Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

544 pointsremolacha276 comments

What unique or high-quality content only exists outside the English-speaking web? Is there a Chinese equivalent to Hacker News? A Hindi StackOverflow? I would love to broaden my horizons :)

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If you're asking about services too: Yandex Market. It's like Google Product Search that is actually successful and widely used for searching for specific products, or Amazon that doesn't swindle you left and right.

It's basically just a large catalog of products, filled by third-parties a-la Amazon now, only it didn't sell anything itself (until recently). Instead, it had detailed characteristics for a lot of products, with corresponding filters in the catalog; and good user reviews. Since Yandex is good at dealing with unstructured text, even poor data exports by vendors end up organized decently on the service. Since Yandex had millions of users on its other services, they all could leave reviews without much hassle. And since Yandex is primarily a search engine, it knows when a bogus review is spammed across the web.

Alas, it's only available in Russian since it works with Russian shops. Every time I need to look for a product on the English web, I lament that there's no service that is quite that solid. Amazon has filters, but search results usually look like simply a bit better Aliexpress. In regard to Google Product Search I don't even know anything particular—I tried to use it a couple times, and my general impression is that it... exists. Not much else.

Amazon product listings and reviews are such a cesspool these days. It's a travesty.

It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same two products with different fake brand names. The sorting options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying reviews.

It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.

You’d think someone would have come along who just scrapes Amazon’s listings, applies their own intelligent indexing heuristics, and spits out a new search/browse page that just links through to Amazon’s regular product pages. Like CamelCamelCamel, but for dimensions other than price.

I thought about trying to build something like this, but figured that I'd probably just get sued. Also I think matching listings to accurate product metadata would be practically impossible even if you had a good source for the metadata, and it still wouldn't fix issues like inventory commingling in the warehouse or bait and switch listings that reduce product quality over time.

AFAIK in the kakaku.com case, between kakaku.com and shopping sites are partner. Sites (including Amazon.co.jp) gets customers, kakaku.com gets affiliate fee. Why this model won't work in the US?

Fakespot

Fakespot does this (it doesn't integrate like you described but it does a decent job of spotting fakes)

I goto Reddit, HN or Nextdoor for product recommends. Amazon reviews are a joke nowadays unfortunately.

Can confirm -- if I need to buy some electronic device, I'd do a search/filter on yandex.market first and compare side by side. Amazon with its fuzzy searches is garbage for such shopping.

Sweden has prisjakt.nu, and Japan has kakaku.com that serve the same purpose, they're both great! It's so nice to be able to drill down into any product in any product category (for kakaku this is not just tech products but contact lenses, credit cards, movers, electricity providers, car insurance, phone plans, etc) using the specs you want, and then sort by intelligently selected columns like $/TB for a harddisk.

Amazon attempts to do some product categorization but it doesn't work at all - even when they have the category you want to filter on the results are usually wrong, and the sort options are bad and marred by their ads and recommendations.

I don't know the exact list, but pricespy (prisjakt) is in a lot of countries. I have used .no/.se/.co.uk previously and they all seem to be at about the same level for their respective countries.

Sounds a lot like geizhals.de - price comparison site with detailed info on products, best for tech products though

Geizhals is amazing! I started using it for price comparison almost 15 years ago, but nowadays I use it mainly as a database to filter for products which fit my needs and are available.

it's an awesome product search focused on depth not breadth. This site lets you filter headsets by connectors and dog food by taste.

Prisjakt (Pricespy) is very deep in Swedish online shopping culture. I wonder if Amazon realizes what they are up to. It does make their website feel superfluous to me and more like what what I'd expect from a company of the year 2010.

What I like most about Prisjakt is that they don't try to second guess what I want given a basic search phrase. Instead, Prisjakt gives me the categories to drill down into tables. Sortable and filterable tables with product name, price, rating, and category-specific columns (like storage size and $/GB for hard drives). The filters run DEEP. If you're looking for a HDR display, you can be happy with a "HDR" filter but also opt into DisplayHDR 1000 certified displays with 120+ Hz. For the entire Sweden because every decent Swedish retail chain and store is on this website, and they have everything between solid state drives and shoes in their database. If you look for watches you have filters and columns for e.g. automatic, solar powered watches, etc.

Amazon is very, very different. They're also a front to various stores but try to make it appear like THEY are the store when they are really not. Prisjakt instead just has this razor sharp focus on making you in charge of the data and forming decisions based on that, and then when the decision is made, presents you a list of the stores with that product and their respective prices. You are in control and maybe you prefer a certain one because you're a long time user there and like them.

So Amazon becomes a "fake store front" (like Sweden's CDON) and Prisjakt is more like just a database. One optimized for usability and presentation.

Yeah, that sounds pretty much like a description of Yandex Market, plus YM also has good user reviews. I regularly learned from reviews what I might want from a product, for both functionality and quality.

> It does make their website feel superfluous to me and more like what what I'd expect from a company of the year 2010.

That is a wonderful feature, not a bug. I wish all websites would go back to 2010 era.

The usability alone of Prisjakt is incredible. It's not in-your-face like the shit that's being invented in 2020s.

Yandex reverse image search is also much better then Google's version in my experience.

Google intentionally tamped down their reverse image search several years ago. They fundamentally changed how the product works, the results that it delivers, and did it on purpose. It's definitely inferior if you're actually looking to find copies of an image (Google is fully aware, they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way).

> they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way)

Why?

This is an excellent question.

Interestingly enough, Yandex did so also, a while ago, as it was being used as a scarily good open-source undercover agent identification tool https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid...

although I can't seem to find the followup post that actually discusses how the Yandex search quality decreased following the publication of the original article

Fascinating read, thank you. I can't help but wonder what is available to big companies and governments these days in terms of technology and algorithms that we laypeople don't have access to or even dream about.

Ah, wow, finally found the exact article I was looking for. This thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22492671

And then there was the genomics or DNA database or something that a couple of people were running out of their garage (well, a bit more than that) but then had to shut down after law enforcement discovered it, found it incredibly useful, and everything rapidly went sideways as "things aren't supposed to work that way"... but I'm having the hardest time finding the link for this one sadly ._.

EDIT (just within the 1hr window :): I think the second one was GEDmatch. A quick search of https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gedmatch didn't relocate what I remember reading, but I think this was it.

Looks like they've been running A/B tests recently - reviews are hidden on some products. Or maybe they hide reviews for anonymous user. I hope it won't go further than that.

Something like https://idealo.de/ (and .at .es .fr .it .co.uk)?

Idealo is a great price comparison website, but not really for finding the right product for you. More for finding where to buy the product you've already chosen.

I usually use https://geizhals.de/ since it is more tech related. Useable for people living in EU/UK/AT/DE/PL.

There's a home automation protocol that's been around for over 20 years called KNX. It's backed by big names (ABB, Hager, Gira, Osram, Mean Well) however outside of Germany it's pretty much unknown. Compared to ZigBee or Z-Wave it's wired and the config is stored in the devices themselves, so there's no single point of failure. It has strict certification requirements so you can be guaranteed that products from different manufacturers will work together (this does mean its more expensive though). The quality of the hardware (esp. motion/presence sensors) is a lot better than what you can buy from Amazon or the 'smart home' section in your local Walmart.

There's plenty of content (in German) on YouTube about it, and forums:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiCPbFz0Ld6mera2fNDRWzw

https://knx-user-forum.de/

Germany really needs to start documenting their work in English. This is good stuff.

Germany is fine with you not being able to ingest their documentation. If there is ever a need to do anything it would be the need for you to learn German and the need for anyone monolingual to learn a second language. The more balance in the world the better place it would be.

I agree with your point on principle, but to balance a bit: I'm trilingual but don't (yet) speak German. Yes there's no fair reason why English should be the standard language, but there's value in a standard language and that's the closest we have.

Edit: I'm not American and English isn't my native language

I empathize with you. But I reject that it should fall upon Germany to learn English for your convenience or that the task of translating their texts should fall upon them. I guess I reacted (perhaps poorly) to GP's statement that Germany "really should start documenting their tech in English" which to me sounded rather preposterous.

Germany already learned English. There is approximately no-one in Germany under 30-40 who doesn't speak a little English.

How does Germany ingest technologies from outside Germany? Is all tech in DE home-grown?

Authors addendum: This post was a mistake on my part. Please downvote this post. Thank you! I would rather have a retract option, but there is none here on HN.

Original post:

Apologies to you on behalf of people who made you feel uncomfortable.

Full disclosure:

I had (still have?) negative biases/sentiments/stereotypes towards Americans: being ignorant, self-absorbed, reckless, careless etc.

And this almost made me have a knee-jerk reaction to the expressed desire to make the content in question available in English. As if I am tired of you Americans Americanizing everything you touch[2]. This sentiment is also expressed in Ramstein's song "Amerika"[3].

But that's why it is called a "stereotype". I shouldn't stereotype a population of +300 m out of a small sample size (that includes YouTube/Twitter too). I lose a lot of potential good/bad experiences if I continue to do that. And even if, for the sake of the argument, 90% match my silly stereotype, I still should have an optimistic modus operandi. Pessimism/cynicism is a counterproductive trait. You should be an optimist[1].

But putting all that aside, what makes you think that the inquirer is an American? He could be a French person knowing Japanese and Russian besides English.

Anyhow, we shouldn't follow protectionist policies. Nothing good comes out of that. We should be thankful/appreciative to people who are willing to share content with others (open source, creative commons, etc.).

References:

[1] Algorithms to Live By

[2] https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2021/01/04/report-plays...

[3] https://youtu.be/Rr8ljRgcJNM

Edit: for the people who take issue with my post here: I would appreciate a feedback on why my post is counterproductive/bad. Thank you!

I am not sure you meant to answer to my comment, because I didn't mention feeling uncomfortable, and didn't take any guess about anyone's nationality. Also I'm not American, I edited my comment to clear that up.

You're right, benhurmarcel. My input here has come to nothing, and it wasn't a good input to begin with. I wish there was a retract option.

Or more people need to learn German? The community is already there, obviously — if others want to join, that's how they do it.

Not everyone has the time to learn yet another language. Besides, learning a language to understand content like this takes a lot of time. (I speak 4 languages already.)

Have you ever tried to communicate in beginner/intermediate-level German with a German speaker? They'd most likely insist on switching to English.

It's a natural reaction in one-on-one conversations to switch to the language that least impedes communication. That's annoying when you're trying to learn a language but wouldn't be too bad as an outcome if your actual problem is just the lack of English documentation.

But in the case of a larger online community where German is used by default, you'd be unlikely to get everyone to switch to English just by posting in bad German. After all, you might just as well be a Kazakh whose English is even worse, and as just another anonymous newcomer, there's no reason to accommodate you in particular.

After many attempts to speak german with germans, it seems to be a consistent theme that they prefer english if you are incompetent.

OP brought up English because it’s one of the most widely used languages in the world, thus a translation would make KNX more accessible to everyone. Standards are created to make things interoperable across manufacturers so expanding the market to include other countries ( and competitors) is good for consumers everywhere. Unfortunately German isn’t as far reaching a language and asking the majority of inhabitants in other countries to learn it may be too high a barrier to entry

So, the OP asks about non-english sites, and the _first_ reply is a "you should do that in English". WTF?

It says software out of Anglosphere not software not in English.

Please post software out of Anglosphere --> reply --> you need to do that in English. W.T.F.???!!!

What's so WTF about suggesting that a software protocol, that would be widely beneficial in most of the world, should have English documentation?

English is the closest thing we have to a common human language.

Learn German, Dummkopf!

We beat them in 1945 just so we didn’t have to do that!

Oh god, please don't.

A lot of negative replies to this which don't make sense.

We're talking about software which is used to make money. Translating it to English would help with that, because English is the default for software development (yes this is changing, but it's true at the moment).

It's not like we're talking about a work of art, it's a tool the creators sell.

I mean I said this out of appreciation. I suppose its just much easier to not get involved with the German software ecosystem at all since the impression is that they dont need attention from people who don't speak German. I don't see any reason why more people would have a professional reason to do so.

Runet (Russian-speaking part of Internet) has LOTS of it. We have HN equivalent (habr.com). We have RSDN (rsdn.org), which is somewhat like StackOverflow, but in Russian.

Social networks largely unknown outside of Russia? We have'em (vk.com, ok.ru). Reddit equivalent? See pikabu.ru. IMDB? See kinopoisk.ru.

There's a Russian browser (Yandex.Browser), Russian map service (Yandex.maps), tons of Russian e-mail, hosting and cloud services, Russian Spotify (Yandex.Music), Russian Netflix (several of them, actually), Russian Uber (Yandex.Taxi, which actually owns Russian Uber).

You'll see lots of Yandex services here, it's sort of Russian Google (except it predates Google by a year or so). Yandex's primary business is search and advertising, but just like Google, they diversify a lot. And even in primary area, they sometimes manage to beat Google. Yandex's reverse image search (when you upload the image to search for similar ones) is FAR superior to Google's.

And there's a lot of unique Russian content on global sites like Facebook, Livejournal (owned by a Russian company nowadays) or Wikipedia.

Maybe helpful when browsing extra-anglosphere sites: translate.yandex both has much more liberal length limits than GOOG translate and makes it easy to look up alternative translations for individual words.

i like anekdot.ru - they have a pretty solid community, and the jokes are really funny (sometimes).

I can vouch for Yandex's reverse image search. It blows Google's out of the water. I think regular image search is typically better too, depending on what your needs are (Google seems to prefer stock imagery which can be frustrating).

Habr is great. I don't visit other Runet sites often, but read Habr regularly - it's part HN, part Slashdot, with great original content.

The Russian Internet seems to be an overall great place to find information on old devices, old software, and the like. http://sht-rajvo.narod.ru/index.htm is a retro-looking site about retrocomputing, it has many articles from computer magazines circa 1990. Also worth noting that due to Russia's traditionally "relaxed view on copyright" it's not hard to stumble upon a site that has direct download links to e.g. versions of MS-DOS or Windows 3.1.

Yandex is responsible for developing and maintaining my favourite columnar database: ClickHouse. It’s one of those pieces of software where everything I use it go “wow this is fast”.

Besides yandex there are also rambler.ru (less popular, but even older) and mail.ru

dic.academic.ru allows you to search through several dozens encyclopedias. And bigenc.ru adds onother one (the largest and the most recent).

fantlab.ru is the best site dedicated to sci fi/fantasy literature (it is IMO 10 times better than goodreads or librarything). There are also a lot of site dedicated to literature like proza.ru lib.ru litres.ru feb-web.ru www.obshelit.su etc.

Besides habr, forum.ru-board.com ixbt.com cyberforum.ru overclockers.ru 3dnews.ru are very popular sites dedicated to hardware/software/coding.

There are a lot of sited about video games like old-games.ru goha.ru stopgame.ru riotpixels.com as well as a streaming platforms like goodgame.ru

rutube.ru exists for many years now but it's crap.

There are several sites dedicated to popular science like elementy.ru arhe.msk.ru gramota.ru histrf.ru

www.intoclassics.net and www.classicalmusicnews.ru are popular for those interested in classical music. www.darkside.ru and rock.ru for rock music.

forum.awd.ru and otzyv.ru are popular travel sites.

There several general purpose forums like forum.rcmir.com www.e1.ru/talk/forum/ In general, classic forums are still very much alive in runet (hell, even LJ is still alive) and there are a lot of niche forums you could visit.

There are more than 100 news sites, but the quality is quite average (like everywhere else). meduza.io ria.ru rbc.ru tass.ru inosmi.ru for example. sports.ru and championat.ru for sport-related news.

ozon.ru is now a russian version of amazon.

And obviously there are a lot of pirate sites from rutracker to flibusta to libgen.

Funny to see RSDN in this list! It now has only around 20 regulars left (many of whom would appear to be posting under multiple accounts), and nobody really discusses tech any more.

But I do love the old usenet-like interface with thread trees. I wish more message boards still used a similar interface (although it is a pain to use on mobile).

Quality docomentaries and looks on society on Arte.tv, the european culture channel

AFAIK, north americans don't know about its existence. It's available in english.

https://www.arte.tv/en/

A great initiative in the media industry for sure. They have a programme call Tracks that explores the underground culture [1]. Very interesting

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/TracksARTEde

And currently a great series on "The civil war" - "La guerre de secession" - "Der Amerikanische Bürgerkrieg", mostly for European watchers obviously. With plenty of photos and citations from the time and just enough commentary as necessary. Available in french and german. https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/040864-001-A/la-guerre-de-sece...

> They have a programme call Tracks that explores the underground culture

I.. I thought that it's gonna be a Youtube channel about people living.. underground. I should get some sleep.

Tracks is what made me discover the demoscene 20 years ago when I was in secondary school. Such a great show.

A while ago ARTE started a side channel and asked users how to name it, which we all know is a bad idea in the internet. The result was "Irgendwas mit ARTE und Kultur" ("something with ARTE and culture") and they really took the name: https://www.youtube.com/c/IrgendwasmitARTEundKultur Kudos to ARTE.

BTW. it's a cooperation between french and german public televisions, is there something similar elsewhere in the world?

Their Twitter team(?) is also all-in on self-deprecation: https://twitter.com/ARTEde/status/928269091311296512

Arte has some amazing German and French documentaries on YouTube. I believe they are not accessible everywhere, but if you have access, it's worth a look.

There is this short weekly broadcast on french and german cultures compared, with a light tone, that we never miss: https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-014034/karambolage/ Available in french and german languages.

You can watch the series which inspired Homeland there in french (Original) or german. No english subtitles though.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1676462/

https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/048080-001-A/hatufim-in-der-ha...

As a French my definition of a documentary is what Arte produce.

I recently discovered what a documentary is for an American and it's night and day. American documentaries are entertainment package with actions and conspiracies. There's really not a lot of discovery and knowledge.

Can you explain how and why you think a documentary such as Ken Burns' Civil War series, a seminal example of American documentaries, is filled with action and conspiracies?

if you go to the "documentary" section on Netflix or another streaming service, there are dozens and dozens of really low-quality documentaries. Some are on conspiracy topics (UFOs, ancient aliens) or stupid and sensationalist. They all seem to treat the audience like they are not very smart.

I think most were produced on small budgets to run during the daytime on cable channels like History or Discovery, and then sold to Netflix as well.

These could definitely give someone a bad impression of what counts for documentary film in America, and in terms of raw numbers there are way more of them than anything else.

However, the documentaries produced for American public television (like those of Ken Burns) tend to be very good. And there are also high-quality American documentaries that go on the festival circuit.

Right, this would be like going into Amazon Prime and saying the median content is what American TV is like.

To be fair, it may be, but the Certified Fresh tab of Rotten Tomatoes is what viewers talking about TV have in mind.

To your point, look somewhere applying a touch of curation by quality for a fairer take on what Americans want in a documentary.

https://www.metacritic.com/browse/tv/genre/metascore/documen...

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-netflix-docu...

You don't know what documentaries are for Americans. You may have been exposed to some garbage (there's plenty out there produced all over the world) but it's just plain ignorant to assume the small sample you have seen is representative.

NHK World is a similar website and app for phones and TV, but for Japan (and occasionally other Asian countries). An immense variety of culture, tourism, history, and food content. I believe BBC and RT also have cultural documentaries (you can ignore their news content).

Vimeo has amazing documentaries as well. Similar to Arte.

Arte is spectacular. I've been a fan for a while, and it keeps popping up good surprises.

Sites and apps in Chinese:

Baidu Wangpan (百度网盘): file-sync service like Dropbox, but gives you 2TB (terrabytes!) of free storage

Tengxun Ketang (腾讯课堂): similar to edX/coursera, they have a lot of free courses on programming, machine learning, and technical topics

Wanmen Daxue (万门大学): similar to edX/coursera, they have a lot of free foreign language classes and lectures on economics/social sciences

HKGolden (香港高登): Hong Kong forum on tech and software, similar to reddit

Huxiu (虎嗅): tech news site

Toutiao Xinwen (头条新闻): news aggregator site, has categories and comments

Zhihu (知乎): QA platform, similar to Quora

Zhihu Zhuanlan (知乎专栏): blogging platform, similar to Medium

Ximalaya FM (喜马拉雅 FM): podcasts app

Duokan (多看): ebooks app similar to Kindle

Douyin (抖音): Chinese version of Tiktok

iQiyi (爱奇艺): video site with tons of movies and dramas

JD (京东): amazon-like marketplace with same-day delivery

Taobao (淘宝): ebay-like peer-to-peer marketplace

Weibo (新浪微博): microblogging site like Twitter

Zhifubao (支付宝): peer-to-peer payments app that works by scanning QR codes, very widely accepted in China

Wechat (微信): messaging app that also has tons of micro-apps and payment functionality built in

how does the p2p payment app work? No middle man?

Ah I meant P2P in the "from user to user with no transaction fees charged, doesn't go through Visa/Mastercard/Unionpay" sense (similar to Venmo, except that in China businesses accept it everywhere), not in the "fully decentralized and doesn't need a server" sense. For Zhifubao the servers are run by Ant Financial (it's a spin-off company of Alibaba), for WeChat the servers are run by Tencent. You can deposit/withdraw money to your bank account.

I'm assuming you're probably more interested in the new digital RMB wallet technology which supposedly works even if your phone doesn't have internet access, but I'm not familiar with how that is implemented (I'm guessing it uses blockchain and broadcasts the transactions later when you connect to the internet). There's some info about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Digital_Renminbi

Zhifubao is better known as Alipay outside of China.

Nice list :)

A few things to add about some of the items:

- Baidu Wangpan's sharing model is more like the file locker sites of the early 00s: when you share a file or folder, the recipient gets a 'copy'. It's not like Dropbox where you collaborate and sync changes with each other.

- Baidu wangpan can download torrents server-side.

- Toutiao is by Bytedance, which readers here will know for their popular Tiktok product.

- Readers here may know Tengxun by its international name Tencent

- Zhifubao's English name is Alipay.

- Taobao is more than a peer-to-peer marketplace. I'd guess that over 50% of e-commerce goods purchases in China (by volume, not value) are via Taobao/Tmall. There are many 'mom and pop' stores, but also many with 10s of employees.

- Tingting FM is another good one for audio content. e.g. it has Peppa Pig episodes in Mandarin, and each episode has some commentary at the end explaining the key lessons from the story. (You can watch Peppa Pig in Mandarin on YouTube for free, but there's no commentary at the end.)

Let me add a few more:

Bilibili Manhua (哔哩哔哩漫画): webcomic site adjacent to the Bilibili video platform https://manga.bilibili.com/

Qidian (起点): webnovels https://qidian.com/

Zhanse Nileyuan (战色逆乐园): discussion forum attached to another webnovel site with female-skewing readership, maybe slightly similar to r/twoXchromosomes https://bbs.jjwxc.net/board.php?board=20&page=1

SegmentFault: StackOverflow-like https://segmentfault.com/questions

V2EX: the closest thing to HN, except more like a traditional forum https://v2ex.com/

> Douyin (抖音): Chinese version of Tiktok

Tiktok is literally chinese??

Tiktok, the app, is made by the same Chinese firm that makes Douyin, but it is maintained separately and not available in China. The content is entirely separate.

It is not uncommon that Chinese firms have separate, parallel versions of their applications within / outside China.

So it is accurate to say that Douyin is a Chinese (meaning, available in China; not meaning made by a Chinese company) version of Tiktok.

Thanks for clarifying

Deepl [0] is available in English but doesn't seem well-known outside of the non-Anglophone Western European countries. It's essentially Google Translate but generally has better quality translations for the languages it supports.

[0]: https://www.deepl.com

Deepl was an incredible tool when I was struggling though my first full length novel in Spanish. It gave much more lucid and nuanced translations than any other automated translation tool I tried.

I find deepl better than Google translate for some languages now. Just the fact that you can change some specific words in the translated text is a game changer for me

In French you have a few interesting options, notably:

- LeBonCoin.fr (“the good corner”, a Craigslist type site that’s used for everything from second-hand selling to job hunting to meet up organising),

- LesNumeriques.fr is a decent tech review media with in-depth tests and a VERY critical community providing good balance

- Gazelle which has now become backmarket.fr (also exists across other countries like Spain and the U.K.) and offers vetted second-hand tech gear - great for bargains and avoiding buying new for ecological reasons,

- LeMonde.fr/Les-Décodeurs is the fact checking arm of the French paper Le Monde and has some really interesting visualisations and articles

- Presse-Citron.fr was one of the first tech blogs in France and continues to be a reference

- priice.fr is a price comparison site I’ve heard good things about but haven’t used myself yet

- danstonchat.com is the French version of Bash.org for IRC fun

- Legorafi.fr is a satirical paper with lots of hilarious fake news - often quite timely - akin to The Onion (it’s a play on words on the famous French paper Le Figaro)

- Gandi.net is a registrar and hosting site which I’ve been using forever - they’re awesome

canardpc.com is probably the best video game magazine and review around.

I would not advise presse-citron they have been pretty obvious about being more or less just a sold out editorial at this point.

Presse-Citron is definitely more aligned with the tech establishment, but it remains useful for general tech news - and the comments are still rather sharp.

CanardPC is a GREAT addition, excellent build! About so much more than games too.

LeBonCoin became annoying since they put contact details behind a login wall. What made it successful back in the day is the simplicity - just post an ad and have interested people call you. Search for something and you can directly call sellers.

LeBonCoin is actually a fork of the Swedish original site Blocket.se, visit it and you will see similarities. Both are today owned by the Norwegian umbrella organisation Schibsted afaik.

I did not know that, thanks for pointing it out. The similarities are flagrant - do they operate such listing sites in other countries too?

Yes, http://segundamano.es/ was the spanish version but it looks like the merged it with another site. https://www.finn.no/ is the norwegian version but it was developed seperately. https://www.tori.fi/ is the finnish one. Such listing sites are big business and they make a lot of money of them.

They have done similar stuff with Prisjakt.nu and made a french version: https://ledenicheur.fr/

I think there are even more still but I am not certain.

It's very niche but Philharmonie de Paris has some brilliant visualized analysis of some classical music scores.

For example:

https://pad.philharmoniedeparis.fr/CMDA/CMDA100008800/defaul...

https://pad.philharmoniedeparis.fr/CMDA/CMDA100003900/defaul...

https://pad.philharmoniedeparis.fr/CMDA/CMDA100004800/defaul...

Sadly they don't present the full scores, only the beginning or some part. I wonder if there are other sites where you can find something similar.

Somewhat related is http://www.critique-musicale.com/ - another great site.

I didn’t know about these viz, they are awesome! Thanks for sharing critique-musicale too, immediately added to my Feedly. :-)

I would add Linuxfr.org and specifically the user journals : https://linuxfr.org/journaux : it is the website of the french libre software community.

Lots of interesting content you don't find anywhere else.

I like Gandi too (I'm American, not French), very pleasant compared to other registrars I've used.

A hispanic/south american forum, hybrid between Image Board and BBS, most good content goes to textboard section.

Not so much new posts, mostly talks about tech and whatever goes.

https://bienvenidoainternet.org /int/ section https://bienvenidoainternet.org/world/

https://yr.no provides an API for high quality open weather data, globally, supplied by the Norwegian meteorological service. Information is available in English too, but it is perhaps not well-known in the anglosophere.

It's what I use for mountaineering in the alps. It has all the mountains as searchable POIs, so it's much better than other consumer apps.

The app also has an extremely enjoyable visualisation of the weather predictions, which is a nice bonus!

this one is also great for sailing

I guess I should add some information, since it's not trivial to find from the main page. The API documentation [1] is in English. Most (all?) the data is dual-licensed under CC-BY-4.0 and the Norwegian open government data license [2]. Please do take care not to abuse a tax-payer funded service, and do obey the the terms of service [3] (these are restrictions on querying the API, not on the use of the data themselves, which seems reasonable).

[1] https://developer.yr.no/

[2] https://data.norge.no/nlod/en/2.0/

[3] https://developer.yr.no/doc/TermsOfService/

https://tweakers.net

Dutch-language tech community. Has news, a well-moderated and active forum, product and price comparison (with many filtering options) and reviews (both by tech journalists and the community), second-hand sales, and a job board.

It was started by one guy 20 (if not more) years ago, but these days it's part of one of the big Dutch-language media conglomerates (DPG Media).

I started visiting this site when I was 16/17 and starting off my IT classes. I still feel like I learned more browsing the site's daily news than my school. It's still my daily routine, nearly 20 years later, to visit it every day. I'm apparently in the top 100 wrt number of comments (mostly shitposts and arguing, kinda like what I do on HN)

Never did get on with the forums much, mind you. But some threads are fun to follow.

I think the forums are one of the site's greatest assets, actually. But there does exist a certain culture there in which absolutely everything is debated into oblivion, even long past the point where such a discussion stops being useful for answering the question at hand.

Nice! Any other Dutch websites you can recommend?

When discussing Tweakers, https://hardware.info comes to mind, which has been run by the same guys as Tweakers since September 2020 and focuses on products. Its associated forums were discontinued in favor of the Tweakers forums.

The community on /r/thenetherlands on Reddit is pretty friendly (more friendly than Reddit at large, where arguments tend to devolve into snide remarks with a higher frequency).

https://fok.nl and its associated forums are still kicking, although I don't personally frequent the site.

There is also https://dumpert.nl, which appeals to a certain subset of the population. I admit some of the videos on there can be entertaining, but the community is offputting to me.

Other than that, there are of course a dozen news media (ownership of which is mostly split between two conglomerates: DPG Media and Mediahuis) which have an online presence. Reputable ones include NOS, de Volkskrant, NRC, Trouw, het Parool, de Groene Amsterdammer, FD, de Correspondent. Don't bother with de Telegraaf, it's the Dutch equivalent of The Sun or Bild (or in certain regards, Fox News). There are also media outlets covering Dutch-speaking areas outside the Netherlands (Flanders (Belgium), Suriname), but I'm not too familiar with those, being from the Netherlands myself.

Also of interest might be https://dutchnews.nl and https://facebook.com/NOSinEnglish, Dutch news coverage in English (the latter one specifically translating NOS's COVID-19 coverage).

Pixiv! (http://pixiv.net/) If you're familiar with deviantart or artstation, it's a similar Japanese digital art site with its own culture, store, contests, and more. While the site has a pretty great English navigation, I was on there back in the day when it was 100% Japanese only, and many of its current mores stem from those days.

This website is well known by the reddit transgender community.

I would mention hitta.se from Sweden. Probably a privacy nightmare to some, and very creepy to others.

On the page you can search peoples home address, phone number, date of birth, other members living in the same house, real estate value, mortgage rate, all by searching their names. I successfully once identified a parent of a owner of a lost wallet, only containing a gym card with last name on it. Found her phone number on the site, called her and gave her the wallet.

WOW. Is this a well known service/site in Sweden? In other countries this would have been blown up into a huge privacy issue. Assuming its not because its sort of underground, why do you think it hasn't in Sweden? Genuinely curious

It's a well known site in Sweden. I remember using it at least 10-13 years back. A quick Swedish googling found me a dozens of sites offering similar services. One even offered credit rating assessment at 1.5 dollar after the search.

I'm not well read on the issue but a lot of things are digitalized in Sweden. It's a cashless society, where everyone have a personal number that they can use for government service & signing up for phone contracts. The tax institute (like USA:s IRS) sends their deductions out digitally, and AFAIK they have a very open API a lot of digital services in Sweden use for online identification of a private person. So I assume those pages probably use the tax-institutes API for personal information, and then other APIs (such as real-estate portals) to tie information together.

So, the government knows every purchase they make, tracks everything they do, and can take it all away whenever it wants? No thanks. And what about homeless and old people, are they disenfranchised too? A cashless society controlled by a government or a corporation means a powerless society.

Norway has had similar tax return approval by text messaging for almost 20 years.

I don't know what your percention of Norway is, but having moved around a bit and currently being based here, I see that Scandinavians have a different relationship with governments and corporations than in many other countries. For a start, it's not primarily seen as an adversarial relationship. It's more of the people, for the people. Not perfect, but Scandinavian societies rely on a high level of trust and it works, for now. There's been an increase in data protection recently, which I think is needed as it's a bit too transparent at times.

The government doesn't know about every purchase you make but there is a lot of data sharing. However there is a lot more consumer protection and less power lies with unaccountable corporations than in many other capitalist countries, where corporations have almost free reign and have powerful influence over society, economy & politic. For example, credit scoring is relatively new here and is a lot less intense than other countries. In places like the UK/USA, credit scoring companies control your financial possibilities. Much less so in Scandinavia.

There is a small number of people for whom a cashless society poses problems, but it's probably less, and a different subset, than you think. Those I know of through association tend to be those who suffer severe mental health issues. Old people have bank accounts, debit cards and mobile phones for digital transactions. As for homeless people, there are less of them in Scandinavia than in other countries. Almost all of them will still have a bank account and a mobile phone and be receiving state funds digitally. (Homelessness is not defined as living on the street, almost all the homeless are in temporary housing.)

Besides, you still can pay with real money in most places, you just have to choose the right line at the exit. Not all of them take cash. For us that has no problems, card is so much easier to use but there are a lot of people that can't handle the tech and they should be able to buy things too.

All this is marketed as better for crime prevention, less bank/store robbery. Ofcourse this only pushes the cost on the individual in the end though. If you can't rob the store, you can still find valuables in private houses with much lower security. Or just stop any youth on the street. Chances are they have an expensive phone if nothing else.

Good point, I should have mentioned that cash is still accepted almost everywhere.

I think the crime thing might not be a direct link, as a bank robber and an opportunistic street thief are probably different people. There is less opportunistic crime than elsewhere as a big driver of crime is people's situation which, in general, aren't bad enough to resort to crime. I'm still unnerved by the lax security everywhere, e.g. the tiny bolts and padlocks in common storage areas in apartment blocks, which are an increasing target for thieves as they are easy pickings.

Another benefit is BankID, which makes fraud & identity theft is a lot more difficult as there is an easy and secure way of identifying yourself online. Even with somebody's ID number you can't impersonate them in most situations. This is something I've really appreciated working in the finance industry. The old way of calling up and accepting people's identity purely on trust never sat well with my non-Scandinavian mind.

On the other hand, BankID has really taken of as the main fraud avenue. It's so much easier to just look someone up, punch in their personal number, start a log in to the bank and then call them up saying someone is trying to steal their money, they need to stop it by verifying their identity with BankID. This instead logs the attacker in to the bank with full access. Now you just need to start a transfer to your bank account and tell them the ID failed, try again. Money is yours, now just make it jump between a few more temporary accounts and let your friend take out the cash at the ATM.

This is not unique to BankID though. Voice phishing is a global problem and independent of authentication method.

What makes you think other governments don't have that kind of information or can easily access it from their friends in bigcorp Inc?

As crime perpetually gets worse in Sweden in the coming decades, it's practically a guarantee their culture will change when it comes to tolerating such privacy violations. They'll begin to lock down formerly open aspects of their culture.

It's not even the only one, there is a bunch of them that gives different levels of information. Partly because the equivalent of social security numbers are public information in Sweden.

There are apps for Eniro and Hitta that could tell you if an incoming call is from a known callcenter for example. Not sure they still work after google tightened up security.

I'm always amazed I can't find someones phone number outside Sweden when I need one. Here it's just a few clicks away. Sure you can ask to be removed from their register but most wants to be there.

tax returns themselves are public in sweden and you can literally find out what anyone has paid in taxes by contacting the authorities.

Sweden has a different attitude to this kind of information that is fundamentally more about transparency than privacy, so it's not perceived as an issue.

yes, it is well known. I just see it as a digital versin of the phone book.

And there are even more extreme versions, like ratsit.se

where you can pay to get credit information on anyone.

Personally I think that what ratsit does is probably too far, and maybe it shouldn't be legal.

But in general I like our "public information" system, that lots of government information is available to every citizen, I find the benefits of being able to check what the government and those with power does (journalism would be way harder without this), outweights the negatives.

It should be noted that when you buy credit information from a site like Ratsit, the person being queried will receive a notice to this effect, including the identity of the person/business making the query.

You clearly have never been the target of abuse or a stalker. Nothing less fun than when someone on a dating app in Sweden messages you saying "I know exactly who you are" and you know they can find out where you live in less than five minutes. If it works for 90% of people in Sweden, that's good but they should really make it easier to get your information hidden. Phonebooks of old times only had your number not your full address, the type of car you drive, who is your sambo etc

It is well known and no one in Sweden seems to give a shit which boggles my mind as a Swede. Anyway, it was nice but it has only worked well beucause of Swedens low crime rate historically.

Now, with increasing criminality due to mass immigration there is only a question of time until these services becomes illegal I think.

I have personally been subjected to a stalker, so it will be nice when these services disappear for me personally but I honestly think the utility of them are great. If you find a wallet for example, you can easily find this person and call them due to these services. But for now, the only way to be truly anonymous in Sweden is to get a protected identity which is pretty much impossible to get or to buy some land and switch your home address to that place. People can still get all the properties you own with your "Personnummer" (social security number) but it is harder, less known, takes more time etc.

Also Lexbase. See anyone that has been subject of a criminal trial, on a map.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexbase

Run a plate for any Swedish vehicle: https://biluppgifter.se/

Another privacy nightmare with complete vehicle history -- better than carvertical.com or vin-info.com

Why is the EU so lenient with Sweden in that case?

So I'm in infosec and I know a lot of americans and some of them work with OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and some things that they spend hours on, a 10 year old kid can do in 5 minutes here in sweden.

It's kind of hilarious.

Sweden is a privacy-minded individual’s nightmare. There are a bunch of other sites like Hitta as well. For example on Ratsit you can pay a small amount of money and see anyone’s salary and full personnummer, which is similar to a social security number in the US. If they live in an apartment you can see exactly where in the building they live. Just as an example, when I was visiting a friend for the first time I wasn’t sure where in the building he lived so I put his name into Ratsit and it said “second floor, third door from the left”. It also had his phone number and other information about him as well, including other individuals he lived with and the names of every person in his building.

> full personnummer, which is similar to a social security number in the US

It's similar in the sense that it's a unique number assigned to each person, but the fact that it's publicly available means that it cannot be used as authentication.

And SSN shouldn't be used as authentication either. It's too easy to steal, too hard to change.

We have a similar issue with Finnish Personal Identity Codes, which are legally public, but there are restrictions related to their processing. Which leads to the common misunderstanding that they're secret, so they're used for authentication. It's a mess.

https://hetueiolesalasana.fi/en.html

Doesn't the EU lean towards privacy protection for individuals? I'm assuming Sweden being a member, means that EU laws would take precedence if someone wanted their information removed from websites like these?

As far as I can tell, the EU tends to lean towards privacy protection for individuals against businesses or other private entities, not against the government, and the focus doesn't always seem to be on governmental datasets being used for private purposes. A lot more governmental data collection is needed to handle things such as mandatory resident registrations in most EU countries, single-payer healthcare in some EU countries, relatively pre-filled tax declarations in some countries, etc.

Not Swedish, but the relevant one in the parent comment is probably mandatory residency registrations, and I'm surprised the data is so publicly accessible there. There are usually attempts at creating firewalls in many countries so the data that one agency collects isn't directly linked to that of other agencies, preventing broad files on individuals.

Is there any way to get taken off these sites?

This should be the way. This eliminate the issue of information leak/having to hide information, since its public anyway. Of course it has it's own downside. So instead of focusing effort on hiding the information, we should instead fix the issue that arise from information being public.

This is probably not what you're looking for, but I recently found this dump of Hungarian tech/gaming magazine scans dating back to the late 80's, and I've been looking for an excuse to share it further: https://retroujsag.com/

Try mentioning it on reddit.com/r/DataHoarder, someone might be interested.

For some reason, the Russian web seems to rehost old drivers/software and such indefinitely without all the malicious spam you normally find in Google.

That led me to Kazus Electronic Portal[0] which seems to have just about every hardware-related piece of information you could need. Including an obscure serial driver from 2005 that I couldn't find elsewhere.

[0] http://kazus.ru/

Not a website, and this may be obvious, but if you are doing research on Wikipedia on a topic from a non-English speaking country, sometimes that nation's language features a longer and more in depth article. I am currently learning German and have noticed this with regard to articles regarding universities in Germany.

this is a great recommendation also for scientific topics:

Often when I am really interested in something I read the article and four different languages, because most often each language offers different aspects and images.

also it's a great way to learn languages.

I found DW's YouTube channels to be good resources to learn about cultures, societies, current affairs and geopolitics from around the world. Auto-generated subtitles for their non-English channels are good enough to understand what is being conveyed.

[1] : https://www.youtube.com/user/deutschewelle

[2] : their other channels are listed at the bottom of [1].

Lots of content in English as well

https://youtube.com/c/dwnews

On YouTube exists tone of lectures about electrotechnics and electronics for software developers

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/user/Zefar91

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/abglazov

https://mapy.cz/

Google maps alternative with great tourist maps (also has a layer for cross-country skiing) and an app with offline maps

As a non Czech I assumed it was a nice layer on top of OSM tiles, but the outdoor trails are truly high quality.

Only have managed to fault it once whilst trying to decide how to descend a mountain in Slovenia.

Yes, outside Czechia and Slovakia they use data from Open Street Maps.

Best worldwide outdoor map there is, with offline support. I use it very often to find trails not even locals know about (e.g. Japan). Don't forget to switch to Outdoor mode!

They have an international version, called Windy Maps. It's the same app, just with international branding & marketing: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind...

I definitely recommend it for worldwide use. It can do _everything_ offline, which is something rarely seen in this age. I have found it very practical for hiking Japanese countryside.

In Poland there is elektroda.pl - forum about electronics, electrics and programming. Is was founded in 1999 and has over 2 500 000 registered accounts.

It is a bit like polish StackOverflow - every time you google a technical problem in polish you will find an elektroda.pl thread on very top. And just like on SO, it will usually be closed by moderator for some bizarre and arcane reason.

It certainly has 'old-usenet' vibe, both the good parts (huge amount of knowledge) and the bad (pretty toxic behaviour of many power users and moderators).

- EU Open Data Portal: https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/home

- Research*EU Magazines: https://cordis.europa.eu/research-eu - EU Research magazine is the World leading open access publication for scientific research and dissemination. Each issue covers a different thematic area, presenting cutting edge science in an innovative and entertaining format.

The French national library has quite an extensive digital collection. https://gallica.bnf.fr/

Wow, just discovered that! thanks it is awesome. I finally found illustrated version of Les trois mousquetaires and Jules Vernes in epub for free !

Most of the techy anglosophere know CCC from the annual conferences. But they do much more: https://www.ccc.de/

https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

A world wide map of rail tracks run by (german) rail enthusiasts.

Surprisingly it also has some planned tram lines in Poland. Quite neat.

It's 'just' OpenStreetMap rendered in a way that emphasizes railway lines and exposes some of the metadata. So whilst the site is german-run the data has no geographical bias.

https://bahn.guru

Easy price calendar for (mostly) German trains.

Qiita https://qiita.com/

its like a cool mixture of stack overflow + reddit + twitter ... all in japanese

It sometimes shows up when you're searching tech topics. I actually found a series of blog posts that explained how to write Erlang/Elixir NIFs in Rust with Rustler.

Yes, it's everywhere when you search technical topics in Japan.

dev.to looks like equivalent to Qiita. Now zenn.dev is getting popular in Japan instead of Qiita.

Any cool monetization strategies on Qiita or Zenn? I know dev.to is betting on Coil, so I'm curious if Japanese developers have a method they're betting on.

Qiita has been acquired by game company Ateam 3 years ago. Possibly it works for the company's advertisement. They also selling collaboration SaaS called Qiita Team. I don't see any their cool monetization.

Zenn has been trying to sell paid article for profit. That's not so cool for tech perspective but it's looks good for me if they succeeded. Zenn was operated by single person but it has been acquired by IT(AWS) service company Classmethod very recently. Maybe they also work for the company's advertisement.

I can understand a fair bit of japanese and posts on Qiita have often been life-savers. They have quite a few medium-like long posts where people describe how to do something specific through a tutorial or step-by-step explanation. StackOverflow/Reddit aren't really great for that

[Ekşi Sözlük](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ek%C5%9Fi_S%C3%B6zl%C3%BCk)

Came to mention Eksi also.

Eksi Sozluk(Sour Times) is a community driven wikipedia without the moderation. Most tech-savvy Turkish people I know visit it atleast once per day.

Why is it "Times" and not "Dictionary"?

news of the weirdest electronic gadgets for sale in japan. google chrome and automatic translate do a reasonably good job on the page. it's related to the retail stores in the akihabara district of tokyo.

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/

also its parent site PC watch

https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/

Thank you for posting! What a nifty little site showing off things I didn't even know I wanted!

Small selection of things that I found interesting:

1. Turn your old Dreamcast VMU into a modern game console: Would never have thought of it but in hindsight its the perfect device to mod given its form factor! https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/news/1306197....

2. Combine a Raspberry pi with a Famicom cartridge to provide the Famicom the ability to run DOOM. Given all the other Famicom related releases listed there, its amazing to see the Famicon still alive and kicking. Wonder how the N64 scene is like over there. https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/news/1297530....

3. IPS Screen mod for Wonderswan (granted we have seen lots of IPS mods so this one for Wonderswan makes sense given its Japan)

The story about Akihabara stores being vacant seems sad though. Even they cannot escape COVID/the future of shopping being online it seems.

Similar website: https://www.gdm.or.jp/

They also posts new PC parts rumors relatively early.

https://pantip.com/ Thai Reddit / Wikipedia / answers.com.

It’s a massive forum with an area for almost any topic.

In French we used to have "le site du zéro". It was a very popular collaborative site with a ton of free courses for beginners in (mostly) programming.

Today it feels that it just became a somewhat bland and nothing-special corporate resource (OpenClassrooms), but it was once a vibrant community with it's own identity:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120309143317/http://www.siteduz...

On a completely different topic, https://www.jeuxvideo.com/ have long been (and still is) one of the most popular forums among young people in France.

Check https://zestedesavoir.com

Made by former staff of Sdz, high quality, can't recommend enough.

I feel like linuxfr.org also deserves a mention: had pretty thorough articles on lots of subject, as far as I could judge them (and knowledgeable members!).

https://www.fun-mooc.fr/

Online courses with a wide variety of topics. Took a number of them unrelated to CS, unfortunately many are archived. There is a very good introduction course to Chinese https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/course-v1:Inalco+52004+sessi... with a session this spring.

Le Site du Zéro is how I got started with programming back in high school. That was a great site, it's a shame what happened to it.

https://www.wykop.pl is probably the biggest Polish site that gathers best experts from most of the industries, to provide comments on the newest political, religious, science and engineering news from all around the world. The comments posted by users of wykop.pl are often cited in other sites.

...at least that's what everyone on this site would like to think. In reality, it's just a digg.com clone, before it started to suck ;)

(even name is a reference to digg, 'wykop' means 'a dig site', or 'to dig')

This page is terrible, heavily biased and almost all discussions that occur there are fundamentally flawed due to basics of basics of logical fallacies.

It's one of those websites that makes you lose faith in people e.g when you read popular takes about Bill Gates and COVID related stuff, it's pretty sad.

I bet that just reading titles from the front page for a 3 months would affect your happines cuz majority of headlines there are sad stories, provocative titles about politics, religion, men and women relations with heavy biass towards one side, generally a lot of junk

It's sad that this is one of the biggest ""discussion"" happening sites in the Polish internet.

While we're doing this, I should point out that every European country has their own public television, radio and news site like NPR/PBS or the BBC. You can easily find them via Wikipedia but I'll list a couple:

- Germany: ARD, ZDF, DW, Deutschlandfunk

- France: France.TV, RadioFrance

- Spain: RTVE

- Portugal: RTP

- Italy: RAI

- Switzerland: RTS, SRF, RSI, RSR

- Sweden: SR, SVT

- Denmark: DR

- Norway: NRK

They all have websites that are pretty easy to find and although some content is region restricted, a lot is not.

Alas, RTVE no longer lets you watch Ministerio Del Tiempo episodes for free (sort of like a Spanish Dr. Who time travel show).

Check out Cuarto Milenio or Milenio 3, by Iker Jiménez.

Nice terror series.

Geizhals gh.de is an amazing product database that lets you filter and sort by tens of thousands of criteria and find the best price.

kachelmannwetter.com is a weather site with more in-depth information and analysis.

vendeeglobe.org is a very exciting solo non-stop around the world sailing regatta that is extremely popular in France. They had very good English coverage on YouTube this time (20/21 race)

http://omegataupodcast.net/ is a podcast with deep dives into many engineering topics. Some episodes are in German, many are in (accented) English.

https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/podcast4684.html German language podcast about the Corona virus with one of the world's leading experts on the Coronavirus, Christian Drosten (who developed the PCR test).

https://endic.naver.com

Best resource for Korean language when approached from the Anglosphere.

Yes, this is truly a great resource for Korean. There are some interesting bugs (like english text example search matches substrings rather than words; e.g. searching "tile" results in "The Ptile value is outside the range of valid values". There were worse cases a few months ago that seem to be resolved), but overall it is an invaluable tool for Korean learners.

A Norwegian web-store is famous for its "design" and is being showcased in all kinds of design talks and presentations. (Of course in the "How not to do it" category)

http://arngren.net/

The most accurate rain/snow/wind forecaster I've ever used: https://www.buienradar.nl/

Sometimes I feel bad for not contributing to the hispanic sphere.

I mean, most of internet's content is in English. Programming is all in english. English is also the lingua franca.

But everything seems dull compared to english content. You have the science, the TV and so on, maybe its just me not feeling so good about local culture.

Yet tourists seem to love these places. What a paradox.

But memes in Spanish seem to be awesome hilarious in comparison

There's a very old Turkish website (late 90s AFAIK) called http://eksisozluk.com - it's like a mix between wiki, reddit and urbandictionary.

It has an important place in Turkish youth subculture and I believe it originated as a 'forum' for the tech community in Turkey.

https://habr.com/ (Russian) has some good articles, some translated, some original.

Looking for reverse copycat? Just kidding.

Taringa used to be the Reddit in Spanish (well, at least for South America), with really interesting content. Microsiervos.com was probably the best tech/curiosities blog in Spanish, and a few days ago I visited and it is still active (from 2006 I think).

You're talking like a real lince intergaláctico de las praderas.

5ch.net

The Japanese anonymous forum that inspired 4chan. It actually started of as 2 channel but various business and legal disputes happened.

If anyone has a site similar to Reddit or HN in German I would be interested. Anything with interesting discussion really.

Someone will probably come up with a better answer but you can check out https://www.heise.de/forum/ for tech news.

The heise forum sadly has been a cesspit of trolls for a long time. In the last 5 years it got even worse because some of the conspiracist and nazi trolls from the Telepolis forum came over to the tech forums an I think heise don't know how to properly deal with them.

I know Heise (the publication) for its good coverage of specific issues, the most recent I recall being the data collection practices of coronavirus-related apps [1].

I've always assumed it's something like a better version of The Register, [2] which I used to read a while ago, but don't really know that much about it, especially the comments section. Thanks for the heads-up.

1. https://www.heise.de/news/Corona-Apps-im-Datenschutz-Check-A...

2. https://www.theregister.co.uk/

Heise is definitely one of the best tech media/print houses.

But their handling of their comment section is seriously lacking and it looks like it is stuck in early 90ies usenet discussions and worse.

What is the difference between golem and heise. I like both but are they equally popular?

I think so. Some might say Golem nowadays sometimes is a bit deeper technologically and more up to current affairs, but in the end it comes down to taste.

Yandex! It's like Russian Google, but the results (or at least the English-language results) are more algorithmic, without human intervention in the rankings.

http://rutracker.org — a torrent tracker

https://www.mercadolibre.com.mx/

is ebay but cooler and from Latino America.

What makes it cooler?

MercadoPago is the payment gatewat and it's amazing. They take care of delivery/logistics like Amazon and it's fast and works in remote places too.

To be fair, they launched the nice things after Amazon opened in Mexico and got the whole market. Before that they could not be bothered.

Norway has finn.no, though perhaps more like craigslist (get rid of old couch, find cheap exercise bike, get job, sell house, etc.)

4PDA.ru is arguably a better version of XDA-Developers: a repository of all kinds of customizations for Android devices.

Unlike XDA, it's well-categorized into threads, the first post is always a good summary of what's inside that particular thread with links to individual posts, and low-effort clutter is mercilessly moderated away.

Yandex Images – https://yandex.com/images/ It's much, much better than Google Images. The only Western equivalent that comes close is DuckDuckGo Images.

I would love suggestions of French language sites! I have found them quiet hard to find, especially of a more than surface level discussion.

France has a few enormous message boards about various topics.

forum.hardware.fr is a big one (it's not just about computer hardware, there's a decent section about news/world events, etc.)

> forum.hardware.fr is a big one (it's not just about computer hardware, there's a decent section about news/world events, etc.)

What I assume is the equivalent, forum.hardware.no, used to be huge in Norway in the 00s too, but then the community more or less got swallowed by Reddit. Did the French one survive?

Oh yes, it's very active. Interestingly, the hardware news, tests and reviews closed a year or two ago, but the message board remained.

diskusjon.no still seems fairly active. Though anytime I search for something non-tech-related in Norwegian ("us taxes norway", "car brake trombone", "kid face blue", "beach meteorite"), I typically get one of the forums Kvinneguiden.no ("the women's guide"), BarniMagen.no ("child in tummy") or MammaNett (… you get the drift). So there's a part of the Norwegian Internet that strangely hasn't been swallowed up by the FRAANG.

Very active, I find it much better than reddit where I usually cannot find anything useful, the UI is awful on reddit.

The real interesting thing is that there are a lot of threads for very specialized topics (e.g. bikes, mattress, pizza oven or torch lights). Before buying something I usually check if a thread exists and read it / ask questions. You however end up having to revise upwards your budget to buy the stuff they recommend.

Try https://teddit.net/ for an alternate Reddit UI interface.

I think it's more or less saved by the bad English level of most users. They won't switch to an international alternative.

La Quadrature du Net [0] is a collective of privacy advocates, like the EFF for the EU. They run an active Mastodon node at mamot.fr.

[0]: https://www.laquadrature.net/

Rezo.net is a leftist portal, often displaying obscure blogs no one reads. I started reading it around 1999 and I’m glad it is still here.

Around 2005 there was a very cute php generalist forum called kopikol.net but I still lament that they had to close around 2008

https://fr.audiofanzine.com/

is a 20 years old French audio/music gear website featuring an exhaustive product database, reviews, newsletters, forum, social network, and marketplace.

Most musicians / producers in the country will be aware of it, including probably some famous ones.

I don't know of an equivalent in the Anglosphere (gearslutz.com would be the closest thing in terms of forum/community, but lacks most of the other features).

Audiofanzine does have some English content, but I don't think that ever really caught on.

https://wiki.selfhtml.org/ (German) is where I learnt the basics of web development in high school. I'm not sure how up to date it is, though.

I particularly like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marefa. I wouldn't know about the quality of the content - I don't speak Arabic - but from what I can tell it's like Arabic Wikipedia, but you also get blogs, forums, ancient manuscripts, email with unlimited storage (?!?) and much more. The Arabic internet in general is always interesting to me, because even in 2021 it still seems very ad-hoc and far less commercialized than the parts of the internet I've seen in other languages.

It started as a fork of the Arabic Wikipedia, though. And most content is outdated since they don't have that many contributors.

https://www.webtoons.com/en/ is massively popular in Korea and surrounding, but niche in NA

Thinkerview: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQgWpmt02UtJkyO32HGUASQ

It's a French podcast covering a wide array of topics such as geopolitics, journalism, big tech, industrial espionage, economic warfare, etc.

I find it refreshing because the ideas and opinions discussed are very different compared to those you'd find in the usual anglophone media, and just that by itself is a ton of value.

Ha, I'm learning Hindi, I'd love a 'Hindi Stack Overflow', I imagine the technical bits would be English anyway so it'd be a great way to familiarise/practice. (Easier than news, say, I imagine, since I'd have more context and it wouldn't be as formal/pure Hindi.)

I could try to contribute too: My cache is full of eels, how do I set the death timer for the evictings of my tenants?

It's a long-running joke that Youtube is a Hindi Stack Overflow, albeit non-text based, though you can view transcripts.

Yup, writing good technical content in Hindi is nigh-impossible.

I've noticed that Twitter will translate Hindi written in Roman characters, which is certainly common on the internet, but I'd think given (AFAIK) there's no formal standard for it it'd be hard to get good data to feed into an AI. Or is it enough of a 1-1 transliteration that all you need to do is encode the Roman->Devanagari rules and that'll work nearly 100% of the time?

There are several standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration#Tra...

Nobody bothers to use them.

Same for Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu

The challenge isn’t with the script - it’s with lack of acceptable technical vocabulary in Hindi/English.

Video works because Hinglish is how tech-talk in (many, not all) companies works.

But you’d never see a technical doc in any of the these companies in Hindi, because you can’t even translate simple terms like Server or package-management. Even if you find acceptable translations, they aren’t immediately obvious, because nobody has heard them before.

In a Python video, you might hear: “मेरा code requests library से Google server को HTTP request भेजता हैं” (My code uses the requests library to send HTTP requests to Google”.

It works on video, but it doesn’t on text because nobody is used to reading this in Hindi in the first place.

So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text?

When I was young I used to play some MSX games in Japanese, the language doesn't really matter for a lot of these 1980s games, and you would frequently see English words and terms written in Latin characters used all over the place.

Why won't this work for Hindi? Are people not familiar with these characters? Or is there just no tradition of doing so?

That does happen, a common word for 'school' is स्कूल ('skūl') for example.

It's just that another phenomenon is the alphabeticising of Hindi (as in actually Hindi words) like 'namaste aap kaise hain? Mera naam Ollie hoon' (IAST āp, nām, olī, and hūñ) is a contrived sentence but the sort of thing someone might text if they didn't have the keyboard for नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा नाम ओली हूँ or whatever reason.

> So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text?

It happens in casual text - WhatsApp forwards, SMS messages. But for official writing - you pick a language and stick to it, as much as possible. This made more than a few notices impossibly hard to read when I was in college, because the Hindi felt archaic, even if it wasn't.

Other countries had a rich culture of research and scientific literature published in native languages. India never got that to a national scale, because India has hundreds of languages[0] so any efforts were local. A paper published in Tamil would be unreadable by folks a hundred miles away, so English became the technical lingua-franca of the nation (The colonial imposition didn't help either).

When a developer searches stack-overflow for an answer, english works better because it serves all developers in India.

[0]: India scores 0.914 on the Linguistic diversity Index, which ranges from 0 (everyone has the same mother tongue) to 1 (no two people have the same mother tongue)

I think English is the lingua franca of science and computing pretty much anywhere now? Just as Latin was in the past? Newton didn't publish in English, but in Latin, as did most people of his day.

In Dutch, I would just say "de server is kapot" ("the server is broken"). There is no attempt to translate words like "server" to Dutch. You see the same in Indonesian (standard Indonesian, Bahasa, there are many Indonesian languages) where these kind of words are just copied ad-verbatim from either English or (for older words) Dutch. For many technical terms in the IT world there are no "Dutch words": just the English ones. The exceptions seem to be the ones where there are Dutch words that are close enough to the English ones ("function" → "functie", "variables" → "variabelen"). Both languages having similar Germanic roots with Latin/Greek influences helps I suppose.

And in those cases all the languages use the same Latin script, so it's easier to include loanwords and technical terms.

So it seems to me, unless I'm misunderstanding something, that it's at least partly an issue of script translations? Adopting the example someone else posted, why shouldn't "नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा server ओली हूँ" be considered acceptable Hindi?

For the English words used in Dutch, do you use Dutch pronunciation, even if the word is spelled the same?

We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs :)

It depends a bit on the person and word, but for most technical terms I'd say it's quite close to the English (other loanwords: a bit less so; my favourite example is "halve zool" ("half sole") which is a way to call someone a fool or idiot; which is adapted from the Britsh "arsehole").

> We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs :)

This depends on the regional accent; the south (and Belgium) has a "soft G", whereas the north (including Amsterdam, for example) has a "hard G".

This is a nice video on the topic with some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNOebbyUgI4

The "R" is also less hard in southern Dutch. Basically, it sounds a bit more like French rather than Klingon :-)

The standard is IAST - but colloquially people don't use it, preferring a more Anglophone phonetic approximation (since English literacy is high) so you get 'aloo' instead of 'alū' (potato) and 'jeera' instead of 'jīra' (cumin), for example.

It's quite annoying as a learner, since it can make it difficult to map back to devnagārī (resp. devnagari) to look up a new word, for example. (It's almost entirely true to say that devnagārī script is phonetic, so if you write कुछ and I don't know the word, I know how to pronounce it without knowing what it means, and can ask someone or look it up, which is a great feature that English of course doesn't have at all, and while Hindi phonetic approximation in the alphabet might get closer, it's still non-standard and different typers will spell words differently.)

+1 for the second line, but I'm very curious about "eels". The rest generally makes sense.

It is part of a collection of well-known phrases that are also translated into many languages.

• https://enwp.org/My_Hovercraft_Is_Full_Of_Eels

• https://enwp.org/I_Can_Eat_Glass

• https://enwp.org/Omniglot

Yep as sibling comment says I was riffing on 'my hovercraft is full of eels' [0], meaning to say that that's probably what me trying to ask questions on a hypothetical 'Hindi StackOverflow' would sound like.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g

mikrocontroller.net, a German resource and forum for electronics, microcontrollers and low level programming.

http://e-maxx.ru/algo I used to study competitive programming algorithms from there with Google translate

Edit: It seems somebody translated it to English https://cp-algorithms.com/

I really like the web page of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.nrk.no/

It is so clean and nice, doing exactly what it should: present the news. No ads, no popup, no clutter. And they are incredibly fast picking up what happens abroad (for example, during several terror incidents around in Europe, NRK has been quicker with updates than bbc) as well as presenting curiosities such as: "Cute owl saved from ugly, Norwegian tree" [0]. In comparison, bbc.com (which is relatively okay for a news web page) makes me dizzy with all the different sections and styles and clutter

[0] https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/fin-ugle-redda-fra-stygt-norsk-tr...

- Tweakers.net; (Dutch)as mentioned by others, tech news / forum / price aggregate. Has consistently been an example of outstanding webdesign and development.

- Catawiki; (Dutch/European) auction site for collectibles, antiques etc. The auctions are moderated by experts.

- NHK world; (Japanese) national broadcaster serving self made English video content (and translations in multiple languages): News,on demand programs, documentaries, sumo! Mainly focused on Japan and SEA. Although the content often doesn't go too deep into a subject - it's not very critical - it's generally a nice mix of human interest, environment, science, culture etc. I had to get used to the Japanese ways/tone, but the overall lightheartedness made it a nourishing non-fiction media escape for me.

In Japan, Yahoo Auctions is still going strong. It's a great place to find car parts. Related but I guess targeted at the anglosphere:

http://jp-carparts.com has schematica of cars so that you can find pretty much any part you need.

https://www.amayama.com is a place you can put the part number in and actually order the part directly from a bunch of Japanese suppliers.

You want some of those little plastic interior clips for a 1996 Nissan? They have them. Power steering pump? Entire transmission? Window glass? Hood latch?

It is often cheaper than getting it locally too because the local markets assume scarcity and Japan tends to not price gouge in the first place.

Taobao!

It's like eBay, but for wholesalers who are ~selling "ghost shift" parts~ offloading excess inventory to small-time consumers.

There are brokers for international customers; they communicate with the sellers and consolidate orders into a single parcel for ~10-15% commission.

But it's harder to browse these days; less is available without an account which you need to provide a mobile number for, and you have to jump through hoops to avoid getting only "international" listings.

Can you provide more detail / links please on how to avoid getting only international listings?

Meteo from Poland is a great source for numerical weather forecast. Website is in english, but their forecast is mainly for Poland + Border regions of the neighbours. http://www.meteo.pl/index_en.php

If you know the coordinates, you can access a jpg-generated meteogram directly over the URL - example for Berlin: http://www.meteo.pl/um/metco/mgram_pict.php?ntype=0u&fdate=2...

In Spain, forocoches.com (started out as a forum around cars, now tons of subforums; right-wing bias; invitation only) and meneame.net (user submitted news, tech & more; left-wing bias; draconian moderation).

Both very useful to understand what people really think in Spain about all kinds of topics.

Meneame is the Spanish /r/politics. You will hardly get anything of value out of there. Even the founder noped the f out.

Same with Racó Catalá.

Menéame has always seem to me as a bad copy of digg.

https://independenttrader.pl/ is a non-mainstream blog about investing, economy etc.

I don't agree with the author on many subjects and views, but it's interesting to read and think about them sometimes.

They do very deep analyses on each subject they cover, provide a lot of context, information, graphs, historical comparisons and interpretations that are not (or only briefly) discussed in mainstream.

It's however best to skip reading most of the comments :)

https://prohardver.hu/forum/index.html

Hungarian tech forum; think tech only reddit. The thinkpad thread used to host quite a decent knowledge in the x200 modding era.

http://www.elektro.zolee.hu/rajz_lista.php

Oldschool electronic circuit board drawings, also Hungarian.

Serbian news aggregator/search engine:

https://naslovi.net/

Its name is "Headlines" in Serbian.

As a learner of Italian I was always wondering if there is any tech site like HN, SO, etc. in Italian. Besides the really good 2024 podcast from Radio 24 - https://www.radio24.ilsole24ore.com/programmi/2024 - I did not find anything I would return to regularly. Any hints?

Tech news: - https://www.hwupgrade.it - https://www.tomshw.it

PC Building: - https://pangoly.com

Gamers Forum (one of the oldest): - https://netgamers.it/index.php

Daily News: - https://www.repubblica.it/

Marketplace: - https://www.subito.it/

Tabelog lead to some amazing dinners in Japan.

I've been using Yandex Translate for months now. The quality of translations isn't as good, but the mobile app UI is far more usable, and I'm tired of sending all the data I translate to Google. Unfortunately, the language I translate most often isn't supported in a lot of other alternatives.

I'm a big fan of werstreamt.es (German), which is a simple search engine for all streaming services.

I. C++ (related) forums from Germany and Japan that I've found (so far):

- https://www.c-plusplus.net/

- https://dixq.net/

II. Quality YouTube channels from Germany:

- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrWissen2go/videos

Explains societal/political/historical topics (in a neutral manner) to laypeople.

- https://www.youtube.com/c/maiLab/videos

Explains science topics (chemistry, biology, studies) to laypeople.

III. Quality YouTube channels from Japan:

- https://www.youtube.com/c/atelierateruimath/videos

Math professor teaching linear algebra, analysis etc.

IV. Services from Germany

- https://www.mindfactory.de/

Computer hardware etc.

- web.de

For me the best European Dropbox alternative so far (Online-Speicher).

V. Services from Japan

- https://fc2.com/

Website hosting etc.

- https://www.nicovideo.jp/

The Japanese YouTube basically.

- https://www.rakuten.co.jp/

The Japanese Amazon.

VI. Concluding Remarks & Miscellaneous

- Arte, Phoenix make good documentaries. (But these were already mentioned by others.)

- https://www.schenker-tech.de/en/ - https://www.xmg.gg/en/

Laptops made/assembled in Germany.

- https://www.gigaset.com/hq_en/

Some smartphones are made in Germany.

- https://www.youtube.com/c/worldorder/videos

By Genki Sudo (須藤元気) former MMA fighter. He's now a politician.

- Hiroshi Abe (阿部寛)

The Japanese Clint Eastwood.

- Kim Ki-duk

A Korean movie director that I happen to like.

PS: If I find/remember more interesting stuff from Japan and Germany, I will update this post. :)

Scrapbox is well made note/collaboration SaaS made in Kyoto. It's frictionless experience but also opinionated (like they don't use Markdown).

https://scrapbox.io/

https://www.multitran.com — a great Russian-to-many dictionary with examples of use across many professional domains. Also has English UI option.

famitsu.com

Japanese site for game news. Every new and upcoming game is in the list, very good to see whata coming

kaffee-netz.de

A german forum regarding coffee, bean roasting, coffee brewing, machine repairs and coffee related trading (tech wise it's mostly covering portafilters though). The community is really nice, very pleasant atmosphere and great content

Great question. +1 for my interest too.

Examples of Chinese equivalents to Western internet services[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#E...

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