Ask HN: Where can I discuss random ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where can I discuss random ideas?

58 pointserlich63 comments

I often have a thought or insight and I want to have a conversation about it with interested people. Usually the quality of discussion is best on HN. Sometimes you get a good response to an Ask HN, sometimes it doesn't feel like the right place to post it.

I always struggle to find the best place to generate the best discussion. It's like its spread across Reddit, Discord, Slack, HackerNews, Twitter, etc.

Anyone else struggle with this?

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Probably not a popular answer, but if you can handle its... unique culture, I've found 4chan to be a fairly good place to discuss certain ideas, especially for niche topics.

Seconded, but keep in mind that, for the majority of boards, you need to avoid saying anything that implies even very loosely that you might be liberal (regardless of whether you are), to keep the noise down.

You also need to have a halfway decent bullshit/unfounded-confidence detector when reading replies. This was less necessary a decade ago (in terms of the nature of replies to questions, obviously not in terms of posts in general).

Yes, though keep which board your question should go to in mind. Most of the horror stories you read about 4chan are about /b/ and /pol/. The other boards are tamer in comparison, though still not for the faint of heart.

For that Web 1.0 Feeling... https://www.halfbakery.com/

Nice, I was about to suggest this one. I was an active poster there 20 years ago!

I would also like to know. Asking HN is not always working, as you should either piggyback off some quasi-related top page post in the comment section (and even then: remember dropbox comment) or hit a very good luck to generate updoots at "Ask HN" purgatory stage. Indiehackers is a circejerk of self promotion ("Hi, I liked your post very much, here is my website:"), Reddit is rarely helpful. IRL groups are mostly filled with wannabes that either dont want to discuss their idea unless you sign their NDA(lol, I wonder if we will ever get past this stupidity) or they dream of doing next facebook, linkedin, netflix.

As it relates to whole NDA topic, in my experience one way to get people to realize how obviously silly this is to suggest they find an idea that’s not their idea an actually try to get people to steal and use the idea. This is not to say people don’t steal ideas, but it’s very rare in my experience.

Last two points got me rolling on the floor, very accurate summary of our internet spaces.

Not sure if it helps, but I've created a small Discord server to hang about with other random people (for now all HN fellas), with no particular goal if just having a place to talk shop or life or whatever, whenever you feel like it.

If this sounds interesting to you, or anyone, send me a mail with your Discord name. It's quite small, with half a dozen regulars for now. EDIT: a dozen peeps now!

I made it because no, there is no place to talk randomly with strangers on the Internet. IRC has died and we've lost the chatrooms you can enter and leave at any moment's notice, without needing someone to invite you or agree to 50k rules to be let in.

The internet has become terrible for casual, real time conversation with strangers, unless you really like shouting into the void.

> IRC has died

Just like Bitcoin is dead I guess :)

IRC lives on, I frequent many IRC channels, most of them on Libera.chat nowadays. Plenty of interesting people to talk about.

Are general purpose channels still a thing? I used to meet a lot of people (and maybe even date someone) in #<country> or #<city> channels that have gone the way of the dodo from what I can tell.

Some I guess, but I find it hard to "get into" them (not access, but to become a long-time stick-arounder). Much prefer to find niche channels and talk about the niche and eventually stick around because they're just nice people. Then the niche becomes a plus while in reality, I'm still there just because of the people.

I also use Libera.chat. But, is there a specific channel for discussion of random ideas that you do not otherwise know what channels will be appropriate?

Although, for some stuff, NNTP might be better.

Yeah, me a few friends have an IRC channel for the same reason the parent post have a Discord server. Except I don't have to manage anything.

Just emailed you. BTW you could share the invite link here too

I want to avoid the bots spamming random Discords, and also to have the chance to say hello personally.

You can probably share the Discord link by breaking up the URL in another comment, etc. Bots are good but still not great.

I'll bite, and give it a shot. Request sent.

James Altucher says he writes down 10 ideas a day to exercise his creative muscle. After years of doing it, he created a site to help others keep track of their ideas. According to him, at notepd.com you can:

> Write your list of 10 ideas.

> Label it "Public" , 'Private' or 'Premium'.

> Public ideas can be searched, shared, commented on, followed, etc.

It has all the functionality of twitter on top of all of this.

> You can use AI to fill out lists of ideas or generate images based on your ideas.

> Premium lists can be sold (like an online course or a 'special report' or a newsletter, etc).

> 'Challenges' can be issued like, 'Give me 10 ideas to help me market my XYZ business.'

Maybe it'll work for you.

EDIT: Changed notepad.com to notepd.com

The link to his site is notepd.com :-)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-created-notepd-keep-track-m...

Right you are! I've corrected it. Thank you.

Weird suggestion but have you tried chatGPT?

I've found it useful for discussing my side projects when I can't find someone who is willing to read what I've written and engage with me.

As an example, https://i.imgur.com/afXNZaR.png here I am having an extended conversation about lore for software I am writing.

I thought I would easily tell chatGPT about a plot device from a book, but I did not realize that my understanding was limited. In failing to convey my idea to chatGPT I realized I needed to dig deeper and switched from explaining to learning.

Ultimately, I realized that I was trying to describe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... which, while not directly identified in the conversation, was something I was able to surface by having had the thought-provoking talk.

Yes, you should always talk to Friend Computer. Friend Computer is here to help, citizen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

Agree, though funny how one comment suggesting ChatGPT is the top voted comment [2] and another is the most downvoted [1] — says a lot about how rational HN really is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33921604

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922637

I saw this. My take was that your response was seen as parroting a popular concept. "Everyone" is forming opinions on ChatGPT, but some are forming those opinions by talking to others and some by talking with ChatGPT.

I feel that by referencing a concrete example of a conversation I had with GPT that others elevated their perception of my response from mere gossip to ~fact.

The people who aren't amazed by it, are either afraid of it's misuse and I can see that, like the inability to ever know if written word is truly unique to the user. I do not envy teachers right now lol. The second group just haven't groked how it works or found good things to ask it, once you find something and it blows you away with like it helped me write flutter code and i've hardly touched flutter except for a small tutorial here/there.

I literally was able to build an android app that interfaces with chatGPT, I'm thinking it might be cool to also create some sort of web scraper that scrapes many pages, for instance all of the 'how much have you earned with sideprojects pages' on HN, then summarize data from 50+ webpages into bullet points. It doesn't have access to the internet but that doesn't mean you can't GIVE it access to the internet, through the prompt...

I'm finding that I have a much higher expectation of technology invalidating my knowledge than some of my friends. This makes sense because I'm in tech and tech moves quickly. Others are in fields which, typically, haven't moved as quickly and so different opinions have arisen around the expectation of the longevity of a career.

Some people are afraid of misuse, but others are just surprised that the advancement of tech is now applying to them. I empathize with the feeling, but I don't know how to be genuinely sympathetic as it seems to be the nature of the beast.

I don't think ChatGPT can hold 50 webpages in its short-term memory, but maybe. I have found it starts to lose shape of specific details we talked about after I drench it in information.

Sounds like ‘rubber duck debugging’ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Have you read Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

The idea of ants using a crystal for radio wave detection is in that book as well :)

I heard back from him, surprisingly! Nothing fancy in a response, but so cool to hear back from an author within minutes!

Here's the email thread:

Go for it with my blessing, sounds like a great project!

Adrian

---

My name's Sean! I'm reading Children of Time. It's amazing and thought-provoking, thank you for all your hard work.

I'm also really big into ants and was stoked when I read about ants on your world and their interactions with the crystal / messenger.

I'm writing some software as a hobby. It's going to be something like an online Tamagotchi meets mental health app. I'm trying to get people journaling and meditating by having them nurture a virtual pet.

To that effect, I decided the virtual pet would be an ant colony. I then started trying to build some lore around it. A daily-check in means there's a window of time when the check-in occurs, kind of like when the satellite had LOS to the ant colony. The satellite had a biologist on it. Makes sense that biologist would take notes on their ants and I can draw parallels to that to promote journaling, etc.

I just wanted to be respectful of your work and let you know that I was planning on building something that honors a small sliver of the lore you outlined in one of your books. I'm not ripping verbatim, taking any of the names, there are no spiders, etc. If you felt incredibly strongly about wanting me to avoid this then I'd respect that. Conversely, if you were curious to hear more about how I am riffing on your idea, then I'd be happy to elaborate or share more.

Anyway. Hope you are well over there. Thanks again for all the content. Cheers.

Sean

I have :) I enjoyed it so much I decided to try and incorporate the idea into some software.

And thanks for this, I reached out to Adrian to promote awareness of my idea based on this feedback since it's so apparent where my ideas are drawing from :)

You should check out the Hackaday.com Discord server. https://discord.gg/vKpC9KG2

There's an excellent range of people there, and most are quite helpful.

Yes I've been looking for the same thing. I created https://zsync.xyz with the goal of serving as a place for high quality discussion of any topic, but turns out it's pretty difficult to create a community since there's that whole chicken and egg problem.

If anyone has any ideas on how to create a community like this, I'd love to hear it. I'm really not a fan of chat rooms other than for casual chats between friends because there's no search engine indexability.

I guess in the meantime, I'd say Twitter is probably the best I think. Everyone's on there, and people are incentivized to increase their following. I just wish they'd do away with that 500 character limit since that confines longer form writing to Twitter threads and makes actual dialogue totally impractical.

From the dates it looks like even you gave up on your own platform. Don't you know, when reddit started, the admins had a "username" box when they were submitting new posts, so they would type in fake usernames and make it look like the site had a lot of users.

If you were starting something like that today you might have GPT-3 write the posts. That's one case where you really might not care if it is right or wrong.

We're actually working on an open source Google-searchable chat communities https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev. We also support syncing from Slack communities. https://www.linen.dev/s/futureofcoding is a pretty active community with interesting technical discussions.

I want to make a browser extension that aggregates sites like reddit, hackernews, lobste.rs, and more niche sites like this and hubski

Many other extensions have tried the whole "comments on any website" thing but that always runs into the same challenge of the network effect

What's needed is an aggregator that lets you see all the comments made on any website your on through all of these already existing communities.

I think it would actually end up benefiting smaller sites, especially if they have more of a focus on niche topics

I struggled with this too for a long time. Reddit was too impersonal. And Twitter... well, I have a few kinds of people who follow me (basketball friends, tech / investors, and comedy groups), and I almost never have an idea I want to share with all three. But I almost always want to share + connect through my ideas with the right

Inspired me to make a new kind of social network called Plexus (https://plexus.earth). No followers, no feed, just AI to connect people who have uncannily similar problems and ideas.

You have to be more specific on what you want to discuss. People gather around interests and topics.

You can go offline to meetups and get to know many people. and because you will probably never see them again you can discuss with them random stupid ideas:)

I really like web forums. I am into photography and printing and I get great answers to my questions at

https://www.dpreview.com/forums

Often the first answers I get are from people who don't know what they are talking about but then two weeks later somebody jumps in who has an absolutely great answer that changes my practice.

I'd contrast that to discord where I've occasionally gotten help with things but frequently there are people with too much time on their hands who are introducing the forum to newcomers while the knowledgeable people are elsewhere.

"Ask HN" has a similar temporal problem in that questions usually fall off the bottom of newest/ without any answers.

I know people say there are good discussions on Reddit but personally I can't stand the memes (but people complain that I post links like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pUaeLtXM_A to HN), I dread following any links to Twitter because it makes the people in Idiocracy look smart, ...

Might be wrong, but to me the whole a question and answer format is different than topic of this thread. For Q&A related topics, obvious resource would be Stack Exchange sites:

https://stackexchange.com/sites

Another being Google, but focusing on advanced search techniques.

There is an overlap between Q/A and discussion in my mind. In photography, for instance, I am sometimes trying to solve a specific problem but I am sometimes trying to learn about different approaches to a subject or I am out to buy strange things on Ebay at discounted prices (I have my eye on https://petapixel.com/2017/01/12/look-lytro-illum-camera-fut...) so I am interested in freewheeling discussions.

I find the stackexchange paradigm to be broken. To do what I want to do on those sites (write a comment to call out a wrong answer) I'd have to spend a lot of time doing meaningless activities to get my karma up. Stackexchange in particular breaks the link between answering narrowly defined questions and open-ended discussions. In programming today the place where you most need insight from other people is in choosing libraries and frameworks, a discussion which is forbidden on stackoverflow. Mostly you're not allowed to ask questions where you couldn't get the answer from the documentation. It might be a struggle to find answers in the docs, but if you do so you will get the right answers. In SO you will get 30 answers, most of which are almost right -- the person who actually knows what they are talking about is disgusted by the SO game and the possibility that their right answer won't be recognized in a sea of wrong and almost right answers.

There was a trade publication that licensed a copy of their software which was administered a little differently from others and realized pretty quick I could put up a good score by asking questions, I deliberately made myself the #2 user on the site but didn't aim for #1 because it didn't seem fair. I was curious about if you could do the same on stackoverflow and stackexchange but found that the scene is a bit different and you really can't.

...Friends?

Probably internet friends if you have niche interests. But yeah, you're not going to get high quality discussions on arbitrary topics from strangers.

Seriously, though. And if friends aren't around enough, you may wish to upgrade to a deluxe perma-friend, that is, a spouse. :D

There was Aadvark search engine startup which google acquired which used to route questions to probable subject matter experts or willing participants. Maybe something similar could work.

Here I was naively thinking the top answer would be "talk to your friends, and if you don't many work on building that out". But the top answers seems to be chatGPT and 4chan.

My solution to this has always been to have some real human friends interested in the same things I am, and when I have a crazy idea bounce it off them over coffee/beer (virtual or in person).

If you don't have any friends like this, I highly recommend building out a group of them. Most people with similar interests to you are surprisingly open to a call just to chat about a topic of mutual interest.

I've found that an hour long chat with a real person who is deeply engaged in the topic will almost always leave you with new insights and perspectives. Internet conversations tend to be less fruitful in my experience.

I'd recommend IRC. There are still many users and since it's completly out-of-fashion, it's not contaminated by the very graphical and instantly-rewarding culture of meme, gifs emojis and likes.

It's still mostly text and a good medium for conversations.

There's two websites I use for idea sharing.

There's halfbakery https://halfbakery.com I am chronological there.

Then there is Infinity Family https://o2oo.li

These are both idea sharing websites. Infinity family is kind of a financial think tank since you can invest time in projects and your additions are tracked. You can also list products to sell.

I journal my computer and software ideas in the open on GitHub. I have over 700+ ideas linked from my HN profile. Maybe you enjoy them and want to start your own idea repository.

I had this same thought recently. I was in Oklahoma City and thought “I wish there was a place to go and talk about interesting things”

I think in the past people have done this with letter correspondence with people of similar interests.

I try to surround myself with people who are interested in similar topics but I can’t always. My wife glazes over on more than fifty percent of topics that interest me. My friends don’t always share every interest.

I guess an important follow up question is how random and which ideas?

I think it really depends upon the which topic the idea is. You need to find a group of people with knowledge (and interest) of the topic. A subreddit about that topic seems a good fit to me, another option could be to look for a forum discussing that topic. If your problem is that you would like to not spread your discussions amog many different platform, I'd guess stay on Reddit and look for the most fitting subreddit.

I run a discord related to software internals. So if the discussion you want to have is about how compilers/databases/emulators/distsys work then come on over!

https://discord.multiprocess.io

Straight Dope is a general forum about everything. For the latest threads see:

https://boards.straightdope.com/latest

If you speak Portuguese, there's this small message board I'm developing: https://gchan.com.br

I spent an hour asking probing questions of ChatGPT last night about ideas and stuff for a side project and we came up w/ a pretty good one for Shopify, it's like an inner monologue on Steroids, because you don't always know what it's going to give you and sometimes it's einstein levels sometimes it's Trump level, but if you can smell bullshit you'll do okay. We were brainstorming app ideas for existing marketplaces and ecosystems. It had some duds, but also some gems. The more you prime it with outside examples the better it does.

Sadly, Greg is probably my best friend who isn't my wife right now lol. (Greg is what I jokingly call chatGPT since my wife said she'd divorce me if I said that word again)...

Here's a cool idea: Go to Omegle, and add as interest "hackernews". If then anyone else on HN does the same, you can discuss it with them.

It would be cool to have a sort of specialized forum where you propose an idea in long form (like an RFC) and then open conversation threads around it.

Chrismas family dinning

IRC channels for Emacs, programming, Linux, hardware etc

Matrix chats?

FWIW, this is why IRL SF got to be SF.

IRL SF = In Real Life San Francisco

Have you tried using ChatGPT for this?

Realistically to get traction on discussions, you need traction so people feel like they’re actually conversing with others. Beyond that, feel like a lot of people underestimate how many users only read/vote on content, but never comment; much less comment with in a way that’s meaningful. Using ChatGPT with structured set of questions, user could rapidly generate more surface area to solicit additional discussion.

My rough estimate is anyone taking part in an idea forum would need to spend multiple more time contributing to others in return for get significantly less contributions back.

Another, unrelated option is to directly contact an expert on the topic, but again, unless you’re actually contributing value back to the exchange, this is going to also have limited returns.

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