Ask HN: Other online communities like HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Other online communities like HN?

138 pointsmpoon51 comments

Interested in knowing if vibrant online communities exist where people talk shop similar to HN for other industries, e.g. construction workers, teachers, actuaries, doctors, etc.

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https://www.barnacl.es - Business

https://www.journalduhacker.net/ - French Hacker News

https://write.narwhal.space/ - Writing

https://g33kz.de/ - German Hacker News

https://paperkast.com/ - Academic Papers

https://bitmia.com/ - Finance/Investing

All of the above are based on https://lobste.rs/, which is pretty much like HN with a few extra features and less Off-Topic

Also, there are independent StackExchange-like sites for physics and bioinformatics

https://physicsoverflow.org/

https://www.biostars.org

A lot of these seem like HN-clones (UI-wise) except that they are ghost towns, with no comments on the top stories.

I think it would be more useful to share sites that have great communities, even if they use different software.

For example, for investing, the Boggleheads forum is excellent: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

Really fascinating. g33kz.de has 25 stories on its front page, and none of them have any comment.

I also has very good about pages that make it seem like a lot of love and thought went into it.

For example, all moderator action is public. You have to give a reason to downvote comments or flag stories, and other mods as well as the user in question can see those in the case of comments, everybody can see them in the case of stories. If a user is banned, the reason for the ban will always remain visible. It has a tagging system for stories, every user can customize what tags they want to see. People can apply for "hats", which means being officially authorized to speak for a website, a project, an organization or company.

Pretty awsome, if you ask me.

You could also look at various subreddits...

http://www.datatau.com/ - Data Science

I also run a lobste.rs sister site dedicated to blockchain protocol engineering: https://std.bz/

The goal is to be a high-signal community to share and discuss research, design, and code of blockchain and cryptocurrency protocols.

It's invite-only (to keep the quality of links and discussion high), but we're just getting started, so definitely apply for an invite if this is a space you're interested in.

How can i read the french hacker news without knowing french?

For frequent flyers, FlyerTalk is excellent.

It could also be described as the birthplace of WhatsApp, in which one of the co-founders asked for 'thoughts on my free iphone app'[0], which is amusing in retrospect.

[https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...]

+1. FlyerTalk is excellent. There are some seriously experienced travelers on that site, and reading comments from 2000 is always fun.

Any number of subreddits?

Construction workers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/ "A subreddit for construction industry professionals."

Teachers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ "The goal of r/Teachers is to provide a supportive community for teachers and to inform and engage in discourse with educational stakeholders about the teaching profession."

Actuaries - https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/ "Articles and links of interest to those in the actuarial profession."

Doctors - https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/ "This is a community for clinicians."

Etc.

Some more that might appeal to the HN set:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur

- https://www.reddit.com/r/coding

- https://www.reddit.com/r/programming

- https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev

- https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY

- https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning

/r/consulting

Slashdot is fun if you want a more cynical take on some of the topics that show up here. Slashdot's articles typically are general tech, science, security, and politics (esp tech related). Here there's more software community stuff, blogs, update notes, personal projects etc. I read both HN and slashdot daily, they each have their own thing.

I remember when Slashdot was THE online community for tech news.

Insightful comments, amazing (!) moderation system.

It all went downhill years ago though and now the quality of the discussions is horrendous.

https://soylentnews.org/

is one of the Slashdot breakoffs from when they went too far. They are using an old fork of the Slashdot engine.

Sadly the site is mainly populated with about 8 extremists and it mainly covers political angles.

Note this is unfortunately not a news discussion site for the meal replacement of the same name.

The primary issue with Slashdot seems to be the flame wars—they don’t have some of the features and the moderation like HN does to detect and prevent them. If someone mentions systemd, you know that the quality of discussion just went from “mediocre” to “terrible”.

I think Slashdot had a superior moderation system to HN, but it lacked an iron hand that led it to local equilibrium that was different from different visions and use-cases of the site by different users.

HN has a clear vision and set of rules, Slashdot didn't. News for nerds, Stuff that matters.

Slashdot did have a moderation system where, if you were over a certain number of points (like HN) (and later hidden on /.) you could moderate. Moderation was a bit more complex sometimes leading to fun results with comments '+5 Offtopic' and '-1 Insightful'. There was playfulness. There was also meta-moderation where consensus was sought for previous moderation decisions. I don't think an learning 3rd stage algorithm would have helped, going back to the above: there wasn't a clear set of principles and very strong enforcement of that either by community of mods. And there was a very strong trolling community that were happy to live at -1, some of whom were Anonymous Cowards but have in some cases come to light as smart leading figures in their technologies.

Cmdrtaco and crew were ridiculed (sometimes very unfairly) but didn't react consistently. I don't think Dang and co wouldn't be bullied by a community site they shepherd.

tl;dr There was a special time in the internet, and some parts of the internet have learnt from this. And before this, there was another special time. And before that another. And we will look back too.

Slashdot is good for the first few comments in every post, then drop's like a ton of bricks.

I thought /.'s articles were copied/pasted from here nowadays :-)

I continue to be impressed with the lesswrong "site" which, it seems to me, is the proper evolutionary step forward from a BBS onto the medium of the web.

For Designers https://www.designernews.co/

https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning

Very high quality.

indiehackers.com!!!

Indeed

https://habr.com – russian community about IT

Not exactly like HN, but stackoverflow has a lot of different sites for niche and interesting topics

Of all the things you can do or can't do on stackoverflow, "discussions" are probably the thing you are going to get doxxed the hardest for.

Wow you get doxxed for going off topic??

Not in my experience. You will however get the discussion shut down.

StackOverflow has extremely high standards, yes, but it is an extremely professional atmosphere. I have never seen someone 'doxxed' on the platform and if someone did it would get shutdown quick. I suspect you don't know what that word means.

I can't remember if it was Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood who said this, but the analogy they used was Stack Overflow is supposed to be the college, not the quad. There we're plenty of unstructured discussions at the time, very few sites dedicated to the creation and cataloging of information.

Arfcom GD: https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/General-Discussion/5/

Definitely a right-wing slant, but there are ton of very knowledgeable people there. Signal/noise ratio is kinda middle of the road, but the quality of the signal more than makes up for it in my opinion.

Ha, I used to post there all the time, still do once in a while. Alas, it's an old-style PHPBB system with no voting, so it gets to be harder to find the good content and keep track of discussions you've been in. And yes, it's a good place to get the pulse of what "Red Team" is thinking in general, and you can get banned for being too Blue.

Aviationherald, it's a bit of a mix but there are some really knowledgeable people on there.

also: https://theairlinepilots.com/

BiggerPockets.com is great for real estate (but beware of the scammers).

bogleheads is great if you're into personal finance of all sorts

airliners.net is great if you're into airline operations; PPRuNe.org too

For the same industry:

- http://indiehackers.com

- http://getlatka.com

encode.ru Data compression. Low flame. "paq man" is there, "durilca man", "ans man", "zstd man"... ("oodle man" left ...)

http://www.airliners.net/ - mostly about civil aviation

And https://www.pprune.org/, which is the "professional pilots network", and usually has some indepth incisive posts when bad things happen to planes

My favorite for Business : https://gladiacteur.com (French)

What would be my option to read this without knowing french?

The same options as someone wanting to read Hacker News without knowing English.

For gaming and a lively off topic community, resetera.

I don't think there's anything comparable in terms of activity/traffic. Lobste.rs is the closest but it just has way less active users and daily content.

reddit.com - let the down votes begin :)

Lobste.rs, however it's invite only to participate.

lobste.rs

www.defence.pk

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