I am clueless about the right etiquette, but can anyone share some high quality publications in the similar vein? Mainly interested in "head content" that is not a book, but a set of relevant, contemporary articles around our trade.
I used to read LWN regularly, but now I only read it when someone links to it.
Beyond link aggregator sites like these, there are dozens of individual people whose writings I read frequently, if not every time I come across anything new they've written, because it's reliably high quality: Landon Dyer, James Hague, Yosef Kreinin, Raganwald, Tim Bray (ongoing), Dave Long, Bill Gosper, Darius Bacon, Fabian Giesen (ryg), viznut, John Carmack, Bret Victor, of course Paul Graham, Bunnie Huang, Seth Schoen, Avery Pennarun (apenwarr), Herb Sutter, Stepanov, Alexandrescu, Oona Raisanen (windytan), Jon Blow, Linus Åkesson, Ian Lance Taylor, Oleg Kiselyov (although this is very difficult!), Ian Piumarta, Mark-Jason Dominus, Aaron Swartz (RIP), and Randall Munroe.
On the hardware side, Anandtech is pretty good.
Above and beyond that, for overviews of objective things with links to further reading, I've found Wikipedia to be pretty consistently good.
Some quasi-journals have been moving in a "magazine-style" direction with broader-interest articles than a traditional journal, in order to fill some of the trade-magazine gap. Some more successfully than others.
A few that I sometimes read:
ACM Queue: http://queue.acm.org/. Online-only, free. Focus is largely on software engineering and some related areas (sysadmin, devops, architecture, reliability engineering, etc.). Probably the closest to a Dr. Dobbs style magazine of the ones I list here, with mostly industry authors.
Communications of the ACM: http://cacm.acm.org/. Most recent issue is free online; print subscription w/ digital back-issue access is $99/yr. Mix of academic and industry articles, leaning more academic, but written in a more accessible and concise style than a typical CS journal. The print version also includes some articles from online-only ACM publications (like Queue).
AI Magazine: http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/magazine.php. Issues >1 yr old are open-access online; new issues are subscription-only. Print+digital subscription is $145/yr. A bit like CACM, in being journal-ish but with an aim at more readable general-interest articles. Some insider-ish news/column type stuff as well (reports on conferences and workshops, etc.).
You may or may not be happy with any of those. The move towards a more magazine-style format is pretty new, and I think still being experimented with. I personally like glancing through and reading parts of CACM and AI Magazine, and less often Queue. I also know some people who like the general-audience IEEE magazines (IEEE Computer, IEEE Software, IEEE Micro, etc.), but I haven't read them enough to have an opinion.
