

Libre News, political discussion powered by Arc Lang - thisisdallas
http://wwww.librenews.us

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

~~~
mcphilip
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.

~~~
jasonkester
First, downvotes aren't for disagreement here. Comments are. Thus...

Second, I disagree, and agree with the grandparent that that other place (or
_any_ other place, really) would make a perfect place for discussing all those
things you list.

Actionable articles about the business of software and technology to help
build same. That's what we're here for. If you'd like more stuff to talk
about, there's lots more internet out there. You're free to hang out at more
than one place.

~~~
tedks
It's beyond hilarious that blog posts about app developers doing annoying
things to make money are totally welcome on HN, and typically spark comments
rabble-rousing towards the goal of making a "Developer's Professional Ethics
Code."

It's hilarious because in every thread about every piece of surveillance
infrastructure that ratchets the United States irreversibly towards
totalitarianism, there are complaints that this is _political_ and
_inappropriate for Hacker News._

You want a tech startup hook on every Snowden leak? 1984-tech is probably a
_great_ field for entreperneurial minded hackers. Too many people are stuck
disrupting laundry and taxicabs! Think big, and disrupt democracy. Change the
way people cling to power.

All of the surveillance state's gear is _software_ , written by _developers_.
Just think: you could be one of those developers! Get your piece of the pie,
and talk about it on HN. There's a whole world of posts there:

\- Best ways to monitor mobile use patterns while minimizing app footprint?

\- What database should I store the entire world's email in?

\- Ask HN: I'm a founder of a spying SaaS platform -- how can I launder "black
money" from intelligence agencies?

\- Ask HN: What Saudi telecos are hiring hackers to help them spy on their
people?

Just remember to pitch a fit every time the mobile equivalent of a popup ad
gets blogged about. Because those developers are giving us all a bad _name_ ,
damn it.

~~~
zarify
The worst part is I think most of the privacy destroying tech stuff makes for
some fascinating problems (as the comments around speculation on the NSA
tapping fibre a while back demonstrated).

People just can't help looking at problems like that even when the
consequences just aren't good from a civil liberties perspective. I think
that's what makes it great HN material.

(Also I wish I could upvote this more for "disrupt democracy" :)

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jere
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?

~~~
thisisdallas
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
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
Can we please not start _this_ flamewar again? It's been done to death and
there's nothing new to be said.

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MarcScott
_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
I'm suspect this will be the case until they achieve critical mass. Of course,
posting it here will likely help.

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Houshalter
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
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
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.

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bradleysmith
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.

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antocv
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
I'll definitely make note of this and get it changed. Thanks for the feedback.

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pmelendez
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.

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Todd
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.

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ing33k
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 .

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grepthis
Seems to be down.

~~~
vinceleo
that's right

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vinceleo
Is it down?

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klrr
Too hard to read the text! :P

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coherentpony
HTML Tables? Really?

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ksrm
HN also uses tables.

~~~
coherentpony
That was my point.

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contextual
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.

