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Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

• dokem 14y ago
  If you ever find this site, let me know. HN is this closest site to what you're looking for that I can think of. We could possibly improve on this by adding subsections, but then that would just turn into reddit.
  • rpm4321 14y ago
    Maybe not subsections, but allow users to create and up-vote tags on stories, or maybe have a simple dropdown on story submission with a dozen or so tags the submitter could apply. That way you could still narrow your focus when you don't want to miss certain content (ex. #Python, #AI, #Business, etc. at news.ycombinator.com/tagged/Python, etc.), but you wouldn't disrupt the current community feel of HN too much.
• pallinder 14y ago
  Check out lamernews http://lamernews.com/ http://lamernews.com/
• tuturu 14y ago
  https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ maybe.
  • ComputerGuru 14y ago
    Can I get an invite, please? Email in profile. EDIT: Got it. Thanks. (So no one double-sends)
    • bhousel 14y ago
      just sent invite..
      • siamore 14y ago
        could i have one? my email id is siamoreslr@gmail.com
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
  • hsmyers 14y ago
    Wouldn't mind an invite myself. While I was wandering the site I thought I had a break through idea only to discover that such a thing already existed. What I wanted was the pushd (dos command---dating myself) Then I realized that if I only would right click on a link and open it in a new window, then I have exactly what I want :)
  • antidoh 14y ago
    One thing is they show scores on comments, as HN used to do. I really miss that.
• jacquesc 14y ago
  http://lobste.rs http://lobste.rs seems like exactly what you want. It's a good community, give it a try
  • zalew 14y ago
    reminds me of http://hackful.eu http://hackful.eu - good links, good idea, good intentions, but almost no engagement, and the only link with more than 3 comments is a meta-discussion.
    • stock_toaster 14y ago
      It is slower paced, for sure. I kind of find that pleasant though (like drinking a coffee and reading the paper). Seems to make me focus more on the linked content, and less on the discussions.
      • zalew 14y ago
        but then it's not a community, it's more of a link aggregator.
        • jamesbritt 14y ago
          There was a (surprise!) meta-thread about that, seems some people are happy using the site as a link resource. Me, I prefer to have discussions, but it's been tough going. I'm optimistic but it may take a while. Last time lobste.rs was mentioned on HN there was an influx of people, but the only noticeable effect was that there were more submissions and slightly higher average submission up-vote numbers. Commenting seem to stay about the same.
    • polyfractal 14y ago
      It's still growing. Development is active, people post plenty of interesting stories. Commenting is slowly increasing. These things take time, and the core group of posters are still posting links on a daily basis which is what a nascent community needs to survive the initial "lull". I'm very hopeful for Lobsters.
• ArekDymalski 14y ago
  To me some parts of stackoverflow might appear interesting to you.
  • stared 14y ago
    Rather http://stackexchange.com/sites http://stackexchange.com/sites (as a side note, I've just made a map of their sites, here http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se-sites-except-the-3-biggest http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se... with a discussion, code on GitHub). There are very dedicated communities, from TeX to gardening. The good thing is that there are great (just IMHO). The bad thing is that, not everything fits in the question-and-answer scheme. There are many interesting subject, which are: open-ended, or requiring polling, or - brainstorming. Also, not every topic is covered, but it that case you can create your own SE site (with http://area51.stackexchange.com/ http://area51.stackexchange.com/); just it takes time and effort to gather the critical mass (at least 200, usually - much more).
  • k3n 14y ago
    Specifically, I was going to suggest: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://cs.stackexchange.com/ http://cs.stackexchange.com/ http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ http://scicomp.stackexchange.com/ http://scicomp.stackexchange.com/ http://math.stackexchange.com/ http://math.stackexchange.com/
• thaumaturgy 14y ago
  I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're looking for. I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN habit while still feeding me stuff I might be interested in. Because I built it, I can make it do anything I want. I've started to turn it into a slightly broader search engine so that I can find the things that I'm looking for; I got sick of seeing search engines brag about the hundreds-of-thousands or millions of search results they were returning when I was trying to find something (really, what's the point of that?), so I'm building my own. I got sick of feeding some psychological trigger in my brain that made me nervously check the HN front page numerous times throughout the day, and I'd find myself clicking on items that had lots of comments and activity even if the subject was something I wasn't interested in. I guess I was thinking, "wow, lots of people over there, I should go check that out." What did it for me was a bit of foggy nostalgia one day. I was thinking about "the good ol' days", how I -- we, all of us if we were lucky enough to be born at the right time in the right environment -- used to modify the crap of out of programs, change their interface, tweak their colors, cheat at games even when we were the only ones playing. We used to take things we didn't like and turn them into things we did like. But nobody, or very few people, do that for the web, even though there are piles and piles of tools that make it easy and doable. So I did it. And it is glorious. It's some of the most fun I've had at programming in years. Now when I'm feeling like a wet cat, I'll just go tweak my little reader-search-engine-toy, and then I feel better. Now I never feel like I'm missing out on something on HN, because my little toy is keeping an eye on it for me and saving the stuff I might care about it. And if you're looking for a new community ... well, build that too! It's clear from numerous threads on HN and other places that people are ready for something new. Make what you want, share it if you feel like, if enough other people like it maybe they'll join in and you'll have your community.
  • anthonyb 14y ago
    Sounds interesting, can you give us more details on how it works? I had a quick look at your homepage, but couldn't see any links for it, or a github profile.
  • VMG 14y ago
    And if you build the next HN, please add an API
• olalonde 14y ago
  http://lesswrong.com http://lesswrong.com and http://forrst.com http://forrst.com come to mind. There are also a few subreddits that might interest you: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci http://www.reddit.com/r/types http://www.reddit.com/r/types
• 6ren 14y ago
  fp: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
• riffraff 14y ago
  I can't believe noone mentioned LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ Also, try Prismatic maybe.
• zalew 14y ago
  > has less negativity what do you mean by that? ironically I'll probably sound negative, but are you looking for a place which enforces PC to an ubearable point where the only accepted state is, you know, people standing in a circle smiling while performing a certain activity?
  • alanctgardner2 14y ago
    HN is definitely not the most supportive place on the internet. I've gotten some really good feedback from people who know what they're talking about, and read some discussion which was more interesting than the linked article. But then, I've also seen some people with a lot of karma who just bicker about insignificant things. Also, the fact that the community rules and best practices are ridiculously opaque, and every new person is initially viewed with hatred/mistrust for being 'from Reddit' or 'from /.' makes the place seem a bit hostile.
  • michaelt 14y ago
    If you take a look at the thread "Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?" [1] I saw that title and thought great, a discussion of the economics and technical side of building out a FTTH network. I was wondering how feasible it would be to start something like Google Fibre in my city. I was disappointed. There's about three reasonable quality posts, and even they are short on technical and financial details. All the other top-level posts are basically noise. I don't think HN needs "enforced PC" but I do think it would be improved if instead of just posting "it won't work" people posted "it will be difficult because of a, b and c which you need for x, y and z and which will cost i, j and k" [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893776 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893776
• georgeorwell 14y ago
  I'd possibly like the same thing, but I don't have much in the way of hope that it will materialize. I see you're a Chem Eng grad student. I'd say for programming language design, read the computer science papers from top conferences that interest you, starting with PLDI: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2254064 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2254064 (click on Table of Contents) If you want to discuss them, send email to the authors, try and find some grad students or professors in your CS department, or find a way to attend some CS conferences. I don't think you'll find deep research-quality conversation in a news aggregator, mostly because the people who are interested in having and also able to have research-quality conversations are for the most part busy doing research, and also because coming up with a reasonable opinion about something complicated that you're not an expert in takes a lot of work. There are specific blogs, mailing lists, and (maybe defunct) newsgroups where you can discuss more focused topics, e.g. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
• nimeshneema 14y ago
  Have a look at this: http://functionspace.org/ http://functionspace.org/ I think this one may come close to your expectations
  • shawn-butler 14y ago
    How does a landing page tell us anything?
    • nimeshneema 14y ago
      The site is currently been developed and would be live soon. (It's been done by one of the close friends so I can assure that it is relevant). Sign up to get notified when it's up and more information.
• michaelochurch 14y ago
  Programming Reddit (Proggit) is more focused on programming (as opposed to politics, tech startups) and therefore, I would argue, is more likely to have the sorts of links you're looking for. But, in my experience, the quality of discussion is lower (though quite high in absolute standards) and you're more likely to have a good comment downvoted.
  • INTPenis 14y ago
    If you take away the religious subreddits like atheism, politics and worldnews you can make your own reddit well worth its weight in neutrinos.
  • shardling 14y ago
    r/math generally has a pretty high quality of discussion.
  • personlurking 14y ago
    "and you're more likely to have a good comment downvoted." This has never made sense to me. On some subreddits that focus on disciplines (like AskHistorians among many others), you can easily get downvoted (ie "dissapeared") just by asking a question, let alone answering one. Other times you'll won't get upvoted nor downvoted when you've actually contributed to the discussion. In these instances I lurk even when I can contribute because it's just not worth it.
    • michaelochurch 14y ago
      Reddit's voting system has two issues: (1) Lots of strategic downvoting. That's why no thread stays above 75%. It happens to comments as well as threads. Some of it is spammers trying to improve their own ranking, and some is probably just trolls. (2) "Stalker" downvoting, which is when a person retaliates to a comment by downvoting that person's contributions en masse. I wonder if they've put any machine learning muscle behind this. Is it easy to fix, or is it just a hard problem?
      • ampersandy 14y ago
• sami36 14y ago
  >Heated arguments that make me feel bad after reading the comments instead of enlightened 1-There is bound to be heated arguments whenever two rational people with different circumstances & a different thought process are asked to opine on any issue with less than an obvious resolution. If you're uncomfortable watching a rigorous back & forth. Try North Korea. 2- You do realize you're asking a question of a social nature. you're contributing to making HN less of a technical forum. 3- Nobody forces you to read comments. The community does a pretty good job both down-voting comments rife with negativity or without any value. (maybe even this one) I'm sorry, but it seems to me you're trolling.
  • lclarkmichalek 14y ago
    How on earth does anyone think this is trolling? Anyway, I disagree with your points. 1) There is a very big difference between a heated argument and an argument. Maybe it's just a side effect of the medium we are using, but everyone seems to have so much trouble being civil. For example, instead of suggesting that OP go look to North Korea, you could have said "For me, the heated discussions are a good thing" or something similar. 2) OP realizes that HN isn't a technical forum, and isn't asking for it to change. 3) Comments are a massive part of the value that HN provides, and even if OP were to stop reading the comments, he'll still see the same mix of articles on the front page.
    • mylittlepony 14y ago
      Everyone is suggesting Reddit, but there too you will find heated arguments [1]. In general, HN comments are way better, and trolls are kept in line. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/135b5z/yes_the_fbi_and_cia_can_read_your_email_even_if/c716b7f http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/135b5z/yes_the_f...
      • im3w1l 14y ago
        No on is suggesting /r/technology though. There are subreddits out there that are a lot better.
• polshaw 14y ago
  Very sad to see all the 'HN competitors' (lobsters, hackful, lamernews) are all essentially dead (at least extremely dormant). To me, all they needed were a small handful of dedicated posters/commenters (and to be open, i'm looking at you lobste.rs) to start to catch on; i'm very much reminded of the story of the reddit founders sockpuppeting to make the site not look like a ghost town; this kind of 'forced' activity doesn't seem to be necessary for long until the site would take on it's own life.
  • polyfractal 14y ago
    Lobsters isn't dead, just not as noisy. I check it once a day and usually walk away with one interesting tech article. Discussions are less lively, but that's because every site follows the 90:10 law (90% lurk, 10% comment)
  • ampersandy 14y ago
    I totally agree. It would even be easy to find old, well-received HN submissions that have likely been forgotten and to queue them up for resubmission to your new service.
    • unimpressive 14y ago
      On a timescale, so that the site would be receiving at least one killer article from the past a day.
• DanBC 14y ago
  One suggesting is to visit new and upvote good stories; flag unsuitable stories; and submit excellent articles. What you're looking for can be found in HN, and is appreciated by many people, but does perhaps need a bit of support and encouragement.
• SamuelKillin 14y ago
  here here!
• aerique 14y ago
  No mention of Usenet :-(. It scores on many of the points you mentioned (Reddit subreddits come close.) I'm sad this part of the net has been fading into obscurity the last ten years especially since its alternatives have proven to be inadequate. Its greatest power was it being decentralised and thus couldn't be policed by anyone, the variety and custom readers. Its greatest weak point was perhaps the trolls. Maybe others can supply more weaknesses? Really, what does Hackernews as a website have over f.e. a newsgroup alt.news.hackers?
  • aw3c2 14y ago
    Voting, a threaded display that does not break, no insane quoting, some markup, karma
    • aerique 14y ago
      Agreed on most of your points except a lot of news readers supported the basic markup for bold, italics, underline, etc. one now sees in Markdown & friends.
  • DanBC 14y ago
    I agree that Usenet was fantastic. > what does Hackernews as a website have over f.e. a newsgroup alt.news.hackers? Communal voting? > Its greatest weak point was perhaps the trolls. Maybe others can supply more weaknesses? A rigid definition of what counts as spam (Breidbart index)? People using all kinds of domains in the From: header. That's a problem because bots scrape the from header for sending spam, and there's nothing to stop people using valid domains that don't belong to them.
  • stared 14y ago
    No up/down voting (so when a discussion get's longer you can track only the most valuable posts). <nostalgia>But otherwise... I miss Usenet so much. I was raised by Usenet, it shaped my life philosophy, I found my best friend there, not to mention knowledge I got.</nostalgia> So, maybe time to write a "Usenet 2.0", with: - up/downvotes, - markdown, - tags?
• srutisha 14y ago
  Slashdot? :-)
  • kdsudac 14y ago
    slashdot seems like it is exactly what OP is looking for.
  • cgh 14y ago
    Huh? Slashdot is almost all politics, very little technical content.
• dysoco 14y ago
  I've been thinking in making something similar: But I though people might not be interested having HN, Reddit and Slashdot.
• frendiversity 14y ago
  Someday I'm going to invent a place where people can gather to learn technical skills from masters of the crafts, and socialize with like-minded enthusiasts. I could even "gamify" it and the players could earn points for passing tests to prove their knowledge, ultimately earning an "achievement" for mastering the craft at various levels of proficiency. We'll allow a diverse range of players to apply and even come live there, maybe right out of high school. I'm thinking "friendiversity" for the name, because you'll make friends and there is diversity there, what do you think?
  • djisjke 14y ago
    You could use every buzzword!
• p_sherman 14y ago
  You see, about a year and a half ago this was what HN was actually like.
• patdennis 14y ago
  A well set up Google Reader account can do wonders... but it takes a while to get to that point.
  • jhund 14y ago
    Yes, that's a good start. And if you want to take it a step further, you could use a tool like intigi.com (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders) which allows you to not only aggregate feeds, but also run Lucene queries on them to filter out the noise.
• message 14y ago
  For me it sounds like whole stackexchange.com network.
  • qntmfred 14y ago
    except you can't discuss things there.
• wilfra 14y ago
  stackoverflow or lobste.rs
  • motoford 14y ago
    Sadly stackoverflow has gotten to mean for anything but the most difficult questions, worded perfectly. They need to also be solved in the same paragraph to escape the wrath of stack.
• trotsky 14y ago
  graduate school
• Hawkee 14y ago
  Well here's my shameless plug. I've been building http://hawkee.com http://hawkee.com for many, many years more or less as a hobby. Lately I've been trying to fill the void between GitHub, StackOverflow and even HN. I don't want to say too much, but if the goal is unclear then maybe I've still got more work to do.
• Kilimanjaro 14y ago
  nReduce is missing a great opportunity. Competition is always good for the consumer.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• wmat 14y ago
  Perhaps a series of SubReddits?
• anonymfus 14y ago
  Does any RSS/Atom client exist which can subtract feeds? So you can for example add HackerNews feed and subtract feeds from /r/politics and /r/worldpolitics so only link mentioned on HackerNews and not mentioned on /r/politics or /r/worldpolitics would pass?
  • jhund 14y ago
    We have designed and built intigi.com for this exact purpose: a secret weapon for hackers to consume news. This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant results. You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for precision or for recall...
    • haldean 14y ago
      That's not really what he/she asked for. What your parent is asking for (and I would love to see this too) is a tool that treats RSS feeds as sets of articles, then lets you do set operations on those sets (i.e., get me all articles a \in A such that a \in HN \and a \notin rpolitics)
      • jhund 14y ago
        Hi there, good point. I didn't explain myself very well. You can do this with intigi, too. You can filter both at the content and the source level. So you could set up an interest that presents you with results that a) appear in the HN RSS feed AND b) that don't appear in the r/politics feed In order to do set operations on URLs reliably, we also solve the issue of canonicalization (resolving redirects, removing tracking markers, etc.).
        • haldean 14y ago
• mehrzad 14y ago
  4chan's /g/ board is pretty good, but at times brutal.
  • DanBC 14y ago
    I couldn't cope with all the "LOL WOODSCREWS!!!1!" type trolling. There's a lot of partisan stuff, and meme-spewing. And while there are plenty of people who really know what they're talking about (to the level the OP wants and above) there are also arrogant but ignorant 14 year olds ranting stuff. The text /prog/ board has some interesting discussion, but there's a lot of "Have you read your SICP today?". And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content. Some of the other chans are better, but still risky and with a lot less traffic. There is a great bit of copypasta about installing Linux though.
    • mehrzad 14y ago
      >And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content. Rarely, /g/ is supposed to be SFW. >there are plenty of people who really know what they're talking about This is why I recommend it; a while back some guys were discussing how to build the low level functions of an OS.
• manish_gill 14y ago
  I usually follow a big mix of subreddits I'm interested in. This is one of my bookmarks: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webdev+learnmath+vim+gamedev+linux+linux4noobs+learnpython+algorithms http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webde...
• ajdecon 14y ago
  I think Hacker News is as close to a "non-social" discussion forum as you're going to find, while maintaining high engagement. The cliché is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and I think one of the primary ways we maintain the high engagement in a discussion thread is by becoming interested in the other participants, not just the topic. That's usually a good thing, because it motivates us to respond and care about the discussion, but it also means that people will go off-topic, get into heated arguments, or bring up memes and social topics. If it were possible to strictly enforce rules against off-topic or non-technical discussions, I suspect engagement would drop very quickly. Learning is a strong motivator, but I doubt it provides the same semi-addictive feedback loop that the social aspects of a site do. (I don't have any evidence beyond my own gut feelings based on web forums over the years --- happy to be proved wrong! A high-engagement non-social discussion forum would be an interesting place.)
  • JonnieCache 14y ago
    I think he means social in the buzzword sense.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  A fairly transparent bit of rhetoric there :-) In answer to your non-question question, yes that site exists, there are literally hundreds of them. They get a few users, then they don't get new news, they get a few 'bad' things (people get scolded for being negative, or chastised for being 'off topic' or 'social') and then no one wants to post because they can't really tell what is "acceptable" and what isn't. People stop going there. It fades into obscurity. My suggestion is that what your looking for isn't a web site its friends. Get together once a week and hang out. You can talk about programming languages, mathematics, science and other oddities. Invite people who stick to the program, shun people who keep wanting to talk about tech products.
  • dreamdu5t 14y ago
    This is the real answer.
• antidoh 14y ago
  Disrupt Hacker News! Come help change the way that we Hacker News Hacker News! :) I'm not near as focused as you are, but I understand your discontent. I have two suggestions. One, the easy thing (easy as in less work and commitment), which a few others have suggested. Help make HN better, make it what you want. It's probably already closest to what you want, among the alternatives. Read /newest and upvote good content and good comments. I personally rarely downvote bad comments, I just avert my eyes. I do flag spam, it's like picking up litter. But downvoting is an option, and part of the deal. Just don't "be a downvoter," it will probably make you feel worse, and make reading HN like a burden. Don't carry a cross, just watch the parade. (Worst metaphor you'll read today.) Write good comments. Respond seriously and helpfully to the occasional lame or hostile comment. Be the change you want to see, and all that. But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to like. Two ... this will take some work and time. You can do it in parallel with HN, or wherever you go from HN. Curate your own discussion group. Look around in your current social, academic and work circle, and talk to a small handful (less than five-ish, more than one), who you think might be interested in discussing what you're interested in. Establish some broad but focused discussion topics. Set up a mechanism for you all to discuss privately. If you're all local, beer is a great mechanism. Otherwise the easiest and simplest thing would be email, and you should probably stop at that; don't focus on the tools (fun though they are, especially the beer), start discussing as quickly as possible; like, this afternoon. Really, this afternoon. If you like, one of you can maintain a forwarding address, so you don't have to each maintain lists. But you don't need that this afternoon, let that emerge naturally. I've been a member of exactly such a list for ... 15 years? Dayam. Every once in awhile, invite a new individual in. Do it slowly and deliberately. Don't obsess or agonize over whether someone is right for the group; if you thought of them, they probably are. If they aren't, they'll stop participating. New people will change the dynamics and focus, and that's a good thing. Just do it slowly, not as a focus. Be generous and engaging with your fellow list members. Accept heat, and let it dissipate quickly. The fewer rules you have, the less they'll be broken. Over the years, your group might grow to five, or ten, or a hundred, it's up to you. As you communicate with people you know personally (or online personally), there's a danger that the group might take on some social aspects. You may even become friends with some or all of them. That's a risk that you'll have to take. It's not so bad. :)
• Mz 14y ago
  Most likely: Nothing is ever going to be exactly what you want. Even if you build it. And I see a fundamental conflict in your criteria: You want a less "social" site. You also want less fighting but with good discussion. Generally speaking, people who have the social savvy to encourage polite discourse are going to have some interest in social stuff. It is the nature of the beast.
• mkr-hn 14y ago
  That sounds profoundly boring. But if you really want that, and have the time, you can get close with Reddit + RES: http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ Add the right subreddits and filter out sites, posters, and keywords to refine it into exactly the thing you want.
• frozenport 14y ago
  Hacker news needs categories.
• shoopy 14y ago
  "Tech products" Not so clear cut. I, too, am sick of the gadget wars infesting every single discussion. Unfortunately, the inanities resulting from this modern day religious war are pervasive and unavoidable. Let's call it Shoopy's Law: Any topic that involves Apple, Google, Microsoft, ${CORPORATE_ENTITY}, no matter how superficial, is bound to devolve into religious flamewars about nonsequitur gadgety things like framerate stutters and marketplace app metrics.
• shoopy 14y ago
  I am also tired of the amount of time we spend patting each other on the back. I learned node.js 36 hours ago and here's my Hello World! 230 points! That's wonderful, but that front page is precious and we should upvote things that are useful to the community, instead of being tools for external affirmation for eager beavers.
• arikrak 14y ago
  More sites should let people tag submissions by topic, to help sort it for readers.
• rcillo 14y ago
  Go to the university.