7 ms·

Ask HN: Other online communities like HN?

138 points by mpoon 8y ago

Interested in knowing if vibrant online communities exist where people talk shop similar to HN for other industries, e.g. construction workers, teachers, actuaries, doctors, etc.

lainon 8y ago
https://www.barnacl.es https://www.barnacl.es - Business https://www.journalduhacker.net/ https://www.journalduhacker.net/ - French Hacker News https://write.narwhal.space/ https://write.narwhal.space/ - Writing https://g33kz.de/ https://g33kz.de/ - German Hacker News https://paperkast.com/ https://paperkast.com/ - Academic Papers https://bitmia.com/ https://bitmia.com/ - Finance/Investing All of the above are based on https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/, which is pretty much like HN with a few extra features and less Off-Topic Also, there are independent StackExchange-like sites for physics and bioinformatics https://physicsoverflow.org/ https://physicsoverflow.org/ https://www.biostars.org https://www.biostars.org
- berberous 8y ago
  A lot of these seem like HN-clones (UI-wise) except that they are ghost towns, with no comments on the top stories. I think it would be more useful to share sites that have great communities, even if they use different software. For example, for investing, the Boggleheads forum is excellent: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php
  - Tomte 8y ago
    Really fascinating. g33kz.de has 25 stories on its front page, and none of them have any comment.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      I also has very good about pages that make it seem like a lot of love and thought went into it. For example, all moderator action is public. You have to give a reason to downvote comments or flag stories, and other mods as well as the user in question can see those in the case of comments, everybody can see them in the case of stories. If a user is banned, the reason for the ban will always remain visible. It has a tagging system for stories, every user can customize what tags they want to see. People can apply for "hats", which means being officially authorized to speak for a website, a project, an organization or company. Pretty awsome, if you ask me.
  - icedchai 8y ago
    You could also look at various subreddits...
- antisocial 8y ago
  http://www.datatau.com/ http://www.datatau.com/ - Data Science
- jashmenn 8y ago
  I also run a lobste.rs sister site dedicated to blockchain protocol engineering: https://std.bz/ https://std.bz/ The goal is to be a high-signal community to share and discuss research, design, and code of blockchain and cryptocurrency protocols. It's invite-only (to keep the quality of links and discussion high), but we're just getting started, so definitely apply for an invite if this is a space you're interested in.
- minhaz23 8y ago
  How can i read the french hacker news without knowing french?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
type-2 8y ago
lobste.rs
david-cako 8y ago
Slashdot is fun if you want a more cynical take on some of the topics that show up here. Slashdot's articles typically are general tech, science, security, and politics (esp tech related). Here there's more software community stuff, blogs, update notes, personal projects etc. I read both HN and slashdot daily, they each have their own thing.
- the_duke 8y ago
  I remember when Slashdot was THE online community for tech news. Insightful comments, amazing (!) moderation system. It all went downhill years ago though and now the quality of the discussions is horrendous.
  - Moru 8y ago
    https://soylentnews.org/ https://soylentnews.org/ is one of the Slashdot breakoffs from when they went too far. They are using an old fork of the Slashdot engine.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      Sadly the site is mainly populated with about 8 extremists and it mainly covers political angles.
    - fancyfish 8y ago
      Note this is unfortunately not a news discussion site for the meal replacement of the same name.
  - snazz 8y ago
    The primary issue with Slashdot seems to be the flame wars—they don’t have some of the features and the moderation like HN does to detect and prevent them. If someone mentions systemd, you know that the quality of discussion just went from “mediocre” to “terrible”.
    - zhte415 8y ago
ryanmercer 8y ago
Any number of subreddits? Construction workers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/ "A subreddit for construction industry professionals." Teachers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ "The goal of r/Teachers is to provide a supportive community for teachers and to inform and engage in discourse with educational stakeholders about the teaching profession." Actuaries - https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/ https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/ "Articles and links of interest to those in the actuarial profession." Doctors - https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/ https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/ "This is a community for clinicians." Etc.
- dionidium 8y ago
  Some more that might appeal to the HN set: - https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject - https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur - https://www.reddit.com/r/coding https://www.reddit.com/r/coding - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming https://www.reddit.com/r/programming - https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev - https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY - https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning
- unixhero 8y ago
  /r/consulting
Xixi 8y ago
http://www.airliners.net/ http://www.airliners.net/ - mostly about civil aviation
- isostatic 8y ago
  And https://www.pprune.org/ https://www.pprune.org/, which is the "professional pilots network", and usually has some indepth incisive posts when bad things happen to planes
MaxLeiter 8y ago
Not exactly like HN, but stackoverflow has a lot of different sites for niche and interesting topics
- oAlbe 8y ago
  Of all the things you can do or can't do on stackoverflow, "discussions" are probably the thing you are going to get doxxed the hardest for.
  - kingofpandora 8y ago
    Wow you get doxxed for going off topic??
    - nicoburns 8y ago
      Not in my experience. You will however get the discussion shut down.
  - DKnoll 8y ago
    StackOverflow has extremely high standards, yes, but it is an extremely professional atmosphere. I have never seen someone 'doxxed' on the platform and if someone did it would get shutdown quick. I suspect you don't know what that word means.
  - chuckgreenman 8y ago
    I can't remember if it was Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood who said this, but the analogy they used was Stack Overflow is supposed to be the college, not the quad. There we're plenty of unstructured discussions at the time, very few sites dedicated to the creation and cataloging of information.
jacquesm 8y ago
Aviationherald, it's a bit of a mix but there are some really knowledgeable people on there. also: https://theairlinepilots.com/ https://theairlinepilots.com/
yj96 8y ago
indiehackers.com!!!
- juangacovas 8y ago
  Indeed
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cedaratlas 8y ago
For Designers https://www.designernews.co/ https://www.designernews.co/
LyndsySimon 8y ago
Arfcom GD: https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/General-Discussion/5/ https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/General-Discussion/5/ Definitely a right-wing slant, but there are ton of very knowledgeable people there. Signal/noise ratio is kinda middle of the road, but the quality of the signal more than makes up for it in my opinion.
- ufmace 8y ago
  Ha, I used to post there all the time, still do once in a while. Alas, it's an old-style PHPBB system with no voting, so it gets to be harder to find the good content and keep track of discussions you've been in. And yes, it's a good place to get the pulse of what "Red Team" is thinking in general, and you can get banned for being too Blue.
mckee1 8y ago
For frequent flyers, FlyerTalk is excellent. It could also be described as the birthplace of WhatsApp, in which one of the co-founders asked for 'thoughts on my free iphone app'[0], which is amusing in retrospect. [https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-thoughts-about-my-free-iphone-app-whatsapp.html https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...]
- nunez 8y ago
  +1. FlyerTalk is excellent. There are some seriously experienced travelers on that site, and reading comments from 2000 is always fun.
gomangogo 8y ago
My favorite for Business : https://gladiacteur.com https://gladiacteur.com (French)
- minhaz23 8y ago
  What would be my option to read this without knowing french?
  - S4M 8y ago
    The same options as someone wanting to read Hacker News without knowing English.
bytematic 8y ago
Lobste.rs, however it's invite only to participate.
thrownaway954 8y ago
reddit.com - let the down votes begin :)
rsync 8y ago
I continue to be impressed with the lesswrong "site" which, it seems to me, is the proper evolutionary step forward from a BBS onto the medium of the web.
person_of_color 8y ago
www.defence.pk
pgcj_poster 8y ago
http://old.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/ http://old.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/ has almost the same content that you see on HN.
xenihn 8y ago
I don't think there's anything comparable in terms of activity/traffic. Lobste.rs is the closest but it just has way less active users and daily content.
sotojuan 8y ago
For gaming and a lively off topic community, resetera.
hikarudo 8y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning Very high quality.
nunez 8y ago
BiggerPockets.com is great for real estate (but beware of the scammers). bogleheads is great if you're into personal finance of all sorts airliners.net is great if you're into airline operations; PPRuNe.org too
112233 8y ago
encode.ru Data compression. Low flame. "paq man" is there, "durilca man", "ans man", "zstd man"... ("oodle man" left ...)
coutvv 8y ago
https://habr.com https://habr.com – russian community about IT
widgetic 8y ago
For the same industry: - http://indiehackers.com http://indiehackers.com - http://getlatka.com http://getlatka.com

138 points by mpoon 8y ago

Interested in knowing if vibrant online communities exist where people talk shop similar to HN for other industries, e.g. construction workers, teachers, actuaries, doctors, etc.

lainon 8y ago

https://www.barnacl.es https://www.barnacl.es - Business https://www.journalduhacker.net/ https://www.journalduhacker.net/ - French Hacker News https://write.narwhal.space/ https://write.narwhal.space/ - Writing https://g33kz.de/ https://g33kz.de/ - German Hacker News https://paperkast.com/ https://paperkast.com/ - Academic Papers https://bitmia.com/ https://bitmia.com/ - Finance/Investing All of the above are based on https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/, which is pretty much like HN with a few extra features and less Off-Topic Also, there are independent StackExchange-like sites for physics and bioinformatics https://physicsoverflow.org/ https://physicsoverflow.org/ https://www.biostars.org https://www.biostars.org

berberous 8y ago
A lot of these seem like HN-clones (UI-wise) except that they are ghost towns, with no comments on the top stories. I think it would be more useful to share sites that have great communities, even if they use different software. For example, for investing, the Boggleheads forum is excellent: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php
- Tomte 8y ago
  Really fascinating. g33kz.de has 25 stories on its front page, and none of them have any comment.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    I also has very good about pages that make it seem like a lot of love and thought went into it. For example, all moderator action is public. You have to give a reason to downvote comments or flag stories, and other mods as well as the user in question can see those in the case of comments, everybody can see them in the case of stories. If a user is banned, the reason for the ban will always remain visible. It has a tagging system for stories, every user can customize what tags they want to see. People can apply for "hats", which means being officially authorized to speak for a website, a project, an organization or company. Pretty awsome, if you ask me.
- icedchai 8y ago
  You could also look at various subreddits...
antisocial 8y ago
http://www.datatau.com/ http://www.datatau.com/ - Data Science
jashmenn 8y ago
I also run a lobste.rs sister site dedicated to blockchain protocol engineering: https://std.bz/ https://std.bz/ The goal is to be a high-signal community to share and discuss research, design, and code of blockchain and cryptocurrency protocols. It's invite-only (to keep the quality of links and discussion high), but we're just getting started, so definitely apply for an invite if this is a space you're interested in.
minhaz23 8y ago
How can i read the french hacker news without knowing french?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

type-2 8y ago

lobste.rs

david-cako 8y ago

Slashdot is fun if you want a more cynical take on some of the topics that show up here. Slashdot's articles typically are general tech, science, security, and politics (esp tech related). Here there's more software community stuff, blogs, update notes, personal projects etc. I read both HN and slashdot daily, they each have their own thing.

the_duke 8y ago
I remember when Slashdot was THE online community for tech news. Insightful comments, amazing (!) moderation system. It all went downhill years ago though and now the quality of the discussions is horrendous.
- Moru 8y ago
  https://soylentnews.org/ https://soylentnews.org/ is one of the Slashdot breakoffs from when they went too far. They are using an old fork of the Slashdot engine.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Sadly the site is mainly populated with about 8 extremists and it mainly covers political angles.
  - fancyfish 8y ago
    Note this is unfortunately not a news discussion site for the meal replacement of the same name.
- snazz 8y ago
  The primary issue with Slashdot seems to be the flame wars—they don’t have some of the features and the moderation like HN does to detect and prevent them. If someone mentions systemd, you know that the quality of discussion just went from “mediocre” to “terrible”.
  - zhte415 8y ago

ryanmercer 8y ago

Any number of subreddits? Construction workers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/ "A subreddit for construction industry professionals." Teachers - https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/ "The goal of r/Teachers is to provide a supportive community for teachers and to inform and engage in discourse with educational stakeholders about the teaching profession." Actuaries - https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/ https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/ "Articles and links of interest to those in the actuarial profession." Doctors - https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/ https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/ "This is a community for clinicians." Etc.

dionidium 8y ago
Some more that might appeal to the HN set: - https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject - https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur - https://www.reddit.com/r/coding https://www.reddit.com/r/coding - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming https://www.reddit.com/r/programming - https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev - https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY - https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning
unixhero 8y ago
/r/consulting

Xixi 8y ago

http://www.airliners.net/ http://www.airliners.net/ - mostly about civil aviation

isostatic 8y ago
And https://www.pprune.org/ https://www.pprune.org/, which is the "professional pilots network", and usually has some indepth incisive posts when bad things happen to planes

MaxLeiter 8y ago

Not exactly like HN, but stackoverflow has a lot of different sites for niche and interesting topics

oAlbe 8y ago
Of all the things you can do or can't do on stackoverflow, "discussions" are probably the thing you are going to get doxxed the hardest for.
- kingofpandora 8y ago
  Wow you get doxxed for going off topic??
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    Not in my experience. You will however get the discussion shut down.
- DKnoll 8y ago
  StackOverflow has extremely high standards, yes, but it is an extremely professional atmosphere. I have never seen someone 'doxxed' on the platform and if someone did it would get shutdown quick. I suspect you don't know what that word means.
- chuckgreenman 8y ago
  I can't remember if it was Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood who said this, but the analogy they used was Stack Overflow is supposed to be the college, not the quad. There we're plenty of unstructured discussions at the time, very few sites dedicated to the creation and cataloging of information.

jacquesm 8y ago

Aviationherald, it's a bit of a mix but there are some really knowledgeable people on there. also: https://theairlinepilots.com/ https://theairlinepilots.com/

yj96 8y ago

indiehackers.com!!!

juangacovas 8y ago
Indeed

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cedaratlas 8y ago

For Designers https://www.designernews.co/ https://www.designernews.co/

LyndsySimon 8y ago

Arfcom GD: https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/General-Discussion/5/ https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/General-Discussion/5/ Definitely a right-wing slant, but there are ton of very knowledgeable people there. Signal/noise ratio is kinda middle of the road, but the quality of the signal more than makes up for it in my opinion.

ufmace 8y ago
Ha, I used to post there all the time, still do once in a while. Alas, it's an old-style PHPBB system with no voting, so it gets to be harder to find the good content and keep track of discussions you've been in. And yes, it's a good place to get the pulse of what "Red Team" is thinking in general, and you can get banned for being too Blue.

mckee1 8y ago

For frequent flyers, FlyerTalk is excellent. It could also be described as the birthplace of WhatsApp, in which one of the co-founders asked for 'thoughts on my free iphone app'[0], which is amusing in retrospect. [https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-thoughts-about-my-free-iphone-app-whatsapp.html https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-technology/952359-tho...]

nunez 8y ago
+1. FlyerTalk is excellent. There are some seriously experienced travelers on that site, and reading comments from 2000 is always fun.

gomangogo 8y ago

My favorite for Business : https://gladiacteur.com https://gladiacteur.com (French)

minhaz23 8y ago
What would be my option to read this without knowing french?
- S4M 8y ago
  The same options as someone wanting to read Hacker News without knowing English.

bytematic 8y ago

Lobste.rs, however it's invite only to participate.

thrownaway954 8y ago

reddit.com - let the down votes begin :)

rsync 8y ago

I continue to be impressed with the lesswrong "site" which, it seems to me, is the proper evolutionary step forward from a BBS onto the medium of the web.

person_of_color 8y ago

www.defence.pk

pgcj_poster 8y ago

http://old.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/ http://old.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/ has almost the same content that you see on HN.

xenihn 8y ago

I don't think there's anything comparable in terms of activity/traffic. Lobste.rs is the closest but it just has way less active users and daily content.

sotojuan 8y ago

For gaming and a lively off topic community, resetera.

hikarudo 8y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning Very high quality.

nunez 8y ago

BiggerPockets.com is great for real estate (but beware of the scammers). bogleheads is great if you're into personal finance of all sorts airliners.net is great if you're into airline operations; PPRuNe.org too

112233 8y ago

encode.ru Data compression. Low flame. "paq man" is there, "durilca man", "ans man", "zstd man"... ("oodle man" left ...)

coutvv 8y ago

https://habr.com https://habr.com – russian community about IT

widgetic 8y ago

For the same industry: - http://indiehackers.com http://indiehackers.com - http://getlatka.com http://getlatka.com