5 ms·
Ask HN: Would you guys visit a purely hacker-oriented version of HN?
A friend and I are sitting on tailrecursion.com wondering what to do with it. I suggested it would be a cool name for an HN-like site that catered specifically to those who spend 8 hours a day behind an emacs or vi session (and no less!), rather than the marketing/sales/non-hacker-founder types (which HN perfectly addresses). What do you guys think?
- grandalf 17y agoyou mean employees of startups / non-founders? Or founders of startups for which marketing is irrelevant?
- jcapote 17y agoEither. Just wanted to emphasize that the discussions are going to be deeply technical in nature and not business related in any sense.
- PieSquared 17y agoI would enjoy an HN-like site with a greater focus on algorithms and other more complex material. HN sometimes gets these posts on things like closures, functional programming, monads, y combinators, etc. A lot of these are just posts from Wikipedia or such, but they're interesting and generate a lot of discussion. Similarly, I enjoy the more physics and chemistry oriented tech articles. To summarize: I'd love an HN for theoretical CS, physics, chemistry, etc, more focused on the actual sciences than on marketing, sales, deployment, etc. I'd be there in an instant.
- jcapote 17y agoExactly! The closest I have found to this is reddit.com/r/compsci, but the comments are nowhere near as valuable as when those threads make it to HN
- nothingmuch 17y agoLtU
- cubicle67 17y agotry http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
- johnnybgoode 17y agoI don't actually know for sure, but isn't this what reddit programming is for?
- jcapote 17y agoIt was for that, but it's caliber has definitely lightened over the years. Compare: http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/r/programming http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/... http://reddit.com/r/programming http://reddit.com/r/programming
- cubicle67 17y agoagreed, although it seems to have not deteriorated to the same degree and the main Reddit
- johnnybgoode 17y agoAh, that's not surprising. Thanks.
- sjf 17y agoGosh, I remember reading those stories on progreddit that day. I was beginning to wonder if I had just imagined the decline in quality or if instead my tastes had just changed considerably. All the haskell, lisp, FP, compsci stories are gone, the comments are complete drivel. I rarely see a story that is worth reading (and I read reddit compulsively several times a day). I think a lot of the blame can be placed on including progreddit on the main page when the subreddits were introduced. Suddenly there were a lot of non-programmers on progreddit. To the OP, yes I would like to see a hacker version of hackernews.
- kailoa 17y agoAbsolutely. I'd even expect some cross-pollination as well.
- lyaunzbe 17y agoGood idea...but its been done already by Academic Hacker News: http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- iron_ball 17y agoDo you have to ask? The tenth result was posted 88 days ago. Clearly not active in the slightest.
- russell 17y agoThe problem is that not much is being posted over there and even less discussion. Edit: I would be all for a more active site. And good discussions of technical issues a step above, "how do I fix this problem?"
- burke 17y agoAgreed, but I don't see how starting yet another site will fix the problematic lack of discussion.
- trevelyan 17y agoOne would imagine posting MORE to the existing site would solve the problem more readily than starting a new one with even less users.
- jcapote 17y agoMaybe the catchier name will help? Also it wouldn't simply be an HN clone, it would have features specific to its use case.
- swombat 17y agoI doubt it. Perhaps the interesting discussion and activity comes precisely from the fact that this community does not suffer from programming tunnel vision. One-dimensional minds are rarely interesting to converse with, no matter how far they go in that one dimension.
- mynameishere 17y agoIt seems to me that, with business, things are constantly changing, thus making it suitable for "news", whereas programming itself is a slow-moving craft. I mean, your text editors are from the 1970s.
- GeneralMaximus 17y agoNot really, no. Programmers deal with tools. Programming languages, IDEs, text editors are all tools. Hammers haven't changed much in the last 100 years, so why should our tools change radically? There are people who have been using Emacs for 10+ years. Making radical changes negatively affects programmer productivity. Hackers embrace new programming paradigms whole heartedly. Learning new programming languages or grokking a new library/framework is fun. Suddenly replacing the tools that have become muscle-memory with something completely different is definitely not fun. IMO, revolution is favored when it comes to programming languages, frameworks and libraries. Evolution is favored when it comes to tools of the trade (text editors, commandline tools, etc.)
- mynameishere 17y agoHackers embrace new programming paradigms whole heartedly I guess. But I've seen so many fawning articles on Lisp (birthdate: 1958) that I'm tempted to stand by my original point: It's a slow-moving craft. EDIT: By the way, I was shocked to look at my own username's created date. 842 days. Jesus christ, time flies. Anyway, most of you probably don't realize that this forum was originally called "startup news" and was designed mainly for business, not "hacking" whatever that is. http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...
- cpr 17y agoHeck, there are old-timers among us (blush) who have been using Emacs for 30 years!
- GeneralMaximus 17y agoYes, please! I crave programming news, and I find none. Proggit is full of Techcrunch-esque crap these days, and meme threads dominate the discussions. HN is food for thought, but it caters to a broader audience these days. If you can build and maintain a community with the same standards as HN, do it. Since I have too much free time on my hands, I'm even ready to lend a hand :p
- andreyf 17y agoUgh, this is such a web1.0 problem. Instead, why not write a greasemonkey plugin that cross-submits posts to Academic Hacker News when you upvote them, and only upvote academic articles?
- 0xdefec8 17y agoIt has as much to do with the community it attracts as the articles themselves. Every social news site has it's unspoken core values that can't be parsed out (easily :) with a script. HN has it's libertarians, reddit has it's contrarian only-I-took-the-red-pill mentality, and 4chan has its poop and kiddieporn. Go against the respective grain, and get ostracized.
- anc2020 17y agoUnfortunately it looks like Academic Hacker News ran out of steam (no new entries) :( http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/
- geuis 17y agoAbsolutely. Build it, and I will come. HN is awesome for its variety of startup/programming related news but I would love to see a site dedicated to nothing but programming, front-end(html/css/javascript), and science news. Would you even consider curating the content somewhat? Definitely have a voting system in place, but be compelled to remove content that doesn't match the purpose of the site.
- jcapote 17y agoWe plan to aggressively (but openly) moderate submissions. Another idea we were kicking around was instead of using forms to submit comments or stories, you would do it solely via the API.
- karanbhangui 17y agoWhy not just use the reddit codebase?
- mnemonik 17y agoOr the HN codebase if you plan to go down this route.
- pg 17y agoWhich articles currently on the frontpage of HN would you not include?
- jcapote 17y ago--I would exclude these: Why Amazon Vine is a Threat Worth Talking About (jonbischke.com) Facebook | Username (facebook.com) MySpace Is In Far Worse Shape Than Its New Executives Thought Does It Matter If The Future Isn't Available In Canada? (techvibes.com) Authors, poets replace reporters at an Israeli newspaper for one day All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours (techcrunch.com) Heyzap (YC09/USV) looking for a flash contractor. Humans prefer cockiness to expertise (newscientist.com) Should you move your startup to the Valley? (tonywright.com) Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address (newyorker.com) All my games are now free (toucharcade.com) How to find new startup ideas? The answer is in the question. (dashnine.org) More Ways to Sell Out of Your Startup Stock (wsj.com) A post college memorandum (alexjmann.com) The TV industry is where the newspaper industry was five years ago: In denial. (businessinsider.com) The Economics of the HDMI Cable Ripoff (marginalrevolution.com) Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming [scribd] (maps.org) Tagged: The World's Most Annoying Website (time.com) --I would include these: Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC The hairy ball theorem Celery: A Distributed Task Queue for Django Linus Torvalds on some good git development practices Offline Processing on Google App Engine [scribd] Why "next-gen games" went gray, brown, and grey. What is RubySpec? Great talk on the Python GIL [video][slides in comments]
- CodeMage 17y agoHell, yeah! I'm sold. Not only do I hope you build it, I also hope it lasts a long time without declining in quality.
- paulgb 17y agoWhere do you draw the line? I see the pattern for most of those (things that directly relate to code), but it seems arbitrary to include The Hairy Ball Theorem but not Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming. I realize the answer is probably "I know it when I see it" - but then, how do you make sure other people know, too?
- markbao 17y agoYou know, I actually feel the contrary: Hacker News has gone the way of more hacker than startups. shrug
- jcapote 17y agoIt makes perfect sense, hacker news should be more for startup/business news than really hacker news.
- alex_c 17y agoHN started out as (hacker) startup news, and it HAS been moving from that focus (part of it intentional, such as the name change to Hacker News). Your sarcasm falls a bit flat :p
- northwind 17y agoActually, no, said sarcasm does not fall flat. A good friend of mine described the articles displayed here as a "rat's nest" which does not lead anywhere. At first, I thought he was crazy; then I began critically looking at said articles. I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud. Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded? In conclusion, I would be VERY interested in being involved with the community type proposed by jcapote (in any capacity: contributing member, developer, beta tester, et cetera).
- gilesgoatboy 17y agoDude, there's no point asking them. They don't know the answer. The only thing is to do it and see how it goes.
- ewiethoff 17y agoMay I suggest http://www.artima.com/ http://www.artima.com/, although not just anyone can post news there?
- cdepillabout 17y agoI'm also working on something similar at http://swooshnews.org/ http://swooshnews.org/. I'll post more info later when I have something to show.
- Eliezer 17y agoNo. I'll be first to say that I would not, in fact, visit it. Or so I expect. I could of course be proven wrong.
- mariorz 17y agoI think that description fits with the content you find on http://programming.reddit.com http://programming.reddit.com
- hooande 17y agoI bet you could build one in about 5 minutes and see what people think. http://slinkset.com/ http://slinkset.com/
- jhancock 17y agoI couldn't handle yet another site to check regularly. I sub-hn might be more appropriate.
- lyime 17y agoNo need. Every time I have wanted a to know about a specific topic on HN, I have used search (searchyc.com) and found plenty of success. I think HN/similar would become rather stale if it was ONLY about programing/CS concepts. I think a variety of discussion topics keeps this forum healthy and well balanced.
- rms 17y agoGood luck; starting a social news site is hard.
- 10ren 17y agoGreat idea, but "tailrecursion.com" is biased towards functional programming. Not all hackers are lisp/fp-hackers. Of course, I understand that that's the domain you have, and your starting point is "what to do with it' - so you have to use it! And it's quite alright with me if your site is targeting lisp-hackers only. And it may be that the interests of lisp and non-lisp hackers substantially (or maybe totally) overlap. And, for example, the name "Y-combinator" doesn't seem to have done any harm. PS: I do about 3-6 hours vi per day when typing, but most of my "coding" is done on paper or in the shower. Do I count as a hacker? Can I join?
- chanux 17y agoOK, If it's really good I'll make it the secondary home page.
- grinich 17y agoYou need to write an experimental dialect of a functional programming language first.
- stuntgoat 17y agoIf I could subscribe to other HN members' posts and upmodded links, I could, in theory be able to preemptively sort the posts that I liked in common with those users. All it would take is a new menu item at the top of the page- called 'peers'. When a HN user posts a link I find most appropriate to my lifestyle, I have the option to subscribe to future links posted by that HN user; all of the links ( or even comments ) of the peers I subscribe to would be listed in chronological order on the 'peers' page. If a similar functionality was enabled and the link posting member was able to tag the submitted link, I think it would make it more efficient for the subscribing member to get the appropriate content listed first- that is, if the subscriber could choose to subscribe to the links that were relevantly tagged by each peer. Simply put: if you ( yes you ) submitted a link that was tagged 'emacs', and I had subscribed to your links tagged as such, I would see it listed on my peers page ( likely near the top, even if I missed a few days ). If you submitted a link tagged 'founder inspiration' and I did not subscribe to that tag of yours, I would only see that link on the front page ( if it made it; and I saw it in time ). Sorta like a collective intelligent RSS feed, hosted on HN!
- jcapote 17y agoVery into this. I twitter most of the things I find interesting in the same vein.
- wooby 17y agoThat's a really, really awesome idea. It's like combining the best of twitter with the best of social news.
- almost 17y agoThe problem with this is that it fragments the community, you now no longer read "Hack News" but instead read "Stuntgoat News" which has a readership of 1. It may have some crossover with "Almost News" but I think it would be deferent enough to remove the feeling of community that a site like this engenders which I think is one of the reasons people take the time to write long interesting comments (like yours here).
- 17y ago
- timothychung 17y agoI think we need a multi-view HN in which we can filter out all non-hacking related news. In that way, you cater both technical users as well as non-technical ones.
- caffeine 17y agoYes! Do it. I want to read gory articles from the hacking fronts. Better yet: write some nice content?
- jyothi 17y agoSlightly off-topic. An alternate idea for tailrecursion.com: how about creating a service which would provide 'unlimited' tail keywords. - the 'unlimited' part is just for the pitch to go with recursion. This is of great interest/need to marketers and does involve recursion in a way that you use a seed to generate few keywords and then in turn use them to generate more. People would pay for it.
- juliend2 17y agoI feel this need for purely hacker oriented news too. That's why i started a little feed aggregator for blogs by Montreal hackers : http://montrealhackers.com http://montrealhackers.com . That said, if you start a purely hacker-oriented version of HN i will watch it. :)
- Zarathu 17y ago"I suggested it would be a cool name for an HN-like site that catered specifically to those who spend 8 hours a day behind an emacs or vi session (and no less!)" I like the idea, to be honest; even though I use TextMate. :D
- mroman 17y agoYes!
- known 17y agoIt depends on the definition of "hack".
- almost 17y agoGo for it, it might work. I think there's a little more to creating a good site then just building and letting stuff happen. There needs to be something that binds the community and some way of keeping the focus. Otherwise it will just drift to the lowest common denominator. I for one will definitely give it a good try though. Love the domain by the way, definitely sounds like a site I'd like :)
- hs 17y agoi would not. i have a lot of interest outside typing. i prefer news site for 'creation' -- not showing often in hn: from bits (how to make buttons, logos, diet, health, pets, hobbies, etc) to physical (how to make soap, ink, fert, shoes, clothing, carpentry, masonry, housing, bomb, cooking, sport, etc) also news for alternative living is interesting (like how to live in desert, mountain, sailing, around-world-air travel, live under $1usd/day, etc) these stuffs are of course a google away (as is everything else), but rarely shown in hn maybe because chemistry (and physics?) is not the prerequisite for CS / EE or maybe those are 'not hackers news' shrug
- drRoflol 17y agoActually, I find HN to be the perfect mix of world news, economics, math papers and programming stuff, so no. And I don't fall into any of the "types" listed, I'm a CS-student (at least in one month I am), and don't have any serious plans of starting a company;)