6 ms·
What are your rabbit holes on the internet? (For instance, HN one we all share)
If some of yours are controversial, please don't sit tight - make a throwaway account
- banterfoil 10y agoNot 100% sure what you mean by rabbit hole tbh. But here goes: http://pastebin.com/trends http://pastebin.com/trends https://github.com/trending https://github.com/trending https://security.stackexchange.com/ https://security.stackexchange.com/ /r/datahoarder /r/stallmanwasright IRC
- crablar 10y agoSoftware Engineering Daily www.softwareengineeringdaily.com
- robertelder 10y agoThe question isn't restricted to technology sites, but I'll restrict the context of my answer that way. I've struggled to find sites that are similar to HN. Subreddits are about the closest thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming https://www.reddit.com/r/programming https://www.reddit.com/r/coding https://www.reddit.com/r/coding + Numerous other subreddits for every language/technology. I really wish there was something just like HN, but for videos (like hour long talks). Does anyone know of any?
- c0nducktr 10y agoYou might like the Lectures subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/ https://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dudul 10y agoWikipedia. I will often get there looking for something specific, and end up following multiple links, opening dozens of tabs and spending several hours reading about various topics.
- chollida1 10y agoFor me it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics I'm an engineer by schooling but I've worked as a quant for the past 10 years. This means that I know a whole lot of "applied" math but will get tripped up by the formal terminology used. This usually means I google a term and end up on wikipedia, where learning that term leads me to realized I need to look up the formal definition of another term, rinse and repeat. As an example from my browser history, I was just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics for fun which lead to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency which lead to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean which lead to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrarily_large https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrarily_large
- agumonkey 10y agoRemember, they all lead to philosophy.
- thrill 10y agoWhich eventually leads here: https://goo.gl/PhVfQd https://goo.gl/PhVfQd
- jerf 10y agoAn idea that I will never implement is to create a mathematics wiki site structured as a "lattice", meaning that all links within a given explanation can only point "down", for suitable definitions of down. It's frustrating to try to learn anything from Wikipedia because it'll freely jump up to post-graduate math on any topic without warning. Despite it being suboptimal from a pure math perspective, I figured "down" would likely end up being "a topic covered earlier in the standard mathematics curriculum"; any other attempt to be clever I came up with always backfired for the "able to learn math from this resource" goal. The second paragraph of the Wikipedia page on integers, about as simple a "math" page as I can imagine, as I write this, brings in "subset" and "countably infinite", and the third paragraph just goes off the rails if you're trying to use this to learn about the integers: "The integers form the smallest group and the smallest ring containing the natural numbers. In algebraic number theory, the integers are sometimes called rational integers to distinguish them from the more general algebraic integers. In fact, the (rational) integers are the algebraic integers that are also rational numbers." I know enough of the relevant maths to actually perfectly understand that. I also remember enough about when I didn't understand the relevant maths to remember what it felt like to read stuff like that. My point here is not that it's a "bad page", just that it is very hard to learn anything that way.
- sheraz 10y agoOn a more lighthearted note, I've given more time to slither.io than I would like to admit...
- jpindar 10y agoIt's a great game to play locally on my phone, but I find the online version usually lags so much as to be unplayable.
- odabaxok 10y agohttps://www.quora.com/ https://www.quora.com/
- agumonkey 10y agohttp://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DougMerritt http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DougMerritt used to be (not that particular page, even though it could)
- pinouchon 10y agohttp://lesswrong.com http://lesswrong.com http://www.semanticscholar.org http://www.semanticscholar.org And more recently, the homepage of some researchers, including: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rsalakhu/publications.html http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rsalakhu/publications.html http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/ So much good stuff
- clavalle 10y agohttp://tvtropes.org/ http://tvtropes.org/ As an fiction writer wannabe, this site is both inspirational and disheartening. There are no new ideas under the sun but the variety and potential for new combinations is dizzying! https://boardgamegeek.com/ https://boardgamegeek.com/ All the information about boardgames you could consume in about four thousand lifetimes.
- patmcguire 10y agoMatt Levine's Money Stuff: The further down the link stack you go the weirder it gets. Slate Star Codex: A bit out of the mainstream, and he clearly has much more contact with people far, far outside of it.
- fellellor 10y agoI really enjoy Matt Levine's work. His articles on insider trading are simply some of the most enjoyable stuff I've read.
- dredmorbius 10y agoInternet Archive's texts collection.
- smuss77 10y agohttp://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ Economics/politics/finance blog by yves smith http://www.zerohedge.com/ http://www.zerohedge.com/ Anti-establishment finance/economics/politics
- LyndsySimon 10y agoI used to love ZeroHedge, but their signal:noise seems to have gone way downhill in the last year or two. There was always more than a healthy dose of paranoia and unconfirmed news, but it's gotten harder and harder to find the "good stuff".
- IgorPartola 10y agoimgur.com for random entertainment Wikipedia about random subjects I come up with reddit.com/r/arduino and related for project ideas hackaday.com Edmunds.com car reviews, at least when car shopping Random sites on Wikia about TV shows or video games.
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoCompulsively reloading SO tags that I follow. Usually I can find questions I can't answer, which leads down the rabbit hole of learning it. Maybe I can even end up answering it by the end. win/win.
- rollcat 10y agonews.rollc.at, my personal feed aggregator. It pulls most content from HN & Reddit, but there's also a bunch of random blogs.
- sbarg 10y agoThe setup at https://usesthis.com/ https://usesthis.com/ What do people use to get stuff done
- bbctol 10y agohttp://fanlore.org/wiki/ http://fanlore.org/wiki/ A wiki of nerd fandom stretching back to the 50s. I can spend hours just hitting "Random Article" and seeing the minutes of a meeting on Starsky and Hutch slashfiction in some hotel in 1978.
- unsignedqword 10y agoTwitter is a big one. Sometimes you just find that someone retweeted somebody else or that someone replied to them so you just peek into their page and you scroll down and occasionally find something interesting or funny; repeat until I'm tired of it.
- sleepingbot 10y ago*faircompanies. Videos by Kirsten Dirksen (check YT channel "kirstendirksen".)
- tuned 10y agoBeing and Time by Heidegger, a never-ending book; the same for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
- nickserv 10y agoI like to read the major online news sources from different countries and compare: http://www.liberation.fr/ http://www.liberation.fr/ http://www.lemonde.fr/ http://www.lemonde.fr/ http://elpais.com/ http://elpais.com/ http://www.bbc.com/news http://www.bbc.com/news http://www.npr.org/ http://www.npr.org/ http://tass.ru/en/world http://tass.ru/en/world It's really quite surprising the differences you'll see as far as what is covered, how it's covered, and the placement & size of the articles. Not to mention of course the content & bias of the articles. By combining the different views, I like to think I'm able to get a more complete picture of the "truth", although as you can see I read relatively left-leaning publications (apart from TASS, obviously) so that is not to say my worldview is completely fair and unbiased. Other than that the usual techie stuff: ars technica, phoronix, nautilus, etc
- _nalply 10y agohttp://tvtropes.org/ http://tvtropes.org/ – click on the blue «Random Trope» button (or it is a pill? — a trope!) and get bogged down in interesting stuff about how stories are made.
- boneheadmed 10y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned the Drudge Report. I'ts like Hacker News minus the comments, but for politics and also odd/unusual stories. http://www.drudgereport.com/ http://www.drudgereport.com/
- Spooky23 10y agoHis ad networks have historically delivered too much malware. We blocked it at work during one such episode many, many years ago, and got crazy complaints from the call centers about IT being part of a vast left wing conspiracy. Funny thing is that our boss was a county conservative party chairperson.
- galaktor 10y agoA few times each year I come back to Randal Munroe's "What If" [1]. By then I've forgotten where I left off last time and just kinda binge-read them over the course of a few days. If anyone here hasn't seen them yet (or, like me, hasn't checked in for some time), do yourself a favour and do it. [1] https://what-if.xkcd.com https://what-if.xkcd.com
- jgeerts 10y agohttp://waitbutwhy.com/ http://waitbutwhy.com/ Gives great insights in various matters for simpletons like myself.
- CM30 10y agoWell, people have already mentioned TV Tropes and Reddit, but they're definitely two places I can spend hours on end browsing for content. Other than that: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ - If you like obscure games, this will keep you reading for hours. The amount of Japan only arcade games you probably never knew you wanted is insane. http://www.spriters-resource.com/ http://www.spriters-resource.com/ - And its various associates for 3D models, textures and sounds. I can easily get sidetracked just looking for examples of strange games, tilesets or enemy sprites. If you're making a fan game or game mod... you'll probably spend more time here than actually making the game. Various Wikis in general. Super Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki and Bulbapedia can keep you reading for weeks if you're a fan of those franchises. https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor - A very large wiki for unused content in games. There's a lot of fascinating stuff there, and just looking for ridiculous developer rants can take up a fair amount of my time. For example, this rather amusing rant about warez teams and the demoscene: https://tcrf.net/Final_Fight_(Amiga) https://tcrf.net/Final_Fight_(Amiga) Forums in general. If I find a new forum, I'm probably not doing anything else for the next weekend or so while I try (and sometimes fail) at catching up on what happened over the last ten years. http://www.suppermariobroth.com/ http://www.suppermariobroth.com/ - Yeah, it's pretty obvious what my focus is when it comes to the internet. But it's basically one very long feed of Mario tech gimmickry and randomness and it makes for one hell of a trivia source.
- evoltix 10y agoCurrently, most of the links within this thread are becoming rabbit holes for me.
- LyndsySimon 10y agoMy biggest one is "Arfcom" - ar15.com. The General Discussion forum (www.ar15.com/forums/f_1/5_General_Discussion.html) there is my primary source for breaking news. The community is big enough there's almost always someone involved in whatever is going on, but small and targeted enough that there isn't a lot of arguments and tangents in those threads. While it is a US-centric gun forum and very heavily conservative/libertarian, the community is far more tolerant of differing views than you would think. It's been interesting watching the older members adjust as niche groups have formed and made their presence known - LGBTQ people, bronies, furries, and anarchists off the top of my head. Finally, while you may get piled on if you post anti-gun views, you're not going to be banned for not agreeing with them. It's honestly one of the more tolerant and valuable forums on the net in my opinion.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoSomehow, I am unable to picture an AR15-toting furry. Not that I'm trying very hard, mind you, but still, the concept boggles my mind. Also, AR15-toting bronies (although, my naive mind is thinking fathers with daughters).
- LyndsySimon 10y ago> Also, AR15-toting bronies (although, my naive mind is thinking fathers with daughters). Note the avatars and usernames: http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1887509_Score___.html http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1887509_Score___.html Come to think of it, the only bronies I know I met through that forum - so I can honestly say that all the bronies I know own AR-15s.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- subpixel 10y agoenglishrussia.com - some rather fascinating images from across the former Soviet Union. From "Lugansk 2016" to "Famous Soviet Salads" and everything inbetween.
- jtcond13 10y agomarginalrevolution.com, a blog maintained by two Economics professors at GMU (more interesting than it sounds).
- tunap 10y agoFor bizarre non-fiction I peruse the DI archives. damninteresting.com
- ddw 10y agoAbout once a month I start watching Larry Bird clips on Youtube, which sends me down a rabbit hole of 80s and on NBA.