Ask HN: What are the most reliable tech sites in east and south Asia? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the most reliable tech sites in east and south Asia?

89 pointsgreggsy34 comments

Almost all of my tech news comes via HN, SubStack, Twitter and Reddit, but they only occasionally cite blogs or reports from China, Japan, South Korea or India - countries where a significant proportion of technology is built, designed, or supported from.

While there is a lot of tech news related to what is going on in those countries (often for the wrong reasons), it’s hard to gage what the tech ecosystem is up to without knowing where to look.

Language barriers aside (which are becoming less of an issue anyway), where would one go for reliable and direct news around semiconductor developments in Taiwan, or the weird products that emerge out of Shenzhen through AliExpress?

Is there an HN of India? Or Indonesia?

View on HN

For India+ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore) I recommend The Ken.

It's basically Stratechery but much more informed about the India+SE Asian technology business. It doesn't hurt that most of the writers for it are ex-VCs and PEs who have worked in the India+ASEAN sector for over a decade.

Inc42 is decent as well.

That said, I'm honestly not impressed with Stratechery anymore. I personally feel the quality of analysis has kinda gone down (sort of feels like he's grasping at straws). But maybe I'm just feeling Dunning-Kruger effect

It's quite far from Stratechery. The Ken is more reportage, investigative at times, but clickbaity at other times.

+1 to The Ken. It's well worth the subscription.

https://restofworld.org is a good place to start.

Interesting news aggregator (looks like), nice one!

Not a news aggregator - all original reporting

I found the site too 'Western'. It feels like reading a NYT or BBC article about what's going on in Asia rather than reading a local paper.

Fair, but most (if not all) of the reporters are in (and often from) the countries or regions they report in.

Eric Schmidt's daughter's pet project is hardly an unbiased source.

Some of these are excellent recommendations, while some are horrible (sorry!). Rather than replying to multiple posts, here is an alternative to consider.

Add Google Alerts for the keywords you want - "AliExpress", "taiwan semiconductor", or with wildcards in between as needed. Keep monitoring the alerts for several weeks. You will find a lot of general news sites, but you will also find who really publishes things that are useful and interesting to you.

Bonus tip: Once you find these sites, keep monitoring them. Find out where they get their news from. Mostly, they will quote or link to the original source. Go to those places. Those are the pristine sources you want.

Asianometry is good youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@Asianometry

Impress Watch and ITMedia to read general tech news, reviews, and some analysis. https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/ https://www.itmedia.co.jp/

Hatena bookmark is now a toxic community in general, but its search feature is useful. Watching good bookmarking user is also interesting. https://b.hatena.ne.jp/q/Ruby?target=title&sort=recent&users...

zenn.dev and Qiita are like dev.to/substack community.

Japan's HN/Reddit equivalent is Twitter but hard to follow/filtering.

I'm also interested in Mainland China tech websites.

Stratechery (https://stratechery.com) is written by Ben Thompson, who is based in Taiwan.

The one I'm following

https://chinai.substack.com/

https://www.techinasia.com/

https://pandaily.substack.com/

dealstreetasia.com

https://kr-asia.com/

chinamoneynetwork.com

I was also going to suggest TechinAsia.com

Japanese tech news site sort of like Gizmodo from the 90s.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/

How popular is this website in Japan?

There's a disclaimer about the stories being machine translated, but I'd still like to know how "Elon Musk" became "Earon Mask."[1]

[1] https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20230529-elon-musk-cut-twit...

Japanese is limited in what phonetic sounds can be written, so I'm guessing that's just a direct translation of what his name becomes in Japanese

Ah, yes that makes sense. I wasn't considering that the translation would have been from a completely different alphabet.

Gigazine (jp) is now too much article translated from HN headline. It seems to re-translate to English. Not much worth to read. Its quality isn't good.

DigiTimes Asia has some decent semiconductor industry coverage.

https://www.techinasia.com/ -- they have high quality tech journalism for Asia

This actually had some good focus on Indonesia and SEA in general, which was a pleasant surprise

https://fossbytes.com/ is India's equivalent of The Verge

Home page is full of thin affiliate pages. I clicked the "News" link at top, and it seems to be a page with links to affiliate pages of movies.

https://b.hatena.ne.jp/hotentry/it is an HN of Japan, but I don't think it's reliable enough.

https://en.pingwest.com/ from China.

Interesting name "Ping West" XD

PCQuest:

https://www.pcquest.com/

I have some Asian and Asiatic ones from my medium blog traffic notes:

zk.com apptractor.ru awayvk.com

zk stuff usually is in English.

Any korean sites? (even if it's in Korean?) interested as a language learner

@ecommurz on Instagram for Indonesia. They communicate in the language of meme, but they do have the latest updates and a strong community. Leaks somehow get there within a day; we joke that you shouldn't share anything on social media that you don't want to see on murz.

Malaysia has multiple communities, but Developer Kaki on Facebook is the most representative of the tech community now. https://forum.lowyat.net/ is more for tech enthusiasts but there's similar overlap without the elitism.

Also I think it's interesting to expect a tech community to look like Blind or HN, but in much of the world, it could be a Telegram group or a SMF forum.

TechinAsia.com and Yourstory.com

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