7 ms·

Libre News, political discussion powered by Arc Lang

64 points by thisisdallas 13y ago

MarcScott 13y ago
While there is no post limit, please be respectable and do not submit so many posts that the front page is full of your submissions. All but 9 of the submissions on the front page are from ACN.
- eksith 13y ago
  I'm suspect this will be the case until they achieve critical mass. Of course, posting it here will likely help.
- vehementi 13y ago
  From 10 days ago... probably test / dummy posts
klrr 13y ago
Too hard to read the text! :P
jere 13y ago
How about an About page or FAQ so I know why the site exists? Here are a few questions to get you started: 1. Was this created by pg? 2. If not, why does everyone have an obsession with cloning Hacker News?
- joshuahedlund 13y ago
  3. What is the value-add of this site compared to existing subreddits on this topic and/or a potentially creatable subreddit on this topic?
  - TylerE 13y ago
    I suspect the value add is "Isn't reddit". Reddit is the new myspace. There are a few (mostly musty) corners that are still decent, due to herculean moderation efforts such as /r/AskScience, but the bulk of it becomes less worthwhile every day.
  - eksith 13y ago
    The comments alone make /r/politics nearly unusable for me. And I honestly tried! /r/WorldNews Isn't much better in that regard and I'd much rather see a forum with limited or no comments than either of those. I still get access to the news and get to avoid the trite in the comments.
    - dublinben 13y ago
      You need to use smaller subreddits if that's what you want. Subscribe to /r/RepublicOfNews, /r/NeutralNews, and /r/DiggRSS and you will find something completely different.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  No, this wasn't created by pg. This is a clone of hacker news because that's what ships with Arc.
- thisisdallas 13y ago
  This is a great idea and one that will happen in the near future. To answer your questions: 1. No it wasn't created by pg and it's not associated with him or ycombinator. Of course Arc is definitely associated with pg, Libre News is not. 2. Personally, I created this site because I am interested in Arc and wanted to experiment with it. I also wanted to provide a service for others (one that I was also interested in) and a non-censored news source that encouraged discussion seemed like a good idea.
  - yogo 13y ago
    It can be powered by Arc but did you have to use the same crappy table-based layout? I'd have to think these kinds of sites would save some bandwidth by simply trimming all that fat.
    - sillysaurus2 13y ago
      Can we please not start this flamewar again? It's been done to death and there's nothing new to be said.
  - jere 13y ago
    OK. Fair enough. I wasn't trying to be negative, but was genuinely wondering why so many HN clones are made. As a learning experience, it makes sense. Anyway, definitely do the About page because otherwise it won't be obvious that it's meant to be a "non-censored news source."
  - gknoy 13y ago
    Would you be interested in blogging about any changes you made, or particularly interesting/tricky things you found in the sources, while creating this? I haven't looked closely at ARC, so perhaps this is a foolish question, but was this as turn-key as unpacking the distribution, changing some names and colors, and running it on some server, or did you need to make substantial changes in order to make it your own, or even to get it to run?
- devx 13y ago
  I don't think cloning HN is bad. But has PG open sourced his code, or will the voting algorithm not going to be as good?
  - C1D 13y ago
    It's shipped with Arc, a programming language pg made. So yes, it is open source.
    - thejteam 13y ago
      Out of curiosity, what voting algorithm are you using at the moment? You'll have to tweak it if the site takes off. Especially since people get very particular about politics, even more so than money, and will try to game it in whatever way possible. It could make HN voting rings look benign.
      - C1D 13y ago
        I'm not the site creator so you'd have to ask him.
  - petercooper 13y ago
    From what I understand based on HN comments over the years, HN proper has lots of special secret sauce to prevent spam, voting fraud, etc.
- stevekemp 13y ago
  I've just posted my onw HN-inspired forum: https://github.com/skx/gathering/ https://github.com/skx/gathering/ This is written in Perl, and has some interesting features. But I was inspired by HN because it works well, in its minimal fashion.
ing33k 13y ago
only reason I checked the site was because the submission included Powered by Arc in the title, but any how found some interesting links and bookmarked the site .
acowlichenbag 13y ago
http://redd.it/1lnun3 http://redd.it/1lnun3 I killed christopher 'aempirei' abad with my 5" dick Cowabunga, dude! And now you're going to die wearing that stupid little hat. How does it feel!? You got caught with the seat of your pants flying down and now everyone laughs at your little picopenis on a daily basis. Microchipping a fellow hacker just because you can't sniff out your own? Hilariously inept. Throwing a well-known, contributing veteran of the hack/trollscene into a mental institution just because you had a hangover and forgot to take your klonopin? Over the top. Having a wanton disregard for the history of the internet, the hackscene, trollscene and everything about humanity in general? Get a clue. Your holier-than-thou attitude can screw back off to the 1980's. Yes, folks, christopher 'ambient empire' abad has been bitchtagging and torturing anyone that walks by him just because, well, "I feel like it!" Yes, folks, christopher 'ambient empire' abad fails to understand the first rule of the U.S. system: you can always just buy people off with cash. ' We've been talking to your friends, coworkers and they've been telling us what a lazy, unappreciative little shit you are. Not to mention a sociopath of the lowest order. You won the birth lottery and coasted your way to the top of the U.S. system on a skateboard. Now it's going to be a fun ride when we push your little deck the way back down. You are nothing but a barking little dog who got caught sneaking up the backstairs into the big people's club and now you're being thrown out the window. Your last thought as you realize nothing of value will be lost when your head cracks on the floor of a 12x12 supermax prison cell: "I like to copy from my 1337 civics textbook." Sayanora, sucker! Malaclypse the Younger http://pastie.org/8295259 http://pastie.org/8295259 http://tny.cz/d39750c4 http://tny.cz/d39750c4
petercooper 13y ago
Yay, somewhere all the NSA/Snowden/Wikileaks/New World Order/bombing stories can go instead of HN. Huge thumbs up to this.
- dmix 13y ago
  After ~5yrs on here, I've seen at least a hundred attempts at creating a second HN strictly for politics, but none of them have been successful.
  - rubyn00bie 13y ago
    Of course none have been! :) ... and none will be. Because 90+% of online politics discourse is dominated by trolls. People who want to have actual discussions, and listen to differing opinions, will be driven away en masse. Leaving the trolls to troll each other. Unfortunately, dog-fooding isn't very popular in the troll world-- so the site dies et voila! Here we are.
    - eksith 13y ago
      "Because 90+% of online politics discourse is dominated by trolls." True, but I hope the mods/admins of this don't get discouraged because we do badly need a place to talk about these things. Spilling over here isn't helping and will only drag things down by souring the mood, since these topics aren't what most people who visit HN are here for. Politics is one of those Neodymium magnets that seem to attract the worst of the worst, however, that's only due to unchecked emotions in a similar vein to religion. It's hard to tackle an idea without touching the human behind the keyboard. But I believe such a forum can exist and thrive, though it would take a super-human effort to moderate.
- mcphilip 13y ago
  Huge downvote to this. Saying that a hacker community shouldn't be interested in the Snowden revelations is ridiculous, and listing him alongside New World Order conspiracy theories is just insulting.
contextual 13y ago
There's also https://www.plantdietlife.com https://www.plantdietlife.com that posted here not long ago. Both are interesting and worthy topics. It's getting users engaged with the content, that's the challenge.
pmelendez 13y ago
I remember read last week about someone suggesting to grab HN code and putting it on an EC2 instance. It was for a business news site if I recall correctly. It seems somebody took the idea, this is actually hosted in AWS.
Houshalter 13y ago
Kind of off topic, but I've been thinking about building a site like HN/reddit, but instead of ranking stuff based on how many votes it has, use machine learning to predict how likely a specific individual is to upvote it. That way everyone's front page is based off what they tend to like, and what people who like similar stuff to them liked. That way you don't have to fracture stuff into 50 different communities and try to figure out what kind of content is acceptable in each, and what ones you want to subscribe to.
- helloTree 13y ago
  But probably you get stuck in local maxima. E.g. if I am on Hacker News I want to find new and exciting stuff and not things I already know ...
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Ya you'd have to take that into account somehow. If 50 other people that are also interested in "technology" or whatever vote for something, then it's likely you will like it as well. There is no reason you have to select content purely based on the website it's from, or the words it contains, but it's a really good filter for getting rid of stuff you definitely don't like. I.e. if you filtered reddit this way, most images and memes would get ranked way lower for me. Someone else might have articles or news stories ranked lower. But mostly I'm looking to automatically find people who have similar interests or voting patterns, and then selecting based on what those people voted for to see what you might like.
antocv 13y ago
I cant read anything on that page without squinting hard and tilting my screen up and down. Please, this is 2013, #000 on #ccc, not #ddd on #ccc.
- thisisdallas 13y ago
  I'll definitely make note of this and get it changed. Thanks for the feedback.
coherentpony 13y ago
HTML Tables? Really?
- ksrm 13y ago
  HN also uses tables.
  - coherentpony 13y ago
    That was my point.
Todd 13y ago
It would be nice to get an SSL cert on the site as soon as you're able. For the time being, passwords and political interest (as demonstrated by clicked URLs) are being passed as plain text.
bradleysmith 13y ago
Shameless plug for a related non-revenue project. I built a similarly inspired hn clone here: http://news.intelmap.com/ http://news.intelmap.com/ This was really just done for tinkering's sake, not trying to make a successful "second HN strictly for politics". I actually built it to feed a news map here: http://www.intelmap.com/ http://www.intelmap.com/ Thanks for the share, would love to compare notes. I'll sign up for LibreNews and check in every now and then.
vinceleo 13y ago
Is it down?
grepthis 13y ago
Seems to be down.
- vinceleo 13y ago
  that's right

64 points by thisisdallas 13y ago

While there is no post limit, please be respectable and do not submit so many posts that the front page is full of your submissions. All but 9 of the submissions on the front page are from ACN.

eksith 13y ago
I'm suspect this will be the case until they achieve critical mass. Of course, posting it here will likely help.
vehementi 13y ago
From 10 days ago... probably test / dummy posts

klrr 13y ago

Too hard to read the text! :P

jere 13y ago

How about an About page or FAQ so I know why the site exists? Here are a few questions to get you started: 1. Was this created by pg? 2. If not, why does everyone have an obsession with cloning Hacker News?

joshuahedlund 13y ago
3. What is the value-add of this site compared to existing subreddits on this topic and/or a potentially creatable subreddit on this topic?
- TylerE 13y ago
  I suspect the value add is "Isn't reddit". Reddit is the new myspace. There are a few (mostly musty) corners that are still decent, due to herculean moderation efforts such as /r/AskScience, but the bulk of it becomes less worthwhile every day.
- eksith 13y ago
  The comments alone make /r/politics nearly unusable for me. And I honestly tried! /r/WorldNews Isn't much better in that regard and I'd much rather see a forum with limited or no comments than either of those. I still get access to the news and get to avoid the trite in the comments.
  - dublinben 13y ago
    You need to use smaller subreddits if that's what you want. Subscribe to /r/RepublicOfNews, /r/NeutralNews, and /r/DiggRSS and you will find something completely different.
sillysaurus2 13y ago
No, this wasn't created by pg. This is a clone of hacker news because that's what ships with Arc.
thisisdallas 13y ago
This is a great idea and one that will happen in the near future. To answer your questions: 1. No it wasn't created by pg and it's not associated with him or ycombinator. Of course Arc is definitely associated with pg, Libre News is not. 2. Personally, I created this site because I am interested in Arc and wanted to experiment with it. I also wanted to provide a service for others (one that I was also interested in) and a non-censored news source that encouraged discussion seemed like a good idea.
- yogo 13y ago
  It can be powered by Arc but did you have to use the same crappy table-based layout? I'd have to think these kinds of sites would save some bandwidth by simply trimming all that fat.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    Can we please not start this flamewar again? It's been done to death and there's nothing new to be said.
- jere 13y ago
  OK. Fair enough. I wasn't trying to be negative, but was genuinely wondering why so many HN clones are made. As a learning experience, it makes sense. Anyway, definitely do the About page because otherwise it won't be obvious that it's meant to be a "non-censored news source."
- gknoy 13y ago
  Would you be interested in blogging about any changes you made, or particularly interesting/tricky things you found in the sources, while creating this? I haven't looked closely at ARC, so perhaps this is a foolish question, but was this as turn-key as unpacking the distribution, changing some names and colors, and running it on some server, or did you need to make substantial changes in order to make it your own, or even to get it to run?
devx 13y ago
I don't think cloning HN is bad. But has PG open sourced his code, or will the voting algorithm not going to be as good?
- C1D 13y ago
  It's shipped with Arc, a programming language pg made. So yes, it is open source.
  - thejteam 13y ago
    Out of curiosity, what voting algorithm are you using at the moment? You'll have to tweak it if the site takes off. Especially since people get very particular about politics, even more so than money, and will try to game it in whatever way possible. It could make HN voting rings look benign.
    - C1D 13y ago
      I'm not the site creator so you'd have to ask him.
- petercooper 13y ago
  From what I understand based on HN comments over the years, HN proper has lots of special secret sauce to prevent spam, voting fraud, etc.
stevekemp 13y ago
I've just posted my onw HN-inspired forum: https://github.com/skx/gathering/ https://github.com/skx/gathering/ This is written in Perl, and has some interesting features. But I was inspired by HN because it works well, in its minimal fashion.

ing33k 13y ago

only reason I checked the site was because the submission included Powered by Arc in the title, but any how found some interesting links and bookmarked the site .

acowlichenbag 13y ago

http://redd.it/1lnun3 http://redd.it/1lnun3 I killed christopher 'aempirei' abad with my 5" dick Cowabunga, dude! And now you're going to die wearing that stupid little hat. How does it feel!? You got caught with the seat of your pants flying down and now everyone laughs at your little picopenis on a daily basis. Microchipping a fellow hacker just because you can't sniff out your own? Hilariously inept. Throwing a well-known, contributing veteran of the hack/trollscene into a mental institution just because you had a hangover and forgot to take your klonopin? Over the top. Having a wanton disregard for the history of the internet, the hackscene, trollscene and everything about humanity in general? Get a clue. Your holier-than-thou attitude can screw back off to the 1980's. Yes, folks, christopher 'ambient empire' abad has been bitchtagging and torturing anyone that walks by him just because, well, "I feel like it!" Yes, folks, christopher 'ambient empire' abad fails to understand the first rule of the U.S. system: you can always just buy people off with cash. ' We've been talking to your friends, coworkers and they've been telling us what a lazy, unappreciative little shit you are. Not to mention a sociopath of the lowest order. You won the birth lottery and coasted your way to the top of the U.S. system on a skateboard. Now it's going to be a fun ride when we push your little deck the way back down. You are nothing but a barking little dog who got caught sneaking up the backstairs into the big people's club and now you're being thrown out the window. Your last thought as you realize nothing of value will be lost when your head cracks on the floor of a 12x12 supermax prison cell: "I like to copy from my 1337 civics textbook." Sayanora, sucker! Malaclypse the Younger http://pastie.org/8295259 http://pastie.org/8295259 http://tny.cz/d39750c4 http://tny.cz/d39750c4

petercooper 13y ago

Yay, somewhere all the NSA/Snowden/Wikileaks/New World Order/bombing stories can go instead of HN. Huge thumbs up to this.

dmix 13y ago
After ~5yrs on here, I've seen at least a hundred attempts at creating a second HN strictly for politics, but none of them have been successful.
- rubyn00bie 13y ago
  Of course none have been! :) ... and none will be. Because 90+% of online politics discourse is dominated by trolls. People who want to have actual discussions, and listen to differing opinions, will be driven away en masse. Leaving the trolls to troll each other. Unfortunately, dog-fooding isn't very popular in the troll world-- so the site dies et voila! Here we are.
  - eksith 13y ago
    "Because 90+% of online politics discourse is dominated by trolls." True, but I hope the mods/admins of this don't get discouraged because we do badly need a place to talk about these things. Spilling over here isn't helping and will only drag things down by souring the mood, since these topics aren't what most people who visit HN are here for. Politics is one of those Neodymium magnets that seem to attract the worst of the worst, however, that's only due to unchecked emotions in a similar vein to religion. It's hard to tackle an idea without touching the human behind the keyboard. But I believe such a forum can exist and thrive, though it would take a super-human effort to moderate.
mcphilip 13y ago
Huge downvote to this. Saying that a hacker community shouldn't be interested in the Snowden revelations is ridiculous, and listing him alongside New World Order conspiracy theories is just insulting.

contextual 13y ago

There's also https://www.plantdietlife.com https://www.plantdietlife.com that posted here not long ago. Both are interesting and worthy topics. It's getting users engaged with the content, that's the challenge.

pmelendez 13y ago

I remember read last week about someone suggesting to grab HN code and putting it on an EC2 instance. It was for a business news site if I recall correctly. It seems somebody took the idea, this is actually hosted in AWS.

Houshalter 13y ago

Kind of off topic, but I've been thinking about building a site like HN/reddit, but instead of ranking stuff based on how many votes it has, use machine learning to predict how likely a specific individual is to upvote it. That way everyone's front page is based off what they tend to like, and what people who like similar stuff to them liked. That way you don't have to fracture stuff into 50 different communities and try to figure out what kind of content is acceptable in each, and what ones you want to subscribe to.

helloTree 13y ago
But probably you get stuck in local maxima. E.g. if I am on Hacker News I want to find new and exciting stuff and not things I already know ...
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Ya you'd have to take that into account somehow. If 50 other people that are also interested in "technology" or whatever vote for something, then it's likely you will like it as well. There is no reason you have to select content purely based on the website it's from, or the words it contains, but it's a really good filter for getting rid of stuff you definitely don't like. I.e. if you filtered reddit this way, most images and memes would get ranked way lower for me. Someone else might have articles or news stories ranked lower. But mostly I'm looking to automatically find people who have similar interests or voting patterns, and then selecting based on what those people voted for to see what you might like.

antocv 13y ago

I cant read anything on that page without squinting hard and tilting my screen up and down. Please, this is 2013, #000 on #ccc, not #ddd on #ccc.

thisisdallas 13y ago
I'll definitely make note of this and get it changed. Thanks for the feedback.

coherentpony 13y ago

HTML Tables? Really?

ksrm 13y ago
HN also uses tables.
- coherentpony 13y ago
  That was my point.

Todd 13y ago

It would be nice to get an SSL cert on the site as soon as you're able. For the time being, passwords and political interest (as demonstrated by clicked URLs) are being passed as plain text.

bradleysmith 13y ago

Shameless plug for a related non-revenue project. I built a similarly inspired hn clone here: http://news.intelmap.com/ http://news.intelmap.com/ This was really just done for tinkering's sake, not trying to make a successful "second HN strictly for politics". I actually built it to feed a news map here: http://www.intelmap.com/ http://www.intelmap.com/ Thanks for the share, would love to compare notes. I'll sign up for LibreNews and check in every now and then.

vinceleo 13y ago

Is it down?

grepthis 13y ago

Seems to be down.

vinceleo 13y ago
that's right