Ask HN: Does anyone know of a general news site akin to Hacker News?

The funny thing is that I find HN especially useful for non tech news. It's highly biased for tech news, but only the most important normal news make it to the front page, so it's a great filter.

I don’t find HN to be a particularly good filter for general news. It’s got political, economic, geographical, and social bias alongside its topic bias.

This is very true.

But perhaps the more important filtering is on quantity as opposed to neutrality? Perhaps filtering out a large amount of news, even with some bias, is the lesser evil, as compared to news outlets that depend on stirring the emotions of their readers every single day?

Wikinews used to be okay in this regard, but the German version I used has died down a bit, and the English one is even more centered on the Anglosphere than HN.

Filtering out news with (probably more than) some bias seems dangerous in encouraging echo chambers.

I have been extremely happy to find

https://www.allsides.com/

Especially when it surfaces a topic with three articles from across the bias spectrum, it feels very rewarding being able to get a fuller picture.

Sometimes there aren't multiple sides, especially when it comes to science reporting. You have fact-based reporting, and then you have conspiracy theories.

How would you handle news where there is sufficient evidence to show one set of reporting is accurate and relatively unbiased, but another report is all made up and designed to inflame its audience?

That's rarely the case with science reporting. The subjects that are sufficiently rigorous to allow no reasonable debate (the physical sciences) are rarely political enough to inspire unreasonable debate.

On the other hand, the subjects that are politically contentious are not rigorous and leave plenty of room for reasonable debate.

If anything, science reporting tends to err the other way, uncritically reporting sensational results that contradict one other, have not been confirmed, or fail to replicate.

I rarely see a popular science article that doesn't report the results of a single experiment as if they were instantly established fact.

I agree with what you say about sensationalist science reporting. It's very common to take one study and then have dummies who aren't scientists report on it as if we've just found out how to live forever. Science is very tricky because it's complicated and the barrier to entry is high - you can't just extrapolate things out like that.

However, there's also the other side of things, which is mostly established science. Which, you're right, don't typically spark political debate... but they do sometimes. Vaccines, climate change, cholesterol, seed oils. The RFK Jr faction of anti-science is rife these days.

I'm not familiar with all the details of RFK Jr's position, the public debate about it, nor how many of the things reported in the news are accurate (truth being the first casualty of politics).

But I just looked for those topics in the official Make America Healthy Again report [1].

The positions in that report on those topics were not so unreasonable. It says seed oils are a concern because they are ultra-processed fats, only mentions cholesterol in the context of PFAS, and says "vaccines benefit children by protecting them from infectious diseases" but we may not need to give children nearly 30 doses of them.[2]

I do think his general position that processed food is unhealthy is not only reasonable, it generally matches conventional modern medical thinking, even if he is wrong about a few details.

And of course people looking for political ammunition only look for details they can use against him.

1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/MAHA-R...

2: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/imz-schedules/index.html

> even if he is wrong about a few details.

https://www.notus.org/health-science/make-america-healthy-ag...

In this example it sounds like there are multiple sides, just that one is baseless. Even these though I have found come from somewhere, maybe a misunderstanding or a conflation of unrelated topics. While not unlikely intentional on the author's side, the readers are not so sinister I think. Being able to read this while grounded with the other more factual side helps when discussing with those I may otherwise generally disagree with. It has felt somewhat like language learning, understanding it helps with communication with people with a very different background.

Admittedly it takes more time to do this, and I can see not being able to invest that in a general sense. I personally think it's worth it.

That's an interesting approach. Unfortunately it's too US-centric (probably by design).

Does anyone know anything similar covering international news?

I think you may be on to something here. When it comes to news, none is bad but so is too much. This would be true even if all the consumed news was politically neutral and completely objectively factual and accurate. But of course all news is biased, and much very deliberately so to the point of obscuring the truth of it. LLMs are not going to make this situation better.

I want to be aware of what's happening, but not to drown in it. How to achieve that is not only a good question but the right question.

Oddly enough I had been considering making a similar thread but asking for something akin to HN but with less non-tech news. Perhaps the question that both I and OP are asking is, does anyone know of a site that stays on topic?

>Thoughts? If this doesn’t exist, would people be interested in it being created, and does anyone think it has a chance of taking off

There is absolutely a market for it but it will eventually become a tech forum.

Edit: I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.

Edit: Prepended "Edit:" to my apology even though it wasn't an edit, it seems more appropriate as an edit. Once again, I apologize for the meta posting, Saturday night, what can I say.

People have made many such curations of HN over the years. I can't recall any names of them or if they still exist but just commenting to say it has been done. Honestly, you could probably just have some AI based chrome extension do the filtering for you.

I think lobste.rs stays on topic (computers and programming).

Every time I go there the only threads which have any discussion tend to be AI/LLM threads, so technically on topic but I think my previous post should make it clear I am a humanities sort and as a humanities sort I have certain expectations of the STEM community and expect them to stay on their side of the fence. This seems completely reasonable and fair.

They banned the Brave user agent I use, for a transgression from many years ago and hasn't reoccurred, and has nothing to do with the way I use that browser. That's their choice of course, but not one I respect - different if it was an ongoing issue. Why don't they ban Chrome or Firefox for their various and more recent privacy violating problems?

To those that upvoted me, I appreciate the sentiment but I should have been downvoted into oblivion. Upvotes are not likes, they are curation and moderation; upvote comments which produce good discussion even if that comment is terrible and low effort and downvote those comments you love or agree with but will never produce any worthwhile discussion. Sometimes it it hurts to do but it must be done if we want to maintain quality.

With that said, I have had fun tonight, thanks for humoring me but my previous post really should not be top post. If you feel bad about downvoting it or unupvoting it for what ever reason than just upvote this one and downvote my previous, no harm, nor foul, but lets not have my previous post be top post in the thread and lets make sure top post in every thread is good solid, on topic discussion.

Of the top 10 HN posts atm, 8 are closely related to software, one is about tech but not computers (Coventry Very Light Rail), and just one is really non-tech (My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle).

Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?

I have already asked for that post to be downvoted into oblivion, see my reply to myself. I despise most side-tracks in internet discussion, they have a tendency to become the main track and uninteresting. I don't expect or want HN to be purely tech but I would love it if people would not use upvoting as a like/agreement and use it to make sure anyone who opens a thread does not have to wade through irrelevant nonsense, pedantry, virtue signalling, etc before getting to the discussion of the thread's topic.

People complain about the lack of humor here but it served a purpose.

It doesn't exist yet. I would argue even HN has its bias. For example for a long time anything MySQL or Java dont get much upvote.

I actually want something that sort of combine the both. I want something that tells me what everyone is reading. Because I dont even consume mainstream news any more. And something that is not mainstream but interesting.

I also think the design of HN is a giant filter for 80 to 90% of internet users.

I also use RSS feeds. A couple sites that are useful to me that I picked up from HN submissions recently:

https://www.phoronix.com/ https://www.neowin.net/ https://kbd.news/ https://betanews.com/

/r/anime_titties on reddit. ignore the name, it helps it go incognito as a better current news / politics sub.

I’m disappointed to find that it is a news /politics sub

If you go to r/worldpolitics, you’ll get how that subreddit got its name. NSFW

FARK is one of the oldest and best for “breaking” news and good for keeping up to date on world politics.

https://www.fark.com/

Anime Titties (not a joke) is great for doom scrolling and realizing how fucked everything is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/

lobster.rs is good and tech focused.

I think it should discard any submissions that are already on Hacker news because it's often same/same. If I think it was reliably different I'd visit it more.

Ditto on lobste.rs - I’ve found myself browsing it more and more when I’ve run out of HN stories to peruse.

Any good iOS client ?

Safari browser

lobste.rs is always called out in threads like this but what I see on the homepage, per usual, is dead threads..

There's https://www.newsminimalist.com/ where 30k news articles per day is ranked by significance, maybe it's what you're looking for?

There is lesswrong, slashdot and lobsters which do have good similarity with HN

Most likely, this is what Digg's comeback is going to be: https://reboot.digg.com

If you are willing to slow down, Tildes.

Small, laid back, conversation focused, but the coverage is definitely more 'general.'

I personally find it really refreshing compared to something like reddit (or even here). It's small enough that the comments section don't feel like an artificial jostle for the fastest, most attention getting response -- and the community seems to maintain that culture well via both scale and rate of scaling.

I've built https://www.mosaique.info (RSS supported) for this (mostly global news).

You won't be able to comment but it will show you what officials, companies and "experts" have said about a particular event. There are a bunch of other features too.

I have considered building this for my own country a couple of times. My general thought was to have left and right areas with submission/discussion a la HN and try to curate a middle of the road point if view from it. But I see too much headache dealing with the extremes and trolls. It would require more passion than I can muster.

Some other:

Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708

Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919

The best one I've found is Progscrape: https://progscrape.com/ "All the news that's fit to scrape." A great mix of tech and non-tech news, with plenty of stories that are think-worthy.

It’s not the same but I’ve been using particle for genera news. It’s an algorithmic news aggregator, theoretically you can tune it for your preferences. I don’t use the commentary feature and there doesn’t appear to be a community yet.

I've been using "clean news" https://cleannews.fyi/

and add it to my RSS feed. this gives me news articles that dont have hyperbolic headlines.

The Fediverse, particularly the Reddit-inspired one (Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin). If you want a specific address, try mine: https://lemmings.world

There's https://www.aldaily.com/, though there's no forum. Great articles more from the liberal arts perspective.

I mostly get my tech news through SkimFeed: https://skimfeed.com/tech.html

I have launched a similar concept as Hacker News, an aggregator for general news. It’s a side project. It’s early alpha. But I think it’s important work.

Link in my profile.

An interesting collection: https://thedukereport.substack.com/

and an oldie: https://www.zerohedge.com/

https://www.metafilter.com

Long-standing community blog with an eclectic mix of link-heavy text posts. The Q&A subsite, Ask MetaFilter, is also quite good.

Reddit is it. The dedicated subreddits give you what you want.

No way! HN is one of a kind. Sorry.

wait for new digg, I hope it doesn't turn into a new reddit

I use brutalist.report

How about ground news?

Formerly, parts of the formerly free website formerly known as Twitter.

Comments here and everywhere else are meh. For general news, lite.cnn.com is fine.

Metafilter. Many users here would probably not vibe with that community, since it tends to be very liberal and people will call you out for your bullshit. However, quality of discussion tends to be quite high. (Or was when I was last active.)

Metafilter, hands down.

Reddit, but you have to carefully select your subs. And it's not very useful for politics, because it's very one-sided, very far left, and they ban you for any transgressions that don't fit the narrative.

Should we create a subreddit for this, with a news/politics focus but an hn vibe?

Good luck with that. Their moderation is too insane and not transparent for my taste.

And, considering HN is quite far left, you won't create anything new really.

You think HN is left?

Ha.

HN is at best center-right.

Try posting anything right-wing, like government crime stats of black vs white people. You will get banned.

Racism = right wing? You mean alt-right?

If you think posting crime stats of all races is racism, you got brainwashed by a cult.

They did say HN is center-right.

They love to pull up the crime stats but never the traffic stop stats or police-initiated contact stats or use of force stats. Wonder why.

Lots of people here favour a lenient regulatory environment and are pro business which seems classically centre right.

Nuanced discussion of things like immigration are challenging though, in all fora I think. I’ve tried to make the point that this is a great opportunity for Europe to pick up valuable American immigrants but somehow am apparently being xenophobic by sharing data of net tax contributions of immigrants by region of origin

That's simply off-topic. Not sure why you would post that on Hacker News. Most things political simply get downvoted on that basis.

Because that's not right-wing, that's just explicitly racist. I mean, are we really going to sit here and pretend to be so stupid that we might legitimately think someone is posting that for not racist purposes?

Look, you can be as right-wing as you want and get away with it, nobody cares. The problem is a lot of right-wingers just... can't do it. They can't. They have to throw in something racist, or something sexist, or say something disparaging about brown people. It's like some kind of compulsion, I don't know.

You can talk about immigration policy allllll you want. You can. What you can't do is call Puerto Ricans trash. That's off the table.

So, if your example you're looking up to is someone like Trump and his cronies, that basically means yes, you're censored. Not because you're right-wing, but because you're crude and don't know how to express your views in a way that isn't disingenuous. Just be normal, be good faith, don't race bait, and you know... I promise it'll work out. I promise.

Well, the first comment accurately describes reddit AND it hasn't been downvoted to hell, so you might be right.

Reddit isn't far right, except some esoteric subs either.

Reddit is generally fairly centrist-left for the most part.

Name any far-left position that's not widely supported on Reddit.

Price controls, direct democracy, abolishing capital. I'm sure you can find places where these are supported but similarly you can find subreddits where far right ideology is supported. The average redditor looks at memes, askreddit threads, and whatever hobby subreddit exists for them.

All of these are widely supported on Reddit.

Conclusion: US left is western european center-right. These political denominators are all relative to your local center.

I think that just shows our different perceptions - I, too, see many HN posts as very left. Frequently seen in assumptions about values/ethics/morals...

Update: On further reflection, it is not HN that I am describing. It is the content of the posts that seem to lean that way...

I am outside both of the US parties, I think it is like being sober at a party of those partaking in alcohol. Different perception of the same situation.

HN is definitely left of center by American standards. For example, it's generally anti-Trump, while half the country supports him.

O RLY? Which right-wing positions are common/popular on HN?

... Very far left. How do you measure "far left"? Do you mean they are concerned with all people, and they don't suffer illusions of "I built my fortune on my own" (ignoring all the socialist infrastructure which enabled their success)?

Let's just say that if you got all your news from reddit, you would be very surprised that conservatives anywhere ever won an election.

that really depends on which subreddits you're in!

Not "very far left" as in socialist / communist. "Very far left" as in "a large and vocal majority of liberals and progressives" which, when combined with the general Reddit tendency to groupthink and mock/attack opinions that aren't the subreddit status quo, make it a very uncomfortable place to be. (And I'm on the left!)

This just demonstrates how far the Overton window has shifted in US discourse if one views HN a hive of "vocal majority of liberals and progressives"

My comment was regarding Reddit, not HN. I would characterize HN as left libertarian, in general.