Loving Hacker News to Death... What next? | Hacker News Reader

Loving Hacker News to Death... What next?

20 pointslunaru32 comments

I've pretty much ditched my RSS reader in favor of hacker news. After all, everything I'm interested in reading consists of 1) entrepreneurial content, 2) silicon valley news and 3) the latest development trends. Why do I need to subscribe to all these blogs when the best content for me ends up on the front page of HN?

That said, I'm wondering if there is any other content out there that like-minded folks would suggest I turn my attention to.

No techcrunch or any of that crap. I'm talking really good content for hacker/entrepreneurs. Or is this mecca for me and there is no where else to look?

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Oh, oh, don't do this! This is a bad bad thing - don't get all your news from one source and already pre-filtered for you. You lose track of alternative opinions, you lose track of how the rest of the world thinks, and soon you cannot innovate anymore because all your ideas are pretty much the same.

It's terrible terrible mistake to only have one news source.

I do agree with you in some respects, but you must also consider that HN isn't "pre-filtered" in the sense of a newspaper. Anyone can submit a link (which can make it to the front page), and you can click over to 'new' to see all links chronologically. I think that's a big flaw in saying "one news source" is bad in today's technology age.

The submitters are somewhat pre-filtered as the group of people that submit links to Hacker News is different from journalists and bloggers.

Certainly, it's better than only viewing one blog, or one website or one parent company (e.g. Fox, CNN), but it still has flaws.

It wouldn't very well be hacker news if it were submitted by non-hackers, huh?

Technically, I'm a non-hacker :).

Agreed. It's why I read BBC & Al Jazeera as often as I read WSJ, the Washington Post and NY Times.

But if you do it for antsy, looking-for-something-else-to-do-besides-work reading, I think you're OK.

Al Jazeera is good. But some years back, I used to live in a place where I got Al Jazeera Arabic. That channel is WAY too gory. Some stuff just should not be shown on TV when I'm flicking through looking for some late night softcore.

http://nonhackernews.com http://newmogul.com http://newsvine.com is good for raw mainstream pundit news of the "breaking" kind. and http://www.newsvine.com/world-news for world news.

Newsvine is way too similar in color and layout to The Onion. I thought, "hey, that's not funny... oh"

I seriously think that's one of the reasons they haven't done so well.

They can't be doing that badly if they're paying the AP syndication fee.

If we didn't read other sources and (especially) aggregators, how would Hacker News continue to thrive?

There are other places to look, as mentioned, but in my experience you are not going to find better stories or commentary than HN.

Yeah, reddit (and digg and dzone and <insert social media site>) just don't do it for me. The content is not the right blend.

I agree (especially on the Digg part), but I still find quality programming-related articles on Proggit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/).

I find interesting stuff on dzone once in awhile, especially Ruby dzone

Hacker news seems to have the best signal-to-noise in its community, that's why I'm here. The spinoffs rms posted are probably the best place to look next, but I don't think they have the critical mass userbase (yet).

What amazes me about HN is the number of famous hackers who post comments and read. It's also like a democracy in that I can vote (comments up/down). I've also worked out what kinds of posts get karma points, and I've adjusted (eg, by sincerity, sarcasm, pun/wit) to what helps the community most, and thus gets me the most karma.

I don't know if its worked for anybody else.. but i recently got the stumbleupon bar and if you choose your interest, it gives quite interesting results.

Not comparable to HN or even reddit/programming.

A very similar question was asked not so long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=284019

It got a lot of interesting answers.

>Why do I need to subscribe to all these blogs when the best content for me ends up on the front page of HN?

So you can submit interesting stuff for the rest of us to read :)

http://www.scholarspot.com still in the works but full of highly relevant hacker videos.

Try online comics. You probably know xkcd. Just look at the authors recommendations at the bottom of his page.

I've actually added a couple dozen blogs to my RSS reader which I first encountered on HN.

I love Hacker news, but, but... has there ever been any discussion about the desirability of having a couple of lines of summary under the headline? The headline only format irks me.

Oops, I'm modded down. I presume that this is a stupid idea that has been suggested and rejected n000 times before. Anyone?

reddit.com

The quality there has gone down. Unfortunately, the quality here has as well. (It's still very good.)

I think there are many stages of social news. The last one is: "when the general population college-aged and younger takes over and unintentionally chase away the community that originally made the site great."

did you mean digg.com? /sarcasm

I can hardly tell the difference there now. :(

reddit.com has more bitter and sensationalist political headlines, digg.com has more linkbait from cracked.com and collegebreak.com.

Oh, and digg.com loads more slowly.

I think that about covers it.

Unsubscribe from the [reddit] subreddit and you filter out a lot of bullshit. The smaller, topic-specific subreddits can be filled with users with a brain.

http://slashdot.org/

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