23 ms·

Ask HN: What are some good alternatives to HN?

182 points by fabrizioc1 13y ago

Lately it seems I go to HN look at the front page and decide "I don't want to read any of these". Where do other HN readers go for finding out about new and interesting technology or science?

alg0rith 13y ago
HackerJews.com
- xinkr 13y ago
  Where is it possible to find the Hacker News theme btw?
t0 13y ago
http://lobste.rs http://lobste.rs
- benologist 13y ago
  Lobsters has better software but they never got enough traction to get any discussion flowing. Apart from that the #1 story is just another stupid adver-article written for HN. The story is by differential.io and submitted by joshowens who works there. The same story was submitted to HN by the author with his coworker joshowens shilling in the comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741554. This kind of exploitation is happening a lot, "Next HN" will hopefully be more discerning about its members' motivations.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- clarry 13y ago
  It looked interesting and I even got an account. Then I found out I must enable JS to make a comment (yes yes, downvote me already). Oh well, I do still check what's listed on there every once in a while.
- shovel 13y ago
  Looks great. Would you be kind enough to hook me up with an invite?
- nilkn 13y ago
  I think the invitation tree is what kept this from gaining sufficient traction. That's a very difficult model to get right, especially for an extremely below-the-radar site. Even Google didn't get it right with G+.
naiyt 13y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ Although it's just programming (the rules say that if there's no code in the link, then you shouldn't post it).
- hengheng 13y ago
  /r/hwstartups, /r/compsci, /r/startups and a few other assorted subreddits make for a nice complement to HN.
  - drakethes 13y ago
    With the use of multi reddits I've found you can build up quite a nice suite of multireddits which supplements hackernews nicely, though you do tend to see quite a lot of cross posting of articles.
ElbertF 13y ago
http://thelist.io http://thelist.io
gits1225 13y ago
Subreddits! http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/ http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/ http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/ http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/ http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/ http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/ http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/ http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/ http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/ http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/
- basch 13y ago
  http://www.reddit.com/r/apple+Astronomy+gadgets+geek+linux+microsoft+nasa+netsec+programming+scifi+space+sysadmin+technology+xkcd http://www.reddit.com/r/apple+Astronomy+gadgets+geek+linux+m...
- ENGNR 13y ago
  And of course: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/
- sauravt 13y ago
  http://www.reddit.com/r/codetogether+progether+collaboratecode http://www.reddit.com/r/codetogether+progether+collaborateco...
- mercurial 13y ago
  Frankly, r/programming is not that good. r/haskell is full of interesting things and has a great community, if Haskell is your thing.
eric-hu 13y ago
I've found that meetup.com and a free night a week serve as a great alternative. programming meetups have given me deeper discussions about software engineering or given me a chance to work firsthand with people in languages or frameworks I'm curious about.
potomak 13y ago
http://lamernews.com/ http://lamernews.com/
- cpach 13y ago
  Seems like a nice site, but only two of the current stories on the front page have comments on them (for a total of 5 comments) :-/
dsaber 13y ago
http://devmaster.net http://devmaster.net for game development
adrianhoward 13y ago
On the startup side I'm often finding more things that are interesting to me on the community side of http://www.usv.com/ http://www.usv.com/
- reiz 13y ago
  I just checked out the side. Didn't know it before. I found some interesting content. It's now part of my feedly. Thanks for the hint man.
jrockway 13y ago
Reddit has gotten better recently, as long as you stay off the popular subreddits. Pick your 10 favorite hobbies or interests, and subscribe to those subreddits. It's got to be specific: not programming, but programming in Java; not electronics, but amateur radio; etc. (I will admit I enjoy r/AskReddit, which is where people write short stories in response to a prompt in the form of a loaded question. Ask Metafilter is much less creative, in comparison.) A lot of people are recommending r/programming. r/programming is why I quit Reddit a few years ago. It's all "computer-related cult wars" rather than actual discussion about programming. Everyone goes through that stage in their programming career, but it's not interesting to read about, and most people eventually grow out of it. Not r/programming.
- idProQuo 13y ago
  My problem with /r/programming is the front page. If you go below 15th place you'll see a cesspool of posts with interesting looking titles, tons of downvotes and no comments explaining why. I feel like the readers there are too discriminating about what they'll allow, but at the same time nobody feels like submitting anything.
- stbtrax 13y ago
  In my experience, any sub-reddits in my interests are filled with incredibly shallow or meme-filled posts. Never have I once thought to myself 'This subreddit is way better than [established forum/community] for this'. Maybe it's the short lifespan of posts, or voting style that promotes snark/pandering type posts, but I have yet to come across an awesome subreddit. Also, I agree with you that the more specific you get the less this becomes an issue, but at that point it's usually just a bunch of ghost-subreddits with < 1K users and a single post every odd month.
  - jccalhoun 13y ago
    That's where the reddit enhancement suite comes in. I use it to hide any post that links to most image hosting sites like imgur.com and it makes all the stupid meme posts go away.
  - 13y ago
jrockway 13y ago
MetaFilter. You have to pay $5 to post comments, and the comments are formatted in such a way as to discourage trolling, long digressions, and other annoying Internet comment features. The material is usually not amazingly interesting to me, but the community is very pleasant.
- PilateDeGuerre 13y ago
  MetaFilter has remained pleasant for years. Turns out $5 is a big enough hurdle to keep it sane.
  - vcherubini 13y ago
    It's the same with The Something Awful Forums. It is $10 to join, and it really helps keep the trolls out. One of the best communities on the web.
    - Sssnake 13y ago
      What? SA has possibly the worst community on the web. It keeps people out alright, but not trolls.
      - omni 13y ago
        I think you might be conflating the terms "troll" and "asshole." If you show up to a subforum on SA and start actually trolling people by posting spam or a bunch of NSFL images or something, you'll get banned pretty much instantly.
        zem 13y ago
        That's not trolling, that's vandalism. Trolling is posting things for the sole purpose of inciting flamewars, or getting people to believe you were serious and react with disproportionate fervour.
- blakesterz 13y ago
himal 13y ago
Almost missed this post becasue this is one of my "I don't want to read any of these" titles.
michaelmartin 13y ago
I quite like Alex McCaw's http://monocle.io/ http://monocle.io/ - It's quite similar in topic to HN, but with less of the news/gossip/drama stories. It also moves a lot slower, so if you miss a few days, it's fine. Just one page or so of links will show you all the best from those few days.
fcambus 13y ago
For JavaScript, HTML5, and front-end news, there is Echo JS : http://www.echojs.com http://www.echojs.com
modi0er 13y ago
http://secletter.com/ http://secletter.com/
simias 13y ago
The thing with HN is that there are a lot of interesting threads that get increasingly drowned in "drama" contents: stuff about politics, the NSA, silicon valley drama... See the G+ outrage lately: there are three articles about that at the top of the frontpage that say exactly the same thing with exactly the same comments. It's reddit/4chan tier "pitchforking". The problem seems to be that the community is growing quickly and as a consequence the upvoted articles are those who cater to the lowest common denominator and it keeps getting lower. It's a problem all successful communities face. The usual solution might be to migrate towards a smaller community as you propose, but the problem then is that you have to rebuild everything from scratch over and over again. IMO a simpler solution would be to make a "meta-HN" which would just add an other layer of moderation on top of the existing HN: - Remove all "drama/politics" entries - Merge entries about the same topic under a single item. Then just link to the usual HN comment threads. I find the quality of comments usually reflects the quality of the article so I think it would work well for me. No need to rebuild everything from scratch and rebuild the community. The HN you once liked is still there, it's just getting increasingly buried it low-relevance contents.
- jpalomaki 13y ago
  I think you proposal is good. One option would be to give out some of the data that is behind HN, namely the information about who has upvoted which article. This should make it possible to create mashup which would try to learn whose thoughts about interesting arcticles match mine. (No need to disclose the actual usernames, some anonymous identifier would be enough)
- ollysb 13y ago
  I like the idea of having a single thread for all related stories. That way if a particular story was generating a lot of noise it would just be one line on the front page and very easy to ignore. It would be a bit like subreddits but more dynamic, the subreddits would flit in and out of existence. Everone would still share the same front page, perhaps each line would be something like "NSA: latest story headline". The question is, what would be the best way to do the grouping?
- gabemart 13y ago
Gaurav322 13y ago
Reddit is the best alternative of HN and the most favorable thing of this community is that it has sub communities such as Technology, Programming,etc. not like HN. But, it also has some disadvantage such as spammers first attack, moderators are not so active, sometime you can find unusual stuffs.
tlo 13y ago
/. http://slashdot.org/ http://slashdot.org/
- devNoise 13y ago
  I still read /. on a daily basis for tech news. Though I find the items that would really interest me have already showed up on HN already.
yoodenvranx 13y ago
I wish there would be a simple tag system to classify the posts a bit. For example i am not interested in most startup posts but rather would just see only programming and technology related articles. How many tags would be sufficient to classify most posts? Startup, marketing, programming, science, politics, ... That's actually a quite hard problem!
smoyer 13y ago
We need sub-HNs!
Sambdala 13y ago
http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com
SanderMak 13y ago
If you are into JavaScript, http://echojs.com http://echojs.com is pretty good.
davidw 13y ago
http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm has some good discussion related to bootstrapped startups, and seems to have a good community.
sauravt 13y ago
I think the only satisfactory alternative to HN, which could attract hackers and hackers only would be some sort of a termminal application, and you would be able to browse it through terminal only, that way we could get rid off all the classy people and hence the drama/politics posts it will be a hacker's paradise like HN used to be. The only question is, how do we do it ?
- mandor 13y ago
  We use Usenet? (although I'm sure that there are good GUIs now)
tephra 13y ago
I like http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ It is focused on programming languages and PL research
milliams 13y ago
http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ to avoid the 'never made it to front page' problem.
- wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
  This. And as was mentioned before, the new page (more crap, occasional spam, but lots of hidden gems).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Tycho 13y ago
Look at the new page instead of the main page.
japaget 13y ago
Techmeme river: http://www.techmeme.com/river http://www.techmeme.com/river
ivan_ah 13y ago
I recently signed up for hubski, which is very similar in style to HN, but uses a tagging system so you choose to follow only the topics you are interested in. http://hubski.com/ http://hubski.com/ So far it has been very good signal to noise...
Datsundere 13y ago
/g/technology
en4bz 13y ago
For C++ lovers I find that http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ always has pretty good content.
joeyh 13y ago
mailing lists irc
angersock 13y ago
Try going to the "new" section and upvoting content you would like to see. If we all don't do that, of course the site will get overrun with stupid kneejerk posts.
- ams6110 13y ago
  Yeah, I'm guilty of rarely upvoting (or downvoting) items. Are upvotes on the actual submission the only driver of where it ranks, or does comment activity also weigh in? If it does, that would seem to encourage flamewar/ideological topics to float to the top.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest I figure I only read about 10% of the posts on HN, and focus on the ones about actual technologies I might use or evaluate. And honestly, that 10% is all I have time to read anyway, so it works out just right. The only better option is to go to reddit and subscribe to all the relevant tech subreddits you're interested in and unsubscribe from everything else. That's more like drinking from the firehose though, requires more mental overhead in filtering only the absolutely most useful and relevant. Also, http://pineapple.io http://pineapple.io if you just want cool tech and no discussions.
cubitesystems 13y ago
I love Hackernews. Here are my additional addictions (in order of preference): * http://reddit.com/r/futurology http://reddit.com/r/futurology * http://reddit.com/r/linux http://reddit.com/r/linux * http://theverge.com http://theverge.com * http://techcrunch.com http://techcrunch.com dying place (although I still read it): http://slashdot.org http://slashdot.org * http://techdirt.com http://techdirt.com * http://reddit.com/r/bsd http://reddit.com/r/bsd * http://reddit.com/r/opensource http://reddit.com/r/opensource
lowglow 13y ago
I'm going to shamelessly plug http://techendo.co/ http://techendo.co/ not as an alternative, but as a supplement. :) We're also on irc: #Techendo on Freenode!
ecesena 13y ago
Theneeds [1]? We built Theneeds with a similar idea in mind, that people should come and just find interesting stuff, personalized according to their interests (we learn from users' activity to get smarter about what the interests really are). We focus on a broader range of topics than just tech & science, thought there is a good selection about that too. [1] http://www.theneeds.com http://www.theneeds.com
- wdewind 13y ago
  I tried your site out, it's pretty cool but some of the backgrounds make it completely unusable. Make it as minimal as possible, people are meant to stare at this for a long time.
  - ecesena 13y ago
    Thanks for trying and for the feedback! The background can be turned off, but we actually decided to keep it on by default. We think that it creates a more "full-immersion" experience and helps not going OT (out of need actually ;). We don't have numbers to support this, but... that's the idea!
  - tigroferoce 13y ago
    I agree, the backgrounds sometimes are annoying. Despite this, cool site.
Kluny 13y ago
Quora is quite good.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
adamzerner 13y ago
There's a huge demand for quality content. Why not just hire a bunch of people with taste to choose the content?
DanBC 13y ago
> Lately it seems I go to HN look at the front page and decide "I don't want to read any of these". Where do other HN readers go https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
TomBeckman 13y ago
Try http://www.dailyrotation.com http://www.dailyrotation.com The top 100 headlines turn up interesting articles for many areas of interest.
Misiek 13y ago
http://www.dzone.com http://www.dzone.com
debacle 13y ago
I've been spending more time in the technology dedicated subreddits. While the general content is lesser than HN was ~1 year ago, it's more on topic. I only see 3-4 stories a day on HN worth reading, which honestly is nice because it limits my browsing time.

182 points by fabrizioc1 13y ago

Lately it seems I go to HN look at the front page and decide "I don't want to read any of these". Where do other HN readers go for finding out about new and interesting technology or science?

alg0rith 13y ago

HackerJews.com

xinkr 13y ago
Where is it possible to find the Hacker News theme btw?

t0 13y ago

http://lobste.rs http://lobste.rs

benologist 13y ago
Lobsters has better software but they never got enough traction to get any discussion flowing. Apart from that the #1 story is just another stupid adver-article written for HN. The story is by differential.io and submitted by joshowens who works there. The same story was submitted to HN by the author with his coworker joshowens shilling in the comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6741554. This kind of exploitation is happening a lot, "Next HN" will hopefully be more discerning about its members' motivations.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
clarry 13y ago
It looked interesting and I even got an account. Then I found out I must enable JS to make a comment (yes yes, downvote me already). Oh well, I do still check what's listed on there every once in a while.
shovel 13y ago
Looks great. Would you be kind enough to hook me up with an invite?
nilkn 13y ago
I think the invitation tree is what kept this from gaining sufficient traction. That's a very difficult model to get right, especially for an extremely below-the-radar site. Even Google didn't get it right with G+.

naiyt 13y ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ Although it's just programming (the rules say that if there's no code in the link, then you shouldn't post it).

hengheng 13y ago
/r/hwstartups, /r/compsci, /r/startups and a few other assorted subreddits make for a nice complement to HN.
- drakethes 13y ago
  With the use of multi reddits I've found you can build up quite a nice suite of multireddits which supplements hackernews nicely, though you do tend to see quite a lot of cross posting of articles.

ElbertF 13y ago

http://thelist.io http://thelist.io

gits1225 13y ago

Subreddits! http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/ http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/ http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/ http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/ http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/ http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/ http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/ http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/ http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/ http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/

basch 13y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/apple+Astronomy+gadgets+geek+linux+microsoft+nasa+netsec+programming+scifi+space+sysadmin+technology+xkcd http://www.reddit.com/r/apple+Astronomy+gadgets+geek+linux+m...
ENGNR 13y ago
And of course: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/
sauravt 13y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/codetogether+progether+collaboratecode http://www.reddit.com/r/codetogether+progether+collaborateco...
mercurial 13y ago
Frankly, r/programming is not that good. r/haskell is full of interesting things and has a great community, if Haskell is your thing.

eric-hu 13y ago

I've found that meetup.com and a free night a week serve as a great alternative. programming meetups have given me deeper discussions about software engineering or given me a chance to work firsthand with people in languages or frameworks I'm curious about.

potomak 13y ago

http://lamernews.com/ http://lamernews.com/

cpach 13y ago
Seems like a nice site, but only two of the current stories on the front page have comments on them (for a total of 5 comments) :-/

dsaber 13y ago

http://devmaster.net http://devmaster.net for game development

adrianhoward 13y ago

On the startup side I'm often finding more things that are interesting to me on the community side of http://www.usv.com/ http://www.usv.com/

reiz 13y ago
I just checked out the side. Didn't know it before. I found some interesting content. It's now part of my feedly. Thanks for the hint man.

jrockway 13y ago

Reddit has gotten better recently, as long as you stay off the popular subreddits. Pick your 10 favorite hobbies or interests, and subscribe to those subreddits. It's got to be specific: not programming, but programming in Java; not electronics, but amateur radio; etc. (I will admit I enjoy r/AskReddit, which is where people write short stories in response to a prompt in the form of a loaded question. Ask Metafilter is much less creative, in comparison.) A lot of people are recommending r/programming. r/programming is why I quit Reddit a few years ago. It's all "computer-related cult wars" rather than actual discussion about programming. Everyone goes through that stage in their programming career, but it's not interesting to read about, and most people eventually grow out of it. Not r/programming.

idProQuo 13y ago
My problem with /r/programming is the front page. If you go below 15th place you'll see a cesspool of posts with interesting looking titles, tons of downvotes and no comments explaining why. I feel like the readers there are too discriminating about what they'll allow, but at the same time nobody feels like submitting anything.
stbtrax 13y ago
In my experience, any sub-reddits in my interests are filled with incredibly shallow or meme-filled posts. Never have I once thought to myself 'This subreddit is way better than [established forum/community] for this'. Maybe it's the short lifespan of posts, or voting style that promotes snark/pandering type posts, but I have yet to come across an awesome subreddit. Also, I agree with you that the more specific you get the less this becomes an issue, but at that point it's usually just a bunch of ghost-subreddits with < 1K users and a single post every odd month.
- jccalhoun 13y ago
  That's where the reddit enhancement suite comes in. I use it to hide any post that links to most image hosting sites like imgur.com and it makes all the stupid meme posts go away.
- 13y ago

jrockway 13y ago

MetaFilter. You have to pay $5 to post comments, and the comments are formatted in such a way as to discourage trolling, long digressions, and other annoying Internet comment features. The material is usually not amazingly interesting to me, but the community is very pleasant.

PilateDeGuerre 13y ago
MetaFilter has remained pleasant for years. Turns out $5 is a big enough hurdle to keep it sane.
- vcherubini 13y ago
  It's the same with The Something Awful Forums. It is $10 to join, and it really helps keep the trolls out. One of the best communities on the web.
  - Sssnake 13y ago
    What? SA has possibly the worst community on the web. It keeps people out alright, but not trolls.
    - omni 13y ago
      I think you might be conflating the terms "troll" and "asshole." If you show up to a subforum on SA and start actually trolling people by posting spam or a bunch of NSFL images or something, you'll get banned pretty much instantly.
      - zem 13y ago
        That's not trolling, that's vandalism. Trolling is posting things for the sole purpose of inciting flamewars, or getting people to believe you were serious and react with disproportionate fervour.
blakesterz 13y ago

himal 13y ago

Almost missed this post becasue this is one of my "I don't want to read any of these" titles.

michaelmartin 13y ago

I quite like Alex McCaw's http://monocle.io/ http://monocle.io/ - It's quite similar in topic to HN, but with less of the news/gossip/drama stories. It also moves a lot slower, so if you miss a few days, it's fine. Just one page or so of links will show you all the best from those few days.

fcambus 13y ago

For JavaScript, HTML5, and front-end news, there is Echo JS : http://www.echojs.com http://www.echojs.com

modi0er 13y ago

http://secletter.com/ http://secletter.com/

simias 13y ago

The thing with HN is that there are a lot of interesting threads that get increasingly drowned in "drama" contents: stuff about politics, the NSA, silicon valley drama... See the G+ outrage lately: there are three articles about that at the top of the frontpage that say exactly the same thing with exactly the same comments. It's reddit/4chan tier "pitchforking". The problem seems to be that the community is growing quickly and as a consequence the upvoted articles are those who cater to the lowest common denominator and it keeps getting lower. It's a problem all successful communities face. The usual solution might be to migrate towards a smaller community as you propose, but the problem then is that you have to rebuild everything from scratch over and over again. IMO a simpler solution would be to make a "meta-HN" which would just add an other layer of moderation on top of the existing HN: - Remove all "drama/politics" entries - Merge entries about the same topic under a single item. Then just link to the usual HN comment threads. I find the quality of comments usually reflects the quality of the article so I think it would work well for me. No need to rebuild everything from scratch and rebuild the community. The HN you once liked is still there, it's just getting increasingly buried it low-relevance contents.

jpalomaki 13y ago
I think you proposal is good. One option would be to give out some of the data that is behind HN, namely the information about who has upvoted which article. This should make it possible to create mashup which would try to learn whose thoughts about interesting arcticles match mine. (No need to disclose the actual usernames, some anonymous identifier would be enough)
ollysb 13y ago
I like the idea of having a single thread for all related stories. That way if a particular story was generating a lot of noise it would just be one line on the front page and very easy to ignore. It would be a bit like subreddits but more dynamic, the subreddits would flit in and out of existence. Everone would still share the same front page, perhaps each line would be something like "NSA: latest story headline". The question is, what would be the best way to do the grouping?
gabemart 13y ago

Gaurav322 13y ago

Reddit is the best alternative of HN and the most favorable thing of this community is that it has sub communities such as Technology, Programming,etc. not like HN. But, it also has some disadvantage such as spammers first attack, moderators are not so active, sometime you can find unusual stuffs.

tlo 13y ago

/. http://slashdot.org/ http://slashdot.org/

devNoise 13y ago
I still read /. on a daily basis for tech news. Though I find the items that would really interest me have already showed up on HN already.

yoodenvranx 13y ago

I wish there would be a simple tag system to classify the posts a bit. For example i am not interested in most startup posts but rather would just see only programming and technology related articles. How many tags would be sufficient to classify most posts? Startup, marketing, programming, science, politics, ... That's actually a quite hard problem!

smoyer 13y ago

We need sub-HNs!

Sambdala 13y ago

http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com

SanderMak 13y ago

If you are into JavaScript, http://echojs.com http://echojs.com is pretty good.

davidw 13y ago

http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm has some good discussion related to bootstrapped startups, and seems to have a good community.

sauravt 13y ago

I think the only satisfactory alternative to HN, which could attract hackers and hackers only would be some sort of a termminal application, and you would be able to browse it through terminal only, that way we could get rid off all the classy people and hence the drama/politics posts it will be a hacker's paradise like HN used to be. The only question is, how do we do it ?

mandor 13y ago
We use Usenet? (although I'm sure that there are good GUIs now)

tephra 13y ago

I like http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ It is focused on programming languages and PL research

milliams 13y ago

http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ to avoid the 'never made it to front page' problem.

wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
This. And as was mentioned before, the new page (more crap, occasional spam, but lots of hidden gems).

deleted 13y ago

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Tycho 13y ago

Look at the new page instead of the main page.

japaget 13y ago

Techmeme river: http://www.techmeme.com/river http://www.techmeme.com/river

ivan_ah 13y ago

I recently signed up for hubski, which is very similar in style to HN, but uses a tagging system so you choose to follow only the topics you are interested in. http://hubski.com/ http://hubski.com/ So far it has been very good signal to noise...

Datsundere 13y ago

/g/technology

en4bz 13y ago

For C++ lovers I find that http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/ always has pretty good content.

joeyh 13y ago

mailing lists irc

angersock 13y ago

Try going to the "new" section and upvoting content you would like to see. If we all don't do that, of course the site will get overrun with stupid kneejerk posts.

ams6110 13y ago
Yeah, I'm guilty of rarely upvoting (or downvoting) items. Are upvotes on the actual submission the only driver of where it ranks, or does comment activity also weigh in? If it does, that would seem to encourage flamewar/ideological topics to float to the top.

SkyMarshal 13y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest I figure I only read about 10% of the posts on HN, and focus on the ones about actual technologies I might use or evaluate. And honestly, that 10% is all I have time to read anyway, so it works out just right. The only better option is to go to reddit and subscribe to all the relevant tech subreddits you're interested in and unsubscribe from everything else. That's more like drinking from the firehose though, requires more mental overhead in filtering only the absolutely most useful and relevant. Also, http://pineapple.io http://pineapple.io if you just want cool tech and no discussions.

cubitesystems 13y ago

I love Hackernews. Here are my additional addictions (in order of preference): * http://reddit.com/r/futurology http://reddit.com/r/futurology * http://reddit.com/r/linux http://reddit.com/r/linux * http://theverge.com http://theverge.com * http://techcrunch.com http://techcrunch.com dying place (although I still read it): http://slashdot.org http://slashdot.org * http://techdirt.com http://techdirt.com * http://reddit.com/r/bsd http://reddit.com/r/bsd * http://reddit.com/r/opensource http://reddit.com/r/opensource

lowglow 13y ago

I'm going to shamelessly plug http://techendo.co/ http://techendo.co/ not as an alternative, but as a supplement. :) We're also on irc: #Techendo on Freenode!

ecesena 13y ago

Theneeds [1]? We built Theneeds with a similar idea in mind, that people should come and just find interesting stuff, personalized according to their interests (we learn from users' activity to get smarter about what the interests really are). We focus on a broader range of topics than just tech & science, thought there is a good selection about that too. [1] http://www.theneeds.com http://www.theneeds.com

wdewind 13y ago
I tried your site out, it's pretty cool but some of the backgrounds make it completely unusable. Make it as minimal as possible, people are meant to stare at this for a long time.
- ecesena 13y ago
  Thanks for trying and for the feedback! The background can be turned off, but we actually decided to keep it on by default. We think that it creates a more "full-immersion" experience and helps not going OT (out of need actually ;). We don't have numbers to support this, but... that's the idea!
- tigroferoce 13y ago
  I agree, the backgrounds sometimes are annoying. Despite this, cool site.

Kluny 13y ago

Quora is quite good.

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adamzerner 13y ago

There's a huge demand for quality content. Why not just hire a bunch of people with taste to choose the content?

DanBC 13y ago

> Lately it seems I go to HN look at the front page and decide "I don't want to read any of these". Where do other HN readers go https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

TomBeckman 13y ago

Try http://www.dailyrotation.com http://www.dailyrotation.com The top 100 headlines turn up interesting articles for many areas of interest.

Misiek 13y ago

http://www.dzone.com http://www.dzone.com

debacle 13y ago

I've been spending more time in the technology dedicated subreddits. While the general content is lesser than HN was ~1 year ago, it's more on topic. I only see 3-4 stories a day on HN worth reading, which honestly is nice because it limits my browsing time.