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Ask HN: Alternatives to HN
Are there other similar sites to HN which focuses more on technical topics, constructive discussions and other interesting things?
- zachlatta 13y agohttp://firespotting.com/ http://firespotting.com/ is a Hacker News for ideas.
- mooism2 13y agohttp://lamernews.com/ http://lamernews.com/ although it's quiet.
- ehsanu1 13y agoNot a true alternative, but less noisy: http://lessmeme.com/less.html http://lessmeme.com/less.html
- pbobak 13y agoThere's http://sidebar.io/ http://sidebar.io/ for web/mobile design topics.
- jacquesm 13y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ And many other subreddits besides.
- davidw 13y agoThat's an alternative, but not a particularly good one, IMO. The Comic Book Guy is strong over there - meaning that a significant number of conversations carry that sort of condescending, unfriendly tone as the Simpson's Comic Book Guy; intending to show that the author is clearly a superior human being due to their knowledge of ARM opcodes and their interaction with GCC or whatever else the subject is. The biggest risks I see for HN are: * Simply getting too big. Not much to do about that. * Noisy political articles (like, say, about China...) that attract people who like noisy political discussions. * Outrage articles. There are a lot of horrible injustices in the world. Enough to completely drown out tech and startup news, and in the grand scheme of things, often much more important than, say, Scala vs Clojure.
- durzagott 13y agoI'm finding I have to check HN around 10-15 times a day, lest I miss some of the more interesting submissions. I really enjoying a lot of the ShowHN, Startup news, and discussions around programming languages/libraries. I primarily come to HN to learn. This seems to be the place that many clever people congregate to share opinions and ideas. I really just like to listen to what they have to say to each other. However, it seems that a lot of the good submissions drop off the front page after just a few hours. The ones that tend to stick around seem to be more "political" than anything else. I guess it's easier to voice an opinion on an outrage-article as you don't need any real expertise. I do wish we could just get back to talking mostly about development/tech stuff. There is so much to learn in this industry and HN is one of the few places where it all comes together.
- krmmalik 13y agoHave you considered setting up a 'recipe' on IFTTT to monitor for posts with your desired Keywords?
- durzagott 13y agoI'd not heard of IFTTT. Thanks for the tip.
- WayneDB 13y agoHave you tried http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ ?
- bradleysmith 13y agoRad, this is really neat thanks for that.
- durzagott 13y agoThis looks great! Thank you.
- Synergyse 13y ago
- olalonde 13y agoIt's interesting to compare the HN[0] and Reddit[1] comments for the same article. The second highest voted comment on Reddit is "this is high levels of bad ass." at 276 points. I guess HN is still far ahead of other communities after all (if you're interested in serious discussion). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5330998 [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/19rzi3/breaking_down_amazons_mega_dropdown/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/19rzi3/breaking...
- RegEx 13y agoNice sample size you have there. There are many extremely insightful comments on the programming subreddit, and there are also many empty, predictable comments on HN. I bet many people here can guess the top comment on particular threads based solely upon the submission title. (There's a high probability the top comment has the phrase "Am I the only one, or ...") So is HN ahead of /r/programming? At times, definitely. However, anyone who frequents both will attest to the fact that /r/programming is much better at ignoring linkbait, while HN seems to fall for it on a daily basis.
- mindcrime 13y agoI bet many people here can guess the top comment on particular threads based solely upon the submission title. (There's a high probability the top comment has the phrase "Am I the only one, or ...") You might just have a point.[1] [1]: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=%22am+I+the+only+one%22&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=%22am...
- calinet6 13y agoSome would see a liberal use of language and the ability to hold a sense of humor to be civilized traits.
- olalonde 13y agoThe comment is indeed funny but I don't come on HN to get my daily dose of humour just like I don't go out to a bar to debate the latest HTML5 specs. Yes, I do enjoy humour, drinking and debating HTML5 specs but each has its own time and place.
- jacques_chester 13y agoI stopped reading /r/programming and came to HN about 2 years ago. There was more programming here and more industry gossip there. It drove me so completely batty that I founded a related subreddit in anger.
- rubinelli 13y agoMost of the subreddits dedicated to a specific language or technology are nice, although it usually takes at least 1,000 subscribers to reach a critical mass, with the sweet spot between 10,000 and 100,000 subscribers. If you are doing front-end web development, for example, /r/webdev, /r/javascript, and /r/html5 are pretty good places to keep on top of interesting projects and exchange ideas.
- piranha 13y ago/r/javascript is full of basic questions, small simple libraries and otherwise not really interesting content. I feel that signal/noise rate was much lower on /r/javascript than on any other subreddit I'm subscribed to. I have unsubscribed half a year ago, and I would never recommend it as an interesting read.
- PaulHoule 13y agoI'm a left winger, I even shook Gus Hall's hand. But for me the people on proggit are too communist. If you show the slightest bit of evidence that you're (at least somewhat) in it for the money, they hit the downvote button hard.
- James_Duval 13y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/functionalprogramming http://www.reddit.com/r/functionalprogramming ^really interesting subreddit imo.
- tezza 13y agohttps://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ - I am not a member, but it looks very similar
- conroy 13y agoIf anyone would like an invite, send me an email or reply here.
- flipgimble 13y agoHi, I'd like an invite if you still have one (my email is on my account page). What is the history of https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs ? Or maybe how would you describe the focus and character of the community?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- steveklabnik 13y agohttps://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/ https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
- i-blis 13y ago'd be happy to get one (mail in profile), thanks
- dreen 13y agoHey can you send one down here please gmail: dreen1 Thanks :)
- shanelja 13y agoHey - I would like an invite. I contacted the founder the day it was released, 4 days after and 2 weeks after, all with well thought out emails which I spent some serious time on. Unfortunately he didn't respond to any off them, not even with a simple "fuck off."
- revorad 13y agoThe best alternatives to HN I've found are Github and meeting interesting people in person.
- olalonde 13y agohttp://www.forrst.com http://www.forrst.com - "A community where developers & designers improve their craft through design feedback."
- Kudos 13y agoWhen I last checked it was community of designers and designers who think they are also developers.
- blparker 13y agoYeah, it's gone through changes over the past year, and it's pretty much all but dead. There used to be a decent blend of development/designer articles, but it's completely dominated by design articles now.
- yefim 13y agoThere's always http://thelist.io http://thelist.io
- olalonde 13y agohttp://www.lesswrong.com http://www.lesswrong.com - "Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality."
- mindcrime 13y agoSlashdot, if you don't mind a heavy dose of Internet Meme along with your Interesting Discussion. There are also sites which focus more on specific topics... if you're into server-side Java stuff, there's http://theserverside.com http://theserverside.com, if you're into programming language research, there's http://lambda-the-ultimate.org http://lambda-the-ultimate.org, etc., etc. And a lot of the more niche subreddits are actually pretty good. Stay away from /r/funny, /r/politics and the other "big" ones and check out /r/machinelearning, /r/compsci, /r/systems, /r/math, or /r/compscipapers, etc.
- Lewton 13y agoadd /r/reverseengineering and /r/netsec to that Not that active but the little stuff that gets posted is usually high quality
- jaytaylor 13y agoSo, http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+PhilosophyofScience+cogsci+startups+math+compsci+SomebodyMakeThis+browsers+gamedev+shamelessplug+Freethought+reverseengineering+netsec http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+...
- TheAcen 13y agoTIL you can append subreddits to get a multi-subreddit.
- jaredsohn 13y agoI've forwarded a domain to this URL if someone to conveniently visit it without creating an account: http://www.hackertraps.com/ http://www.hackertraps.com/ (Bought since mentioned in Arrested Development Season 4 and I'm otherwise not sure what to do with it.)
- Nursie 13y agoSlashdot is ad-plagued and not at all the techie site it once was, IMHO. You used to get the big names in the field discussing their topics on there. Now it's mostly fanboy flamewars.
- phyalow 13y agohttp://arxiv.org http://arxiv.org - I like reading the abstracts and occasionally papers if I happen on something interesting.
- X4 13y agohahhahahaha :D you're cool man... The Op asked for a HN alternative. (Arxiv is great, I subscribed to all rss) But I bet you can't comment on a dissertation/tehsis/publication like you do on HN/reddit. hehe :)
- phyalow 13y agoSure you can if your on relevant mailing lists / with your department colleagues.
- phyalow 13y agoSure you can if your on relevant mailing lists / with your department colleagues. Don't know why your laughing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- X4 13y agoI'm laughing because I found that very post great. The reason is, I also enjoy Arxiv and that comment topped all other news sources. It like when someone asks for a the definition of a word and you plonk the entire collection of human wisdom on his head. :D All other news sources are merely news, where that post contained hard science news, but it was overkill.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- aymeric 13y agoThere is http://inbound.org http://inbound.org for a marketing oriented HN.
- thoughtcriminal 13y agoThe site that started it all: Slashdot: http://slashdot.org http://slashdot.org
- greyman 13y agoI have found only two such sites so far: 1) reddit - here, you have to subscribe to the right mix of subreddits according to your interests 2) Google+ - also quite good, but one needs to do some work, namely to find the right communities, pages and people to follow. But if you are asking about sites with the same "genre" as HN (the same functionality), then no, I haven't found alternative to HN.
- zalew 13y ago> Google+ - also quite good, but one needs to do some work, namely to find the right communities could you link? I subscribed to some lang/framework/os ones, but didn't find much value there and found it's better to follow people. if you got some it would be nice.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> reddit - here, you have to subscribe to the right mix of subreddits according to your interests Can you recommend some subreddits beside /r/programming and the subreddits mentioned in the sidebar of /r/programming)? I have not found a generic software engineering subreddit (probably without any web development content), which is quite strange.
- fractalsea 13y ago/r/webdev
- samweinberg 13y ago/r/webdev just rehashes the stuff posted on HN.
- mietek 13y agoSome of my subreddits, with a slight theoretical slant: coding, cognitivelinguistics, cogsci, compsci, compscipapers, criticalsoftware, crypto, erlang, gamedev, haskell, icfpcontest, MachineLearning, mathpsych, netsec, ReverseEngineering, systems, truegamedev, types
- 13y ago
- l33tfr4gg3r 13y agoHow about http://thingsiwantmade.com/ http://thingsiwantmade.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vanwilder77 13y agoHackernews Clone http://hackerstreet.in http://hackerstreet.in
- rounak 13y agoIndia specific though
- Sambdala 13y agohttp://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com/ http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com/ I built a tongue in cheek tool to keep track of communities like HN that might be relevant to other interests. However, I'm the only one that has ever used it, and I think all the things I've submitted have already been mentioned here.
- jaytaylor 13y agoThis is fun. I wish there was a way to edit or delete my submissions -- I accidentally submitted a dupe and messed up the title of another. Fun little app, thanks for sharing!
- sycamore 13y agohttps://news.layervault.com/ https://news.layervault.com/ Designer News is quite good for design discussion. It's an invite only site though ( I don't have an account so I can't invite - sorry! )
- md8 13y agofirespotting.com
- ameyakarve 13y agoEchoJS is pretty nice for JS stuff
- lukego 13y agoTwitter is my current favorite way to keep up with the Zeitgeist.
- mkstowegnv 13y agohttp://www.crowdsourcing.org/ http://www.crowdsourcing.org/ specialized but hitting all the same themes as HN. Surprising how surprising crowdsourcing still is.
- ikonos_de 13y agoAre there also any business related alternatives?
- konradb 13y agoYes - I'd be very interested in this also.
- jrgnsd 13y agoI thought this post to be quite ironic.
- andyzweb 13y agopg: can we just blacklist medium. problem solved
- mcovey 13y agoWell if you speak Spanish, there's http://www.noticiashacker.com/ http://www.noticiashacker.com/ but it looks kind of dead.
- mmahemoff 13y agoThe Google Plus Hacker News community is a good supplement, which has 55K members. (I'm a moderator.) https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266 https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266 There are some other worthwhile tech communities on G+ - just visit https://plus.google.com/communities https://plus.google.com/communities and do some searches, e.g. for your favorite programming language, platform, or framework.
- hdra 13y agoI find the posts and discussion in G+ communities (in general, I am no referring any specfic community) to be in general to be terrible in quality. For programming related communities, there are too many newbies who don't bother googling asking the same stupid question over and over. For some others, many are reposting the same thing that made it to the front page of HN or Reddit, to earn 'creds' I guess. There are a few obscure ones that post high quality content that I wouldn't discover otherwise, they usually lack lively discussions.
- neaanopri 13y agoThere's Hubski: hubski.com The content there is MUCH less tech focused, it's more about longform writing, and the comments are superb.
- hispanic 13y agoThanks for sharing this. Looks good. I like the ability to follow specific people and topics.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- RobSim 13y agoHave you heard of http://thelist.io http://thelist.io? Self Proclaimed social knowledge board for designers and developers.
- ewheeler 13y agohttp://leapfrog.io http://leapfrog.io for international development, human rights, and technology news
- haffi112 13y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned this but a really good option is Prismatic (getprismatic.com). You basically just follow topics/sites and it suggests to you more sites/topics which are similar. Browsing from there I get all the big articles on hacker news and from other sources which I wasn't aware of previously.
- voidvoid 13y agopandawhale.com tends to have a medium sized portion of startup/tech news bulked up with a best-of selection from reddit or facebook.
- capnjngl 13y agoFor marketers, http://inbound.org http://inbound.org has a similar format.
- hoopsho 13y agoI have been working on a project: http://www.ellsy.io http://www.ellsy.io It is not complete yet, but I could use some feedback. Specifically regarding a commenting system. I am thinking about rolling my own, but that comes with a lot of issues. Any ideas on how you would like it to look? The site has the ability to curate posts, and then as you follow topics or even other users, you can start to build out a custom stream of news by sources that you like or are interested in. Both curated items and stream items are ordered based on the amount of likes that they receive. There is no down voting. Each user also has a profile page showing where they typically "like" items and where they post them.
- dhotson 13y agohttps://pinboard.in/popular/ https://pinboard.in/popular/ I'm being serious. If you're looking for a raw source of interesting material—you can often find some really interesting stuff.
- jpdevereaux 13y agoYou can find some cool stuff via tag filtering - e.g. https://pinboard.in/t:nodejs/t:distributed/ https://pinboard.in/t:nodejs/t:distributed/
- dhotson 13y agoAlso, the network feature works great when you subscribe to people who bookmark interesting stuff.
- t_hozumi 13y agohttp://rootopic.com/test/root http://rootopic.com/test/root I created a forum service. Flat time ordered comment system is easy to read. You can create your own community.
- cvg 13y agoSomeone here once posted this aggregation of subreddits as an alternative: http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+PhilosophyofScience+cogsci+startups+math+compsci+SomebodyMakeThis+browsers+gamedev+shamelessplug+Freethought http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+... It's not a perfect version of 2010 HN, but with some pruning and grafting I imagine it could be close.
- malkia 13y agohttp://TheChaosEngine.com http://TheChaosEngine.com focuses on video game development (art, programming, design, general topics). To get full access you would need to send an work email to confirm that you are from the industry. There are also some indies, educators, and ex-video game folks (so it's not a strict order). There is also http://www.altdevblogaday.com/ http://www.altdevblogaday.com/ also for game development. Recently http://flipcode.com http://flipcode.com has been getting up from long sleep (it was my favourite site back in the days).
- kevinburke 13y agoI wrote a Chrome extension designed to filter HN down to the more technical posts. It might help. You need to download/load it as an unpacked extension, due to the new Chrome security policies, sadly http://bitbucket.org/kevinburke/better-hn-filter http://bitbucket.org/kevinburke/better-hn-filter
- giribin 13y agoPhrack.org for security research and exploits
- nickfrost 13y agoThanks for the crowdsourced list of great resources for distributing unique content. Yay pageviews and engagement! :D
- jmartens 13y agohttp://thelist.io http://thelist.io
- hidden-markov 13y agoThere's also a moderately good russian http://habrahabr.ru http://habrahabr.ru It's mostly translations of what you can see on hackernews, but there's a lot of original content which is oftentimes interesting. Of course, it's in russian.
- DanBC 13y agoI hope people who dislike the political stories are flagging those stories.