I'd be interested in seeing what Hacker News thinks of this site. It's the best one I know about the general topic of socializing.
No hard feelings if this is deemed off-topic, I never would have even submitted this without the other article appearing.
Socializing is where geeks get into the other kinds of hard thought. Having to work hard to get data. Having a bunch of apparently valid ideas that yield contradictory results. Arriving at valid, logically sufficient ideas, but discovering that they aren't suitable for application in practice. Living, over extended time intervals, with observations and techniques that you empirically know to be valid, but which you can't find satisfying explanations for.
Plus it's universal. We could have similar discussions about painting, music, or gardening, but only a small minority of HN readers could contribute to each of those topics.
(P.S. Difficult engineering problems are discussed here often, but I think people mostly tackle them vicariously. In the real world, solving a hard engineering problem is rarely the most efficient way to deal with it. It's kind of a last resort.)
Not that I'm saying it's bad or anything. Just a textbook case of like encouraging like.
And goes to show that on a rapid-fire site like this, speed of moderation is vital - a mere 6 hours between the first article's submission and then the submission of this one, explicitly because the poster was encouraged by the cultural green light of seeing that the first one had survived. That's astoundingly fast, when you think about it.