Actually learn something

News for nerds since 1997, with tech headlines and threaded comments kept in order by a reader moderation system older than most social networks.

The original rumour desk, still patiently establishing whether the thing your uncle forwarded actually happened.

Push crates into place in rooms built to punish the obvious first move, with thousands of community-made levels behind them.

The newsroom that trains other newsrooms to cover responses instead of problems, with a searchable tracker of the results.

Solar flares, sunspot counts and geomagnetic storm levels in real time, plus the aurora forecast that decides whether tonight is worth the drive.

Code typing drills across a dozen languages, where the indentation is handled for you and the punctuation certainly is not.

Seven letters, one compulsory centre letter, and the long climb from Solid to Genius. Ruins mornings extremely productively.

A hundred billion dollars and a shopping list running from Big Macs to aircraft carriers, and it is harder to spend than you expect.

Hundreds of thousands of user-made timed quizzes: name every element, every country, every Friends character. The genre's warehouse.

A daily letter grid with dozens of words buried in it, plus a bonus list that runs on far longer than anyone expects.

Constructive journalism collected from other outlets into one free feed, so somebody else does all the sifting.

Compare image codecs side by side with a draggable split, and see precisely what each quality setting costs you.

Grades any public HTTPS server from A+ down to F and explains every single deduction. The reference test the whole industry quotes.

Curated collections around specific research subjects, preserved because a university decided they would matter later.

Ask a sports question in plain English and get the actual numbers back with a chart. Ends pub arguments in about four seconds.

Long-form serialised fiction with a reader built for actually reading — chapter memory, no pop-ups, no interruptions.

A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.

The actual cables carrying the internet between continents, each one named, with its landing points and the year it went live.

Clean daily sudoku across five difficulties, with a notes mode that behaves the way a pencil is supposed to.

Real-time First World War grand strategy played over weeks against dozens of other people, most of whom will lie to you.

Ascending through increasingly abstract mathematics, with a community that treats optimising it as a competitive spreadsheet sport.

World atlas of traditional dishes and the specific places that still make them properly. Endless, and reliably makes you hungry.

A collaborative database of example sentences translated across languages, better than any dictionary for context.

Train an image or sound classifier from your own webcam in about three minutes, no code involved. The clearest explanation of machine learning built.

Non-commercial web search indexing only pages carrying no ads or trackers at all. A very small and very different internet.

Hundreds of players carve up a real world map using one attack slider. Diplomacy emerges in the chat within ninety seconds.

Thousands of browser-playable parser and choice games, plus Quest, the authoring tool most of them were written in.

Everything people typed at each other on bulletin board systems before the web existed, preserved as plain text and left open.

Wiki for an infinite office nobody built, mapped level by level in damp yellow carpet by contributors who take it extremely seriously.

Teaches the pen tool by making you trace shapes with the fewest possible anchor points. Level nine is genuinely cruel.

Millions of pages of declassified government documents prised out by freedom of information requests, free to browse.

The gentle way into fragment shaders, with every example editable in the page and redrawing itself as you type.

Combine shapes with union, subtract and intersect to hit a target silhouette in as few operations as you can manage.

Profiles of thousands of American cold case disappearances, written and maintained by one person for decades.

Every component you might need to build, with links to how twenty different design systems each named and handled it.

Scroll from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, meeting every creature at the depth it actually lives.

A volunteer register of unidentified remains and missing people, matched by amateurs who keep on succeeding.

A scholarly reference to the whole genre, free to read, covering authors nobody else ever bothered to write up.

A playable account of why cooperation appears and then collapses, using game theory and roughly ten minutes of attention.

Bisect angles, find midpoints and judge parallels by eye, then get told in pixels precisely how wrong you were.

The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.

Complete texts, timelines and scholarship for a writer whose entire output is public domain, on a site that has barely changed since 1994.

Every interactive fiction file anyone thought worth keeping since 1992, in a directory listing that has never once been redesigned.

Jay Alammar's diagram-by-diagram walkthrough of the architecture underneath every modern language model.

Every possible page of text that could ever exist, already written, sitting at a findable address.

A catalogue of films, broadcasts and recordings that are known to have existed and cannot now be found. Some entries get solved.

Community-maintained film and television database with an open API, which is why half the apps you use are quietly built on it.

Five solutions-focused stories a day, from a team that has been running this beat since the mid-nineties.