Ask HN: Alternatives to HN
Are there other similar sites to HN which focuses more on technical topics, constructive discussions and other interesting things?
There are also sites which focus more on specific topics... if you're into server-side Java stuff, there's http://theserverside.com, if you're into programming language research, there's http://lambda-the-ultimate.org, etc., etc.
And a lot of the more niche subreddits are actually pretty good. Stay away from /r/funny, /r/politics and the other "big" ones and check out /r/machinelearning, /r/compsci, /r/systems, /r/math, or /r/compscipapers, etc.
(Bought since mentioned in Arrested Development Season 4 and I'm otherwise not sure what to do with it.)
It's really too bad, in a way, that the founders of /. didn't take a more aggressive stance towards eliminating the silly bullshit. That used to be my absolute favorite site on the 'Net, back in the day.
Part of the problem is it's not the same site it was in 1998. The other problem is it is the same site it was in 1998.
The level of discussion though is much better here.
> And a lot of the more niche subreddits are actually pretty good. Stay away from /r/funny, /r/politics and the other "big" ones
esp. stay away from r/programing. It degenerated to the moderators' fanzine.
There are some other worthwhile tech communities on G+ - just visit https://plus.google.com/communities and do some searches, e.g. for your favorite programming language, platform, or framework.
For programming related communities, there are too many newbies who don't bother googling asking the same stupid question over and over. For some others, many are reposting the same thing that made it to the front page of HN or Reddit, to earn 'creds' I guess. There are a few obscure ones that post high quality content that I wouldn't discover otherwise, they usually lack lively discussions.
Thanks :)
I contacted the founder the day it was released, 4 days after and 2 weeks after, all with well thought out emails which I spent some serious time on. Unfortunately he didn't respond to any off them, not even with a simple "fuck off."
Especially after reading a bit about the background, and stumbling on this link on the front page:)
http://pthree.org/2013/05/30/openssh-keys-and-the-drunken-bi...
feltocraig [at] gmail [dot] com
samweinberg [at] me.com
mengkuan [at] gmail.com
wesleythurner gmail.com
hn at zxvf dot us
Thank you!
thanks
Update: Thanks mate, I received the invite :-)
maybe it will result in more discussion around there.
And many other subreddits besides.
The Comic Book Guy is strong over there - meaning that a significant number of conversations carry that sort of condescending, unfriendly tone as the Simpson's Comic Book Guy; intending to show that the author is clearly a superior human being due to their knowledge of ARM opcodes and their interaction with GCC or whatever else the subject is.
The biggest risks I see for HN are:
* Simply getting too big. Not much to do about that.
* Noisy political articles (like, say, about China...) that attract people who like noisy political discussions.
* Outrage articles. There are a lot of horrible injustices in the world. Enough to completely drown out tech and startup news, and in the grand scheme of things, often much more important than, say, Scala vs Clojure.
I really enjoying a lot of the ShowHN, Startup news, and discussions around programming languages/libraries.
I primarily come to HN to learn. This seems to be the place that many clever people congregate to share opinions and ideas. I really just like to listen to what they have to say to each other.
However, it seems that a lot of the good submissions drop off the front page after just a few hours. The ones that tend to stick around seem to be more "political" than anything else. I guess it's easier to voice an opinion on an outrage-article as you don't need any real expertise.
I do wish we could just get back to talking mostly about development/tech stuff. There is so much to learn in this industry and HN is one of the few places where it all comes together.
Wait, are we talking about /r/programming or HN? ;)
Seriously though, I see a lot of that here, it's frustrating. Lots of rude, condescending ad hominem shit. Lots of Alpha Geek posturing and (to borrow pg's term) middlebrow dismissals to seem smarter.
I get that HN commenters are the pinnacle of the design industry, but there are better ways to remind people of it than ripping apart something unique based on the color of the buttons on the web page.
Reading some of the threads around here you'd think we're giving points for being rude, condescending, assuming everyone else is a complete idiot, and utter and complete verbal evisceration of other posters.
In short, there are an awful lot of people here that behave like complete assholes to everyone else, and when called out on it they'll yell loudly about how they're being oppressed for expressing valid opinions in vitriolic ways, and then follow that up with some variation of "well, the world isn't nice, wuss".
I'm not old, but I long for the old days :)
The second highest voted comment on Reddit is "this is high levels of bad ass." at 276 points. I guess HN is still far ahead of other communities after all (if you're interested in serious discussion).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998 [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/19rzi3/breaking...
So is HN ahead of /r/programming? At times, definitely. However, anyone who frequents both will attest to the fact that /r/programming is much better at ignoring linkbait, while HN seems to fall for it on a daily basis.
You might just have a point.[1]
[1]: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=%22am...
It drove me so completely batty that I founded a related subreddit in anger.
But for me the people on proggit are too communist. If you show the slightest bit of evidence that you're (at least somewhat) in it for the money, they hit the downvote button hard.
^really interesting subreddit imo.
1) reddit - here, you have to subscribe to the right mix of subreddits according to your interests
2) Google+ - also quite good, but one needs to do some work, namely to find the right communities, pages and people to follow.
But if you are asking about sites with the same "genre" as HN (the same functionality), then no, I haven't found alternative to HN.
could you link? I subscribed to some lang/framework/os ones, but didn't find much value there and found it's better to follow people. if you got some it would be nice.
Can you recommend some subreddits beside /r/programming and the subreddits mentioned in the sidebar of /r/programming)? I have not found a generic software engineering subreddit (probably without any web development content), which is quite strange.
coding, cognitivelinguistics, cogsci, compsci, compscipapers, criticalsoftware, crypto, erlang, gamedev, haskell, icfpcontest, MachineLearning, mathpsych, netsec, ReverseEngineering, systems, truegamedev, types
I built a tongue in cheek tool to keep track of communities like HN that might be relevant to other interests. However, I'm the only one that has ever used it, and I think all the things I've submitted have already been mentioned here.
Fun little app, thanks for sharing!
I'm being serious.
If you're looking for a raw source of interesting material—you can often find some really interesting stuff.
The Op asked for a HN alternative. (Arxiv is great, I subscribed to all rss) But I bet you can't comment on a dissertation/tehsis/publication like you do on HN/reddit. hehe :)
Don't know why your laughing.
http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+...
It's not a perfect version of 2010 HN, but with some pruning and grafting I imagine it could be close.
You basically just follow topics/sites and it suggests to you more sites/topics which are similar.
Browsing from there I get all the big articles on hacker news and from other sources which I wasn't aware of previously.
It is not complete yet, but I could use some feedback. Specifically regarding a commenting system. I am thinking about rolling my own, but that comes with a lot of issues. Any ideas on how you would like it to look?
The site has the ability to curate posts, and then as you follow topics or even other users, you can start to build out a custom stream of news by sources that you like or are interested in. Both curated items and stream items are ordered based on the amount of likes that they receive. There is no down voting.
Each user also has a profile page showing where they typically "like" items and where they post them.
There is also http://www.altdevblogaday.com/ also for game development.
Recently http://flipcode.com has been getting up from long sleep (it was my favourite site back in the days).
The content there is MUCH less tech focused, it's more about longform writing, and the comments are superb.
I created a forum service. Flat time ordered comment system is easy to read. You can create your own community.
Here is a link : http://www.echojs.com