Buttondown Newsletters

If you're ready to pay 5$ each month for each thousand subscribers, Buttondown seems like a great tool. It does offert paid subscriptions as well if you want to earn money with your content. https://buttondown.email

Self-hosting is your best bet, in my opinion. Personally, I use Sendy[1], but other options are Mailcoach[2], and Mailtrain[3], both options I am considering switching to. While they all offer the option of tracking opening, clicks, and whatnot, you can disable these features easily. The same can be said about hosted solutions, though, so maybe take a look at Buttondown[4], if self-hosting is not an option for you. [1] https://sendy.co/ [2] https://mailcoach.app/ [3] https://mailtrain.org/ [4] https://buttondown.email/

I moved my newsletter[0] from Mailchimp to Buttondown[1] and have been very happy. The price is much cheaper, and Buttondown does exactly what I need it to do: manage my list of subscribers and send emails reliably. As the cherries on top I can compose my emails in markdown and their public API is nice to use. Highly recommended for personal newsletter needs! [0]: https://mxstbr.com/thoughts [1]: https://buttondown.email

For anyone who's interested in this but wants to check out various services: https://buttondown.email/ uses Markdown. I've had a great experience with it so far.

This is a cliché but honest answer — I was using a similar tool and thought to myself “man, I could make something better than this.” I have this impulse a lot, and usually I stop myself from actually following through (there is always so much complication hiding below the surface!) but I kept coming back to it. Eventually, I set a deadline for myself; I said if, six months later, I couldn’t scratch the itch to make something better (or at least find something better) than what I was using, then I’d start working on it. The six months passed, and so it was born: https://buttondown.email

I like that this exists, as someone who writes everything in Markdown. (I should note that there is a platform that offers something similar to this already: https://buttondown.email/) But while Markdown on its own is great to see more of in the email space, I think there's room to extend the idea. A few years ago, an employee of CakeMail created this great demo of a concept that mixed shortcodes and Markdown, but never followed through with the idea: http://cakedown.alexandredeschamps.ca/ Part of the problem with that design was that it was built around specific components in Foundation for Emails, which kinda backed that design in a corner, but there's room to allow end users to custom-build components for easy access, along the lines of what MJML can do. To me, I think that idea has a ton of blue water around it. Nobody is combining shortcodes and Markdown in this way for email clients, and it could potentially be very valuable as an alternative to the overly complex WYSIWYG editors the rest of the email market uses. I run a newsletter with 10k+ subscribers (https://tedium.co/) and I run it on Craft CMS in a way that replicates the CakeMail approach to a degree, with my own flourishes (which was convenient as I already use shortcodes for my text). It allows me to throw in ads on the fly and simply add design features to content without a lot of extra work. I'd love to see the general idea get picked up by some new email provider. I think we need more thinking in this…

indeed. I pointed out in https://buttondown.email/ainews/archive/ainews-llama-31-the-synthetic-… that the frontier model curve is currently going down 1 OoM every 4 months, meaning every model release has a very short half life[0]. however this progress is still worth it if we can deploy it to improve millions and eventually billions of people's lives. a commenter pointed out that the amoutn spent on Llama 3.1 was only like 60% of the cost of Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania, in which case I'd advocate for killing all Marvel slop and dumping all that budget on LLM progress. [0] not technically complete depreciation, since for example 4o mini is widely believed to be a distillation of 4o, so 4o's investment still carries over into 4o mini

For me https://buttondown.email is the equivalent for TinyLetter before it got acquired by Mailchimp. It's a honest small business and the founder also has an interesting blog: https://buttondown.email/blog

Thanks. Mostly just Twitter, following all the companies & researchers for any new announcements, then reading any interesting papers mentioned/linked. I also subscribe to YouTube channels like Dwarkesh Patel (interviewer) and Yannic Kilcher (AI News), and search out YouTube interviews with the principles. Of course I also read any AI news here on HN, and sometimes there may be interesting information in the comments. There's a summary of social media AI news here, that sometimes surfaces something interesting. https://buttondown.email/ainews/archive/

I've been following this newsletter since Matthias launched it - I recommend going through the archive [0] if you're into personal websites and the "IndieWeb". On a similar vein, I also recommend Manuel Moreale's newsletter "People and Blogs" [1]. Props to both for promoting the greener pastures of the internet! [0]: https://buttondown.email/ownyourweb/archive/ [1]: https://peopleandblogs.com/

The author previously discussed the four-document model and some additional kinds of documents at <https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/beyond-the-four-document-… and goes into further detail about conceptual overviews and examples. Of the other kinds of documents he mentions, "Best Practices" are often the ones I look for early on when learning a new language or library. It's easier for me to get up to speed by emulating what works.

Whoa, what a coincidence! I was planning on sending you an email this weekend. I've been working on an idea for Buttondown I think you're really gonna like :) For those who don't know, Justin runs https://buttondown.email It's an incredible newsletter service that's been growing in popularity, because well, he built a delightful product :)

I love the plotter community! A timely shill: for three years now, I've run an annual international postcard exchange that's kinda like a Secret Santa for people with plotters. This happens to be the week that registrations are open. https://buttondown.email/ptpx/archive/ptpx-2022-holiday-card-exchange-…

Thanks for flagging. opsindev.news is hosted on GitLab Pages using Let's Encrypt. Maybe the TLS ciphers or versions do not match. Which error message do you see, browser/OS and location may help (if you want to share) If the MkDocs website does not work, suggest the following workarounds: Newsletter issues in [0] as markdown files, example [1] or the newsletter archive on Buttondown [2]. I'm using Buttondown to send the newsletter, MkDocs serves as web-searchable archive. Kudos to Michael Hausenblas here for the idea, he publishes the o11y.news newsletter. [0] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/opsindev.news/-/tree/main/docs/archive [1] https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/opsindev.news/-/blob/main/docs/archive/202… [2] https://buttondown.email/opsindev.news/

Posts are fairly few & far-between, but Cryptography Dispatches [1] always has very high-quality content; worth reading if you work in that space. 1: https://buttondown.email/cryptography-dispatches

Near Future Lab [1] does a great newsletter on things happening in 'design fiction' space — https://buttondown.email/designfiction [1]https://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com

I'm actually currently writing a book with exactly this emphasis! The working title is "Practical Math for Programmers," and the idea is to build a collection of 60-75, 3-page long, _compelling_ demonstrations of mathematics used in production settings, biased toward stuff a generalist programmer might find useful. Not going into proofs or foundations, but providing lots of references to further reading. I'm aspiring for it to be like a Hacker's Delight, or Programming Gems, but just for math that is genuinely useful. Read more here: https://buttondown.email/j2kun/archive/a-week-of-book-writing/ Sign up to hear when it's released here: https://jeremykun.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=99aa071e97df95d3a14…

sorry dendron didn't work out. was there anything specific that felt "janky"? we've had lots of updates on general ux (see https://buttondown.email/dendron/archive/) and are continuing to focus on that this year. that being said, logseq is also a great tool. a bunch of folks use both dendron and logseq in tandem

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/new-essay-and-thoughts-on… seems to be the newsletter in question; I am not subscribed despite fitting the demographics on a number of axes.

2019 thread on the paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433315 Another review: https://buttondown.email/nelhage/archive/papers-i-love-gg/

For a relatively-privacy-focused newsletter service check out Buttondown[0] Not affiliated, just a happy user [1] [0] https://buttondown.email [1] https://sourcetarget.email

Hard to take this seriously, citing Durovs nonsense about best practices and backdoors and completely ignoring the fact that Telegram almost certainly shipped a backdoor! https://buttondown.email/cryptography-dispatches/archive/cryptography-… You even discuss this issue in the "History of Telegram vulnerabilities", but don't bother to mention the fact that this was almost certainly a deliberate backdoor. You also seem to suggest that DUAL_EC_DRBG was promoted as a best practice by the crypto-community, what an utterly bizarre claim. Of course, the mental gymnastics in the "Defamation" section make it clear that this was never intended to be a honest analysis.

I don't subscribe to many, but I do subscribe to filipp.io's Cryptography Dispatches https://buttondown.email/cryptography-dispatches/archive Fermat's Library fermatslibrary.com The Popehat Report https://popehat.substack.com/ and I've been subscribed to Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram since before newsletters were cool ;) https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/

While the creator of Buttondown [0] and Spoonbill [1] wasn't trying to get a job, I really like the philosophy he talks about in this post about side projects [2]: > If you are going to find a project, I encourage you to find something particularly small and particularly durable (which is to say, does not require constant or near-constant attention), so that you give yourself the ability to take a break from the project for weeks or months while it accumulates interest. *edited for formatting [0]: https://buttondown.email/ [1]: https://spoonbill.io/ [2]: https://jmduke.com/2020/06/26/atypical-success

Buttondown lets you send emails to just paying subscribers of the newsletter, kinda like substack. I was playing around with the config and didn't realize it would ask people to pay! I am very dumb. Anyway, I disabled it. There is no paying-subscriber-only content and I don't plan to offer any in the near future. Sorry about that! There's some archive posts[1] that are only for newsletter subscribers. Those are usually first drafts of blog posts I'm writing and don't want to be shareable yet. But that's just a newsletter subscription and totally free. [1] https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive

About the hosting site (Buttondown) - does anyone know what "Unlock full access" does? I liked the post, so I filled out the newsletter signup form with my email. It immediately switched to show a credit card form to "Unlock full access" for $25/month. I was annoyed by this bait-and-switch, only to find that apparently it's all already accessible [1] and I received a confirmation email with a link to subscribe. So now I'm just confused. [1] https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive

I’ve not tried it, but this looks good: https://buttondown.email/

https://buttondown.email/ I haven't used it yet, but I'm planning to use it for a personal project. I like that it has built-in support for Markdown.

Mine would be Cassidy William's newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/cassidoo. It's free, but there was a few newsletters where she linked her Venmo/Paypal in case people wanted to support, and I contributed during that time. She's since removed those from the letters for whatever reason. This newsletter is great on a Monday morning because it's light and has some interesting/cool links in it. Another great one would be Kent C Dodds' newsletters: https://buttondown.email/kentcdodds. Kent is highly active in the React/JS/OS community and he's a super great guy. Same deal here, its free but you can choose to support, which I do from time to time. His newsletters are focused on JS/React and are a bit more dense, but they're interesting.

Buttondown https://buttondown.email/