
Ask HN: Alternatives to HN - klrr
Are there other similar sites to HN which focuses more on technical topics, constructive discussions and other interesting things?
======
mindcrime
Slashdot, 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>, if you're into
programming language research, there's <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
add /r/reverseengineering and /r/netsec to that Not that active but the little
stuff that gets posted is usually high quality

~~~
jaytaylor
So,
[http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+...](http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+PhilosophyofScience+cogsci+startups+math+compsci+SomebodyMakeThis+browsers+gamedev+shamelessplug+Freethought+reverseengineering+netsec)

~~~
TheAcen
TIL you can append subreddits to get a multi-subreddit.

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mmahemoff
The Google Plus Hacker News community is a good supplement, which has 55K
members. (I'm a moderator.)
<https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266>

There are some other worthwhile tech communities on G+ - just visit
<https://plus.google.com/communities> and do some searches, e.g. for your
favorite programming language, platform, or framework.

~~~
hdra
I 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.

------
tezza
<https://lobste.rs/> \- I am not a member, but it looks very similar

~~~
conroy
If anyone would like an invite, send me an email or reply here.

~~~
flipgimble
Hi, 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> ? Or maybe how would you describe
the focus and character of the community?

~~~
steveklabnik
[https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...](https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/)

------
jacquesm
<http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/>

And many other subreddits besides.

~~~
davidw
That'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
I'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.

~~~
WayneDB
Have you tried <http://hckrnews.com/> ?

~~~
bradleysmith
Rad, this is really neat thanks for that.

------
olalonde
<http://www.lesswrong.com> \- "Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to
refining the art of human rationality."

------
greyman
I 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.

~~~
_pmf_
> 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
/r/webdev

~~~
samweinberg
/r/webdev just rehashes the stuff posted on HN.

------
Sambdala
<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
This 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!

------
dhotson
<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
You can find some cool stuff via tag filtering - e.g.
<https://pinboard.in/t:nodejs/t:distributed/>

~~~
dhotson
Also, the network feature works great when you subscribe to people who
bookmark interesting stuff.

------
phyalow
<http://arxiv.org> \- I like reading the abstracts and occasionally papers if
I happen on something interesting.

~~~
X4
hahhahahaha :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
Sure you can if your on relevant mailing lists / with your department
colleagues.

Don't know why your laughing.

------
revorad
The best alternatives to HN I've found are Github and meeting interesting
people in person.

------
zachlatta
<http://firespotting.com/> is a Hacker News for ideas.

------
mcovey
Well if you speak Spanish, there's <http://www.noticiashacker.com/> but it
looks kind of dead.

~~~
davidw
Along those lines, in Italian there is antirez' <http://hackingitalia.com/>

------
cvg
Someone here once posted this aggregation of subreddits as an alternative:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+...](http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+PhilosophyofScience+cogsci+startups+math+compsci+SomebodyMakeThis+browsers+gamedev+shamelessplug+Freethought)

It's not a perfect version of 2010 HN, but with some pruning and grafting I
imagine it could be close.

------
andyzweb
pg: can we just blacklist medium. problem solved

------
haffi112
I'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.

------
hoopsho
I have been working on a project: <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.

------
mooism2
<http://lamernews.com/> although it's quiet.

------
vanwilder77
Hackernews Clone <http://hackerstreet.in>

~~~
rounak
India specific though

------
malkia
<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/> also for game development.

Recently <http://flipcode.com> has been getting up from long sleep (it was my
favourite site back in the days).

------
RobSim
Have you heard of <http://thelist.io>? Self Proclaimed social knowledge board
for designers and developers.

------
neaanopri
There's Hubski: hubski.com

The content there is MUCH less tech focused, it's more about longform writing,
and the comments are superb.

~~~
hispanic
Thanks for sharing this. Looks good. I like the ability to follow specific
people and topics.

------
kevinburke
I 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>

------
pbobak
There's <http://sidebar.io/> for web/mobile design topics.

------
capnjngl
For marketers, <http://inbound.org> has a similar format.

------
hidden-markov
There's also a moderately good russian <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.

------
sycamore
<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! )

------
mkstowegnv
<http://www.crowdsourcing.org/> specialized but hitting all the same themes as
HN. Surprising how surprising crowdsourcing still is.

------
t_hozumi
<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.

------
olalonde
<http://www.forrst.com> \- "A community where developers & designers improve
their craft through design feedback."

~~~
Kudos
When I last checked it was community of designers and designers who think they
are also developers.

------
ikonos_de
Are there also any business related alternatives?

~~~
konradb
Yes - I'd be very interested in this also.

------
ewheeler
<http://leapfrog.io> for international development, human rights, and
technology news

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ehsanu1
Not a true alternative, but less noisy: <http://lessmeme.com/less.html>

------
nickfrost
Thanks for the crowdsourced list of great resources for distributing unique
content. Yay pageviews and engagement! :D

------
aymeric
There is <http://inbound.org> for a marketing oriented HN.

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l33tfr4gg3r
How about <http://thingsiwantmade.com/>

------
ameyakarve
EchoJS is pretty nice for JS stuff

~~~
olalonde
This looks nice, signing up! Hopefully the community will grow over time, it
seems a bit quiet at the moment.

------
yefim
There's always <http://thelist.io>

------
DanBC
I hope people who dislike the political stories are flagging those stories.

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lukego
Twitter is my current favorite way to keep up with the Zeitgeist.

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jmartens
<http://thelist.io>

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voidvoid
pandawhale.com tends to have a medium sized portion of startup/tech news
bulked up with a best-of selection from reddit or facebook.

------
giribin
Phrack.org for security research and exploits

------
md8
firespotting.com

------
jrgnsd
I thought this post to be quite ironic.

