5 ms·
Ask HN: What sources like HN do you consume?
I appreciate HN for staying up-to-date with technical news.
For my side hustle I have to ramp-up on other areas like marketing, legal, sales, ...
So I wonder if there are similar high-quality sources like HN for these areas.
- Nathanf22 7mo agoLobste.rs for the more technical deep-dives — smaller community but higher signal-to-noise ratio. Dev.to and Zenn for longer-form technical writing, though the quality varies a lot. For architecture and system design specifically, the Software Architecture subreddit (r/softwarearchitecture) has surprisingly good discussions. HN remains the best for the intersection of tech + business + ideas.
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoThis question comes up every year (I've seen it for the nearly 2 decades of HN), and the answers are never satisfying. Other industries just don't have an HN equivalent, either for lack of trying or because hackers are good making and using things like HN when others aren't.
- LollipopYakuza 7mo agoA psychologist told me a few days ago that they would love having an equivalent for their domain of work.
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoOf course: for psychology, various other medical fields, and plenty of creative fields a HN-equivalent would be gold. But it's impossible without their equivalent of @dang managing their equivalent of a forum of smart people who have a deep allergy to being marketed to/advertised at/BS'd or enshitified at. They need a HN-like immune system, often grossly overzealous and way too self-serious, that actively polices things like this. That's why there's no HN equivalent elsewhere.
- 1attice 7mo agoThis is the sort of a smug self-satisfied hot take that makes many non-SWEs recoil from this community. Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang. What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized. You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines. Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them. But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success. It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization. This is both good and bad.
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoYou’d think so, but then what’s the HN for those various fields? Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day. I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.
- chistev 7mo agoYou could build a HN clone for them for that purpose, but I tell you the problem would be onboarding users. I built a HN clone for someone who wanted it focused on just E-Commerce discussions, but it failed to take off. Also didn't help that the person wanted to monetize it using a pay-to-use model. It never took off.
- h4ch1 7mo agohttps://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews Or use this, rebrand it; but I don't know if people in other fields would be turned off by the aesthetic and simplicity (?) I remember seeing some green themed website that used Arc as a forum but I completely forgot what it was. Pretty active as well.
- LollipopYakuza 7mo agoThis makes sense. Community driven websites need... a community. Same reason why it is hard for subs to move away from Reddit.
- masterlee_fn 7mo ago[dead]
- qalmakka 7mo agoThat's precisely why we had forums back in the '00s. there were forums for basically everything under the sun - unfortunately they mostly died nowadays. HN is basically just a forum with a single board that got enough recognition - your average forum had more boards than users and was so fragmented it mostly ended up in instadeath after a few months,maybe years
- sph 7mo agoThere are plenty of mental cases on x.com
- robtherobber 7mo agoUnsure why @Nathanf22's comment was downvoted to death. I would also suggest Lobste.rs and Reddit. But then again, RSS seems to work quite well in my case.
- DavidHaerer 7mo agoCan you recommend some of your favorite RSS feeds for non-technical topics?
- robtherobber 7mo agoSure. Here is an older list that I shared a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28911253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28911253 In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
- rmm78 7mo ago[flagged]
- whattheheckheck 7mo agoI know those pesky workers and people without capital are so annoying asking for Healthcare and consumer protections... I wish they just worked for the billionaire oligarchs without compliant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
- AbstractH24 7mo agoAnd bots
- rmm78 7mo agowell at least Iranian bots are silent now, but CCP bots are still in full force
- somenameforme 7mo agoNASA Space Flight [1] is the forum for anything and everything space industry related. [1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/ https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]
- doublet00th 7mo agoPunchbowl News is a great source for American congressional politics. They have a newsletter for free that goes out every weekday at 6 AM.
- DavidHaerer 7mo agoI notice a lot of the suggestions are news-oriented. However, the thing I like about HN are all the non-news gold nuggets about tech. I'd love to find such gold nuggets for other industries as well.
- chistev 7mo agoThere's nothing like HN, but the closest is Reddit. If you're interested in programming then r/programming If UFC, for example, then r/ufc r/mma r/python Just whatever it is you're interested in, there's likely a subreddit for it. The more niche it is, the better the quality of the sub.
- thal3s 7mo agoReddit is deteriorating by the day. The Fediverse (specifically Lemmy and PieFed) have much higher signal to noise ratios and are frequented by the same folks you see here in a lot of cases. Additionally, their APIs are open and free.
- detritus 7mo agoReddit is deteriorating every day like China's economic model is ever-closer to collapse each day - oft-repeated claims that become ever harder to believe when they've been trotted out, on the daily, for fifteen years whilst seemingly never getting any truer.
- rithdmc 7mo agoThe Eternal September is live and well.
- detritus 7mo agoAnd it's barely even March. Not even a Long March. Just to entirely mix metaphors.
- nitwit005 7mo agoPersonal theory is, you can get into a state where you'd still growing due to network effects, as you're the main location for some topics, but new communities go somewhere else, so you're losing that traffic. Some of Discord's largest servers are for AI tools, as it seemed like the logical choice when they were getting going. A couple years earlier I'm sure it would have been reddit.
- DriveTime 7mo agoI'm on HN mainly to keep up with surveillance and privacy news and tech. I have a number of sources I pull from, including: OSINT blogs and resources like indicator news, Bellingcat 404 Media Individual Blogs like michaflee.com, Zach wittackers "This week in security" Courtwatch.news Privacy related forums like privacyguides.org Academic sources like Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, etc etc. I'll spin up an n8n instance at some point to sift through everything I find.
- CodeBit26 7mo ago[dead]
- coip 7mo agoGitHub trending is one that comes to mind
- bilsbie 7mo agoX.com is my new go to especially after I found enough interesting accounts to follow.
- Gooblebrai 7mo agoI vibecoded a clone of HN, for philosophical topics, which I'm very fond of. However, I have done a terrible job of marketing it, so that is still on my list: http://forum.philosofriends.com http://forum.philosofriends.com Right now is basically a repository of philosophy-related links I find interesting, but it would be awesome to find a way to start generating philosophical discussions of the quality I find in HN for tech/AI