stack in mind, there is no need for me to share anything here; everyone has suitable, targeted blogs and articles to draw on. So I will simply list two that I think are pretty good.

Meituan Tech Team

https://tech.meituan.com/

Updated irregularly. This is, in my personal view, the tech blog with the highest “substance” among China's big internet companies. It does not write fluff; it is all real, hands-on summaries of Meituan's work in large-scale, high-concurrency business scenarios. The content covers architecture design, AI engineering (such as the LongCat series of models), big data, algorithm optimization, and more. It is a great way to sharpen your systems thinking through real cases.

Google Research

https://research.google/blog/

The official blog of Google Research (now deeply integrated with DeepMind). This is the “source” of many frontier technologies—the earliest explanations of foundational work such as Transformer and BERT came from here. It mainly publishes the latest progress in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and quantum computing (all very cool technologies 😯!). Some of it is on the research-heavy side, but through its accessible posts you can directly feel the direction in which “future technology” is evolving, and seeing them, you are bound to feel at least a little excited.

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What I have shared above are the sources I followed most often during these four years—in other words, the mysterious “little drawers” I gradually found. They opened up a great many perspectives for me, and they kept my steps from falling too far behind the times. This article is mainly meant to start the conversation: if you have a treasured source of your own, I would love for you to share it in the comments!