

Ask HN: Would you guys visit a purely hacker-oriented version of HN? - jcapote

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?
======
stuntgoat
If 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!

~~~
almost
The 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).

~~~
stuntgoat
I was thinking of simply adding a link at the top of the main page between
'new' and 'threads' that was 'peers' and I could subscribe to multiple HN
users' tagged links. I believe it would allow a closer connection between the
members of the community that have interests in common. Seemingly, there is a
sub-culture of people interested in mostly programming news; so, instead of
moving them to a new site altogether, allow them to maintain a connection to
this site, at the same time as giving them a tool to build community.

------
PieSquared
I 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
Exactly! 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
LtU

------
markbao
You know, I actually feel the contrary: Hacker News has gone the way of more
hacker than startups. _shrug_

~~~
jcapote
It makes perfect sense, hacker news should be more for startup/business news
than really _hacker_ news.

~~~
alex_c
HN 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
Actually, 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).

------
pg
Which articles currently on the frontpage of HN would you not include?

~~~
jcapote
\--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]

~~~
quoderat
If those stories were excluded, I'd be very uninterested in visiting here.
This sort of tunnel-vision is why hackers and engineer types often seem
completely out of touch with society -- and not in the good way. It's
engineer-itis.

~~~
wooby
I enjoy the engineering tunnel vision that good days on HN provide me. On the
bad days, HN, for me, is sort of only the culture and pieces of society that
those who don't know much about either are interested in. To learn about
people, places, and things I don't know anything about that aren't hacking
related - I go outside.

------
andreyf
Ugh, 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?

~~~
anc2020
Unfortunately it looks like Academic Hacker News ran out of steam (no new
entries) :(

<http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/>

------
GeneralMaximus
Yes, 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

------
lyaunzbe
Good idea...but its been done already by Academic Hacker News:
<http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/>

~~~
russell
The 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
Agreed, but I don't see how starting yet another site will fix the problematic
lack of discussion.

~~~
spectre
Academic Hacker News may be suffering because the term academic in the name
scares a lot of people away.

~~~
SapphireSun
Maybe it's just solving the wrong problem. AHN only discusses CS, but I'm sure
the discussion would not devolve if you included other subjects (ie Physics,
Biology). A potential problem is that though you might have read something
interesting, it might not quite fit.

Perhaps because the articles are dense and require time to read (a prof. told
me to expect to take at least three hours to read an academic paper properly
as an expert in the field), it would help a lot if the original poster would
help jump start the discussion by talking about the interesting features of
the experiment or study. I'm not sure if this can be forced though.

AHN (completely) aside, I had another idea for a news site that addresses a
pain point of mine. I'm not sure if it belongs in this thread, but it seems as
good a place as any. Many, if not most, articles in the mainstream media are
horribly devoid of content, information, and context. An aggregator that posts
stories and has a historian annotate them and add links to documents
(especially primary source!) describing previous relevant events (sorted by
importance and date) might be really cool and useful. I am stumped as to how
to actually make it work though as if you do it with personnel, your labor
costs would be enormous. On the other hand, there may be a ready supply of
liberal arts doctorates who missed out on professorships (I understand there
is a major discrepancy between the supply and demand). The real trick of this
would be that if you managed to realistically rate historical events according
to how they impacted the world, then you could sort your front page by both
newness and importance score, thus mining the gems that are misplaced in
regular papers. However, this would be susceptible to gaming by writers -
which is unavoidable in the long run.

Automation would be much better. However, it becomes a classification problem
along waaaay too many dimensions, and assembling a supervised learning dataset
would be a giant task that I'm not even sure how to do as these labels can be
very uncertain.

The rewards would be great if some sort of system like this could be devised
on a reasonably sized scale.

------
Eliezer
No. 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.

------
rms
Good luck; starting a social news site is hard.

------
cdepillabout
I'm also working on something similar at <http://swooshnews.org/>. I'll post
more info later when I have something to show.

------
hooande
I bet you could build one in about 5 minutes and see what people think.
<http://slinkset.com/>

------
lyime
No 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.

------
10ren
Great 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?_

~~~
Raphael
What? I thought nearly all languages supported tail recursion.

~~~
blasdel
Yes, but in language implementations without TCO, it's just recursion.

------
timothychung
I 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.

------
almost
Go 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 :)

------
jyothi
Slightly 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.

------
mariorz
I think that description fits with the content you find on
<http://programming.reddit.com>

------
ewiethoff
May I suggest <http://www.artima.com/>, although not just anyone can post news
there?

------
juliend2
I 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> .

That said, if you start a purely hacker-oriented version of HN i will watch
it. :)

------
drRoflol
Actually, 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;)

------
hs
i 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_

------
grinich
You need to write an experimental dialect of a functional programming language
first.

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Zarathu
"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

------
mynameishere
It 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
Not 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
_Hackers 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.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

------
kailoa
Absolutely. I'd even expect some cross-pollination as well.

------
grandalf
you mean employees of startups / non-founders? Or founders of startups for
which marketing is irrelevant?

~~~
jcapote
Either. Just wanted to emphasize that the discussions are going to be deeply
technical in nature and not business related in any sense.

------
caffeine
Yes! Do it. I want to read gory articles from the hacking fronts.

Better yet: write some nice content?

------
jhancock
I couldn't handle yet another site to check regularly. I sub-hn might be more
appropriate.

------
johnnybgoode
I don't actually know for sure, but isn't this what reddit programming is for?

~~~
jcapote
It _was_ for that, but it's caliber has definitely lightened over the years.
Compare:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/r/programming)

<http://reddit.com/r/programming>

~~~
sjf
Gosh, 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.

------
geuis
Absolutely. 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
We 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
Why not just use the reddit codebase?

~~~
mnemonik
Or the HN codebase if you plan to go down this route.

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chanux
OK, If it's really good I'll make it the secondary home page.

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known
It depends on the definition of "hack".

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mroman
Yes!

