Libre News, political discussion powered by Arc Lang
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Leaving the trolls to troll each other. Unfortunately, dog-fooding isn't very popular in the troll world-- so the site dies et voila! Here we are.
True, but I hope the mods/admins of this don't get discouraged because we do badly need a place to talk about these things. Spilling over here isn't helping and will only drag things down by souring the mood, since these topics aren't what most people who visit HN are here for.
Politics is one of those Neodymium magnets that seem to attract the worst of the worst, however, that's only due to unchecked emotions in a similar vein to religion. It's hard to tackle an idea without touching the human behind the keyboard. But I believe such a forum can exist and thrive, though it would take a super-human effort to moderate.
Whether or not that means it shouldn't be here at all is up for debate, but don't act as though he's being insulting when he's just supporting something that's reasonable. He can voice his reasons just as you can voice yours. You're the one being more insulting.
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
So basically anything upvoted by this community is considered on topic since enough people deem it gratifying intellectual curiosity.
Secondly, the insulting part is about how he snarkly listed Snowden alongside conspiracy theories. Like him or not, the risks he's taken to get this information out deserve him some level of repspect.
Second, I disagree, and agree with the grandparent that that other place (or any other place, really) would make a perfect place for discussing all those things you list.
Actionable articles about the business of software and technology to help build same. That's what we're here for. If you'd like more stuff to talk about, there's lots more internet out there. You're free to hang out at more than one place.
This absolutely includes NSA/Snowden news and any other news relating the intersection between politics and technology.
A snark one-two liner sitting on the top of the comment page is hardly a comment that's adding anything interesting to the discussion of Libre News
As a wise man once said, and I paraphrase: So basically anything upvoted by this community is considered on topic since enough people deemed it worthwhile.
Really?
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
The guidelines do also say, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [etc.]," but then qualify, "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
It might be that HN has reached a point at which there ought to be a split with accompanying comment police to enforce it, but it seems presumptuous to assume that the decision has already been made in alignment with your particular preferences.
That's not true. PG has said the opposite many times.
Commenting is for when one has something to say.
It's hilarious because in every thread about every piece of surveillance infrastructure that ratchets the United States irreversibly towards totalitarianism, there are complaints that this is political and inappropriate for Hacker News.
You want a tech startup hook on every Snowden leak? 1984-tech is probably a great field for entreperneurial minded hackers. Too many people are stuck disrupting laundry and taxicabs! Think big, and disrupt democracy. Change the way people cling to power.
All of the surveillance state's gear is software, written by developers. Just think: you could be one of those developers! Get your piece of the pie, and talk about it on HN. There's a whole world of posts there:
- Best ways to monitor mobile use patterns while minimizing app footprint?
- What database should I store the entire world's email in?
- Ask HN: I'm a founder of a spying SaaS platform -- how can I launder "black money" from intelligence agencies?
- Ask HN: What Saudi telecos are hiring hackers to help them spy on their people?
Just remember to pitch a fit every time the mobile equivalent of a popup ad gets blogged about. Because those developers are giving us all a bad name, damn it.
People just can't help looking at problems like that even when the consequences just aren't good from a civil liberties perspective. I think that's what makes it great HN material.
(Also I wish I could upvote this more for "disrupt democracy" :)
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
And for "on topic":
anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Mainstream US-centric political news is not particularly intellectually gratifying and not what this site has ever done well. Reddit and Twitter had all the same pointless arguments.
And I say "mainstream" because perhaps the only hacker-specific part of the story was Snowden being a sys-admin. His revelations and the impact of the story were felt across all of society and were not specifically related to hackerdom (the follow up stories about DEF CON or protecting your own privacy by technical means, however, were clearly hacker oriented and well suited to HN).
1. Was this created by pg?
2. If not, why does everyone have an obsession with cloning Hacker News?
1. No it wasn't created by pg and it's not associated with him or ycombinator. Of course Arc is definitely associated with pg, Libre News is not.
2. Personally, I created this site because I am interested in Arc and wanted to experiment with it. I also wanted to provide a service for others (one that I was also interested in) and a non-censored news source that encouraged discussion seemed like a good idea.
I haven't looked closely at ARC, so perhaps this is a foolish question, but was this as turn-key as unpacking the distribution, changing some names and colors, and running it on some server, or did you need to make substantial changes in order to make it your own, or even to get it to run?
https://github.com/skx/gathering/
This is written in Perl, and has some interesting features. But I was inspired by HN because it works well, in its minimal fashion.
All but 9 of the submissions on the front page are from ACN.
That way everyone's front page is based off what they tend to like, and what people who like similar stuff to them liked. That way you don't have to fracture stuff into 50 different communities and try to figure out what kind of content is acceptable in each, and what ones you want to subscribe to.
There is no reason you have to select content purely based on the website it's from, or the words it contains, but it's a really good filter for getting rid of stuff you definitely don't like. I.e. if you filtered reddit this way, most images and memes would get ranked way lower for me. Someone else might have articles or news stories ranked lower.
But mostly I'm looking to automatically find people who have similar interests or voting patterns, and then selecting based on what those people voted for to see what you might like.
This was really just done for tinkering's sake, not trying to make a successful "second HN strictly for politics". I actually built it to feed a news map here:
Thanks for the share, would love to compare notes. I'll sign up for LibreNews and check in every now and then.
Please, this is 2013, #000 on #ccc, not #ddd on #ccc.