Ask HN: More tech-oriented HN alternative?
Sometimes I think the amount of political/social/sales submissions is just to great and I would like something more technical to read.
What are your suggestions?
What are your suggestions?
So depending on what one means by "an HN alternative," maybe that fits. Maybe not.
I bet some folks could also recommend some good Reddits if you list what type tech is your thing. Some Reddits are really good, I just try to stay off the main front page which tends to be all the drama for which Reddit is infamous.
---- Generic Lobsters invite info:
The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site or request one in chat.
Chat info: https://lobste.rs/chat
This also gives you a chance to help make the front page more of what you want by upvoting what you like.
Another option is Twitter. It puts the burden on you to do the curation, which is hard at first. But if you get following a good mix of people and accounts, it’s a great way to find new tech content.
An increasingly frequent experience on HN is to get into a front page submission, leave a minute later, and see the thing has entirely disappeared from sight, for entirely opaque reasons.
It just happened again with this very AskHN.
Lesson: We can upvote all we like, but unless it's exactly like the stuff that's always on HN, we can't trust HN to honor our votes.
That sounds cool. Can you give some examples of interesting stories that you found this way, which you wouldn't have found otherwise.
It will take a while to find all that interests you; some only have posts once a week but are still worth it.
HN has a decent amount of breadth and depth. I imagine you'd be able to find more depth (read: technical discussion) in listservs, subreddits, slack channels, and some niche forums. For example: https://elixirforum.com/
But as far as breadth, every field can get technical. Person A might consider Physics and Math technical, while person B considers quantitative finance to be technical, while person C considers organic chemistry technical. Heck even farming can get technical[0]. There are few places that have quality posts from diverse backgrounds. Have you tried filtering out stuff you don't want to see on HN?
https://hn.algolia.com/ is a great tool to do that. You can avoid terms using the `-` character see examples here: https://hn.algolia.com/help
[0] Energy Discussions on a Permaculture Forum: https://permies.com/forums/jforum?module=search&action=searc...
Edit: perfect example currently on the front page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179511
How is this related to tech or entrepreneurship?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re that example, it wasn't a great HN submission because it stokes indignation without teaching us anything new. Indignation is always good for upvotes, but it didn't last long on the front page.
“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”
It's hit and miss, but reddit is kinda nice in that you can subscribe to pretty narrowly focused, well moderated subreddits. I'm only familiar with the case of r/java. You actually get a really weird mix of really low and incredibly high quality posts and discussion. Half of what you get is what I assume are beginner programmers coming out of school or early junior programmers while the other half are \big names\ in Java-land. Like people who work on, design, build and decide what goes into Java 10, 11, 12 etc. I know I'm biased and a bit of an HN snob about it, but that odd mix is part of why I never became a redditor or frequent the technical landscape there.
They have great content and a great community and enough traction that they're not about to disappear.
Forgot to add: sleep shit. What's up with that?
To actually answer OP's question - Lobste.rs is worth a look. It can be quite technical, if a bit on the dry side. It's public, but accounts are by invite only. That said, if anyone might be able to extend an invite (to myself, OP, or both), that would be much appreciated indeed.
I know the source says that, but wouldn't mind seeing some elaboration on why that is the case. If the `newsguidelines` made a point of mentioning it, there's perhaps some merit to this "illusion".
The problem is that so much of "tech" forums, magazines, sites, etc are not run by "techies" but agenda driven media people masquerading as "techies". TheVerge, arstechnica, etc being prime examples.
My advice is to browse the "new" section of HN for the interesting tech/science/hack stuff. But unfortunately, most of the interesting stuff has no traffic or discussion. But maybe that's a good thing.
I didn't say HN was all tech. My point was that HN was tech oriented like reddit, digg, etc.
HN isn't less tech-oriented now than it used to be. The mix of topics fluctuates, but within a stable range which has been about the same since pg renamed Startup News to Hacker News 12 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. That announcement is where this language originated: "That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Anyone who's read the HN guidelines should recognize that.
We've put a ton of effort into countering wares-pushing. If you think you see a story that is only on HN's front page because "journalists, NGOs, PR, foreign actors, think tanks, etc" are sneaking it in, you should let us know right away at hn@ycombinator.com.
I don't know if we count as "techies" in your book but if there's one thing I'm sure we're not, it's "agenda driven media people".
If "most of the interesting stuff has no traction or discussion", you could help out a lot by upvoting it. That's at least an easier problem to solve than interesting things not getting submitted in the first place.