
Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff? - Xcelerate
Is there a website out there that's more technical than HN, has less negativity, and leaves out the "social" aspects of technology?<p>What I'm looking for is a site where I can discuss things like:<p>-Programming language design (functional languages, different type systems, point-free style, etc...)<p>-Interesting mathematics (deeper understanding of statistics, implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem)<p>-Interesting science (advances in quantum mechanics, optical gyroscopes, etc.)<p>-Other technical oddities (Turing complete systems, global illumination on GPUs, supercomputing)<p>-News on start-ups that solve technical rather than social problems (DE Shaw instead of Socialcam)<p>I'd like to avoid:<p>-Tech products<p>-Heated arguments that make me feel bad after reading the comments instead of enlightened
======
thaumaturgy
I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're
looking for.

I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN habit
while still feeding me stuff I might be interested in. Because I built it, I
can make it do anything I want. I've started to turn it into a slightly
broader search engine so that I can find the things that I'm looking for; I
got sick of seeing search engines brag about the hundreds-of-thousands or
millions of search results they were returning when I was trying to find
something (really, what's the point of that?), so I'm building my own. I got
sick of feeding some psychological trigger in my brain that made me nervously
check the HN front page numerous times throughout the day, and I'd find myself
clicking on items that had lots of comments and activity even if the subject
was something I wasn't interested in. I guess I was thinking, "wow, lots of
people over there, I should go check that out."

What did it for me was a bit of foggy nostalgia one day. I was thinking about
"the good ol' days", how I -- we, all of us if we were lucky enough to be born
at the right time in the right environment -- used to modify the crap of out
of programs, change their interface, tweak their colors, cheat at games even
when we were the only ones playing. We used to take things we didn't like and
turn them into things we did like.

But nobody, or very few people, do that for the web, even though there are
piles and piles of tools that make it easy and doable.

So I did it.

And it is glorious.

It's some of the most fun I've had at programming in years. Now when I'm
feeling like a wet cat, I'll just go tweak my little reader-search-engine-toy,
and then I feel better. Now I never feel like I'm missing out on something on
HN, because my little toy is keeping an eye on it for me and saving the stuff
I might care about it.

And if you're looking for a new _community_ ... well, build that too! It's
clear from numerous threads on HN and other places that people are ready for
something new. Make what you want, share it if you feel like, if enough other
people like it maybe they'll join in and you'll have your community.

~~~
sgdesign
If anybody wants an easy way to set up their own HN, may I suggest taking a
look at Telescope?

<http://telesc.pe/>

It's a real-time, open source HN clone built on Meteor, with features like
invite-only mode, notifications, and a lot more stuff.

And since it's open source, if something is missing you can always code it
yourself and contribute it back to the project.

~~~
rickdale
How do you install meteorite? I can't get this working!

Frustrated!

~~~
JEVLON
<http://docs.meteor.com/#quickstart>

~~~
rickdale
Thanks. I got this far after posting my comment. Figured out I needed
NodePackageManager. I hate when instructions say npm and dont say what npm
means. Now I am getting another error when I run mrt inside the telescope
folder. I am working on it.. I love this. I spent weeks trying to get
newscloud going, but never did...

------
ChuckMcM
A fairly transparent bit of rhetoric there :-)

In answer to your non-question question, yes that site exists, there are
literally hundreds of them. They get a few users, then they don't get new
news, they get a few 'bad' things (people get scolded for being negative, or
chastised for being 'off topic' or 'social') and then no one wants to post
because they can't really tell what is "acceptable" and what isn't. People
stop going there. It fades into obscurity.

My suggestion is that what your looking for isn't a web site its friends. Get
together once a week and hang out. You can talk about programming languages,
mathematics, science and other oddities. Invite people who stick to the
program, shun people who keep wanting to talk about tech products.

~~~
dreamdu5t
This is the real answer.

------
georgeorwell
I'd possibly like the same thing, but I don't have much in the way of hope
that it will materialize. I see you're a Chem Eng grad student. I'd say for
programming language design, read the computer science papers from top
conferences that interest you, starting with PLDI:

<https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2254064> (click on Table of Contents)

If you want to discuss them, send email to the authors, try and find some grad
students or professors in your CS department, or find a way to attend some CS
conferences.

I don't think you'll find deep research-quality conversation in a news
aggregator, mostly because the people who are interested in having and also
able to have research-quality conversations are for the most part busy doing
research, and also because coming up with a reasonable opinion about something
complicated that you're not an expert in takes a lot of work.

There are specific blogs, mailing lists, and (maybe defunct) newsgroups where
you can discuss more focused topics, e.g. <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

------
riffraff
I can't believe noone mentioned LtU: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

Also, try Prismatic maybe.

------
ajdecon
I think Hacker News is as close to a "non-social" discussion forum as you're
going to find, while maintaining high engagement.

The cliché is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and I think one
of the primary ways we maintain the high engagement in a discussion thread is
by becoming interested in the other participants, not just the topic. That's
usually a good thing, because it motivates us to respond and care about the
discussion, but it also means that people will go off-topic, get into heated
arguments, or bring up memes and social topics.

If it were possible to strictly enforce rules against off-topic or non-
technical discussions, I suspect engagement would drop very quickly. Learning
is a strong motivator, but I doubt it provides the same semi-addictive
feedback loop that the social aspects of a site do.

(I don't have any evidence beyond my own gut feelings based on web forums over
the years --- happy to be proved wrong! A high-engagement non-social
discussion forum would be an interesting place.)

~~~
JonnieCache
I think he means social in the buzzword sense.

------
jacquesc
<http://lobste.rs> seems like exactly what you want. It's a good community,
give it a try

~~~
zalew
reminds me of <http://hackful.eu> \- good links, good idea, good intentions,
but almost no engagement, and the only link with more than 3 comments is a
meta-discussion.

~~~
polyfractal
It's still growing. Development is active, people post plenty of interesting
stories. Commenting is slowly increasing. These things take time, and the core
group of posters are still posting links on a daily basis which is what a
nascent community needs to survive the initial "lull".

I'm very hopeful for Lobsters.

~~~
zalew
I wanted to register, but there is no link. it's some exclusive club?

~~~
polyfractal
Quoting from the original "about" post:

> _Invitations_

> _Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control
> mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations
> will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new
> accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that
> invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as
> needed._

<https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters>

~~~
zalew
ah, ok, I get it. got the invite, signed up.

------
olalonde
<http://lesswrong.com> and <http://forrst.com> come to mind. There are also a
few subreddits that might interest you: <http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/>
<http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci> <http://www.reddit.com/r/types>

------
aerique
No mention of Usenet :-(. It scores on many of the points you mentioned
(Reddit subreddits come close.)

I'm sad this part of the net has been fading into obscurity the last ten years
especially since its alternatives have proven to be inadequate. Its greatest
power was it being decentralised and thus couldn't be policed by anyone, the
variety and custom readers.

Its greatest weak point was perhaps the trolls. Maybe others can supply more
weaknesses?

Really, what does Hackernews as a website have over f.e. a newsgroup
alt.news.hackers?

~~~
aw3c2
Voting, a threaded display that does not break, no insane quoting, some
markup, karma

~~~
aerique
Agreed on most of your points except a lot of news readers supported the basic
markup for bold, italics, underline, etc. one now sees in Markdown & friends.

------
zalew
> has less negativity

what do you mean by that?

ironically I'll probably sound negative, but are you looking for a place which
enforces PC to an ubearable point where the only accepted state is, you know,
people standing in a circle smiling while performing a certain activity?

~~~
alanctgardner2
HN is definitely not the most supportive place on the internet. I've gotten
some really good feedback from people who know what they're talking about, and
read some discussion which was more interesting than the linked article. But
then, I've also seen some people with a lot of karma who just bicker about
insignificant things. Also, the fact that the community rules and best
practices are ridiculously opaque, and every new person is initially viewed
with hatred/mistrust for being 'from Reddit' or 'from /.' makes the place seem
a bit hostile.

------
anonymfus
Does any RSS/Atom client exist which can subtract feeds? So you can for
example add HackerNews feed and subtract feeds from /r/politics and
/r/worldpolitics so only link mentioned on HackerNews and not mentioned on
/r/politics or /r/worldpolitics would pass?

~~~
jhund
We have designed and built intigi.com for this exact purpose: a secret weapon
for hackers to consume news.

This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter
accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a
lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your
sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only
the relevant results.

You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of
this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and
find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for
precision or for recall...

~~~
haldean
That's not really what he/she asked for. What your parent is asking for (and I
would love to see this too) is a tool that treats RSS feeds as sets of
articles, then lets you do set operations on those sets (i.e., get me all
articles a \in A such that a \in HN \and a \notin rpolitics)

~~~
jhund
Hi there, good point. I didn't explain myself very well. You can do this with
intigi, too. You can filter both at the content and the source level. So you
could set up an interest that presents you with results that

a) appear in the HN RSS feed AND b) that don't appear in the r/politics feed

In order to do set operations on URLs reliably, we also solve the issue of
canonicalization (resolving redirects, removing tracking markers, etc.).

~~~
haldean
Nice! I'll have to take a look. Thanks!

------
6ren
fp: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

------
manish_gill
I usually follow a big mix of subreddits I'm interested in. This is one of my
bookmarks:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webde...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webdev+learnmath+vim+gamedev+linux+linux4noobs+learnpython+algorithms)

------
DanBC
One suggesting is to visit new and upvote good stories; flag unsuitable
stories; and submit excellent articles.

What you're looking for can be found in HN, and is appreciated by many people,
but does perhaps need a bit of support and encouragement.

------
tuturu
<https://lobste.rs/> maybe.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Can I get an invite, please? Email in profile.

EDIT: Got it. Thanks. (So no one double-sends)

~~~
bhousel
just sent invite..

~~~
siamore
could i have one? my email id is siamoreslr@gmail.com

------
pallinder
Check out lamernews <http://lamernews.com/>

------
dokem
If you ever find this site, let me know. HN is this closest site to what
you're looking for that I can think of. We could possibly improve on this by
adding subsections, but then that would just turn into reddit.

~~~
rpm4321
Maybe not subsections, but allow users to create and up-vote tags on stories,
or maybe have a simple dropdown on story submission with a dozen or so tags
the submitter could apply. That way you could still narrow your focus when you
don't want to miss certain content (ex. #Python, #AI, #Business, etc. at
news.ycombinator.com/tagged/Python, etc.), but you wouldn't disrupt the
current community feel of HN too much.

------
p_sherman
You see, about a year and a half ago this was what HN was actually like.

------
polshaw
Very sad to see all the 'HN competitors' (lobsters, hackful, lamernews) are
all essentially dead (at least extremely dormant).

To me, all they needed were a small handful of dedicated posters/commenters
(and to be open, i'm looking at you lobste.rs) to start to catch on; i'm very
much reminded of the story of the reddit founders sockpuppeting to make the
site not look like a ghost town; this kind of 'forced' activity doesn't seem
to be necessary for long until the site would take on it's own life.

~~~
ampersandy
I totally agree. It would even be easy to find old, well-received HN
submissions that have likely been forgotten and to queue them up for
resubmission to your new service.

~~~
unimpressive
On a timescale, so that the site would be receiving at least one killer
article from the past a day.

------
patdennis
A well set up Google Reader account can do wonders... but it takes a while to
get to that point.

~~~
jhund
Yes, that's a good start. And if you want to take it a step further, you could
use a tool like intigi.com (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders) which
allows you to not only aggregate feeds, but also run Lucene queries on them to
filter out the noise.

------
antidoh
Disrupt Hacker News! Come help change the way that we Hacker News Hacker News!
:)

I'm not near as focused as you are, but I understand your discontent. I have
two suggestions.

One, the easy thing (easy as in less work and commitment), which a few others
have suggested. Help make HN better, make it what you want. It's probably
already closest to what you want, among the alternatives.

Read /newest and upvote good content and good comments. I personally rarely
downvote bad comments, I just avert my eyes. I do flag spam, it's like picking
up litter. But downvoting is an option, and part of the deal. Just don't "be a
downvoter," it will probably make you feel worse, and make reading HN like a
burden. Don't carry a cross, just watch the parade. (Worst metaphor you'll
read today.)

 _Write_ good comments. Respond seriously and helpfully to the occasional lame
or hostile comment. Be the change you want to see, and all that.

But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to
like.

Two ... this will take some work and time. You can do it in parallel with HN,
or wherever you go from HN. Curate your own discussion group. Look around in
your current social, academic and work circle, and talk to a small handful
(less than five-ish, more than one), who you think might be interested in
discussing what you're interested in. Establish some broad but focused
discussion topics.

Set up a mechanism for you all to discuss privately. If you're all local, beer
is a great mechanism. Otherwise the easiest and simplest thing would be email,
and you should probably stop at that; don't focus on the tools (fun though
they are, especially the beer), start discussing as quickly as possible; like,
this afternoon. Really, this afternoon. If you like, one of you can maintain a
forwarding address, so you don't have to each maintain lists. But you don't
need that this afternoon, let that emerge naturally. I've been a member of
exactly such a list for ... 15 years? Dayam.

Every once in awhile, invite a new individual in. Do it slowly and
deliberately. Don't obsess or agonize over whether someone is right for the
group; if you thought of them, they probably are. If they aren't, they'll stop
participating. New people will change the dynamics and focus, and that's a
good thing. Just do it slowly, not as a focus.

Be generous and engaging with your fellow list members. Accept heat, and let
it dissipate quickly. The fewer rules you have, the less they'll be broken.

Over the years, your group might grow to five, or ten, or a hundred, it's up
to you.

As you communicate with people you know personally (or online personally),
there's a danger that the group might take on some social aspects. You may
even become friends with some or all of them. That's a risk that you'll have
to take. It's not so bad. :)

~~~
scott_s
_But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to
like._

I think this advice is crucial. I try to follow it.

------
Mz
Most likely: Nothing is ever going to be _exactly_ what you want. Even if you
build it.

And I see a fundamental conflict in your criteria: You want a less "social"
site. You also want less fighting but with good discussion. Generally
speaking, people who have the social savvy to encourage polite discourse are
going to have some interest in social stuff. It is the nature of the beast.

------
shoopy
I am also tired of the amount of time we spend patting each other on the back.
I learned node.js 36 hours ago and here's my Hello World! 230 points! That's
wonderful, but that front page is precious and we should upvote things that
are useful to the community, instead of being tools for external affirmation
for eager beavers.

------
ArekDymalski
To me some parts of stackoverflow might appear interesting to you.

~~~
stared
Rather <http://stackexchange.com/sites> (as a side note, I've just made a map
of their sites, here [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of-
all-se...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se-sites-
except-the-3-biggest) with a discussion, code on GitHub). There are very
dedicated communities, from TeX to gardening.

The good thing is that there are great (just IMHO).

The bad thing is that, not everything fits in the question-and-answer scheme.
There are many interesting subject, which are:

open-ended,

or requiring polling,

or - brainstorming.

Also, not every topic is covered, but it that case you can create your own SE
site (with <http://area51.stackexchange.com/>); just it takes time and effort
to gather the critical mass (at least 200, usually - much more).

------
frendiversity
Someday I'm going to invent a place where people can gather to learn technical
skills from masters of the crafts, and socialize with like-minded enthusiasts.

I could even "gamify" it and the players could earn points for passing tests
to prove their knowledge, ultimately earning an "achievement" for mastering
the craft at various levels of proficiency.

We'll allow a diverse range of players to apply and even come live there,
maybe right out of high school. I'm thinking "friendiversity" for the name,
because you'll make friends and there is diversity there, what do you think?

~~~
djisjke
You could use every buzzword!

------
shoopy
"Tech products"

Not so clear cut. I, too, am sick of the gadget wars infesting every single
discussion. Unfortunately, the inanities resulting from this modern day
religious war are pervasive and unavoidable. Let's call it Shoopy's Law: Any
topic that involves Apple, Google, Microsoft, ${CORPORATE_ENTITY}, no matter
how superficial, is bound to devolve into religious flamewars about
nonsequitur gadgety things like framerate stutters and marketplace app
metrics.

------
nimeshneema
Have a look at this: <http://functionspace.org/> I think this one may come
close to your expectations

~~~
shawn-butler
How does a landing page tell us anything?

~~~
nimeshneema
The site is currently been developed and would be live soon. (It's been done
by one of the close friends so I can assure that it is relevant). Sign up to
get notified when it's up and more information.

------
srutisha
Slashdot? :-)

~~~
cgh
Huh? Slashdot is almost all politics, very little technical content.

------
Hawkee
Well here's my shameless plug. I've been building <http://hawkee.com> for
many, many years more or less as a hobby. Lately I've been trying to fill the
void between GitHub, StackOverflow and even HN. I don't want to say too much,
but if the goal is unclear then maybe I've still got more work to do.

------
mkr-hn
That sounds profoundly boring. But if you really want that, and have the time,
you can get close with Reddit + RES: <http://redditenhancementsuite.com/>

Add the right subreddits and filter out sites, posters, and keywords to refine
it into exactly the thing you want.

------
trotsky
graduate school

------
message
For me it sounds like whole stackexchange.com network.

~~~
qntmfred
except you can't discuss things there.

------
dysoco
I've been thinking in making something similar: But I though people might not
be interested having HN, Reddit and Slashdot.

------
arikrak
More sites should let people tag submissions by topic, to help sort it for
readers.

------
mehrzad
4chan's /g/ board is pretty good, but at times brutal.

~~~
DanBC
I couldn't cope with all the "LOL WOODSCREWS!!!1!" type trolling. There's a
lot of partisan stuff, and meme-spewing. And while there are plenty of people
who really know what they're talking about (to the level the OP wants and
above) there are also arrogant but ignorant 14 year olds ranting stuff.

The text /prog/ board has some interesting discussion, but there's a lot of
"Have you read your SICP today?".

And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content.

Some of the other chans are better, but still risky and with a lot less
traffic.

There is a great bit of copypasta about installing Linux though.

~~~
mehrzad
>And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content. Rarely, /g/ is supposed
to be SFW. >there are plenty of people who really know what they're talking
about This is why I recommend it; a while back some guys were discussing how
to build the low level functions of an OS.

------
wmat
Perhaps a series of SubReddits?

------
Kilimanjaro
nReduce is missing a great opportunity.

Competition is always good for the consumer.

------
rcillo
Go to the university.

------
SamuelKillin
here here!

------
michaelochurch
Programming Reddit (Proggit) is more focused on programming (as opposed to
politics, tech startups) and therefore, I would argue, is more likely to have
the sorts of links you're looking for. But, in my experience, the quality of
discussion is lower (though quite high in absolute standards) and you're more
likely to have a good comment downvoted.

~~~
personlurking
"and you're more likely to have a good comment downvoted."

This has never made sense to me. On some subreddits that focus on disciplines
(like AskHistorians among many others), you can easily get downvoted (ie
"dissapeared") just by asking a question, let alone answering one. Other times
you'll won't get upvoted nor downvoted when you've actually contributed to the
discussion. In these instances I lurk even when I can contribute because it's
just not worth it.

~~~
michaelochurch
Reddit's voting system has two issues:

(1) _Lots_ of strategic downvoting. That's why no thread stays above 75%. It
happens to comments as well as threads. Some of it is spammers trying to
improve their own ranking, and some is probably just trolls.

(2) "Stalker" downvoting, which is when a person retaliates to a comment by
downvoting that person's contributions _en masse_.

I wonder if they've put any machine learning muscle behind this. Is it easy to
fix, or is it just a hard problem?

~~~
zalzane
The entire concept of the downvote is flawed and is very likely to be the
absolute worst part about reddit.

In theory it may be a good idea, but in practice it's essentially a "CENSOR
THIS POST" button that people use to get rid of content they don't agree with.

I've also noticed that negative points on a post completely destroys
credibility despite cited evidence or a well thought out argument. I've seen
identical comments on similar posts in the past where the first few voters
determined the post's fate in that if the first few voters voted it down, the
post would receive flames and even more downvotes, but if it was initially
upvoted, more people would upvote it and it would receive well thought out
replies.

Probably the most horrifying part of the downvote is that all it takes is 51%
of voters to dislike your post to destroy it. For example, all it takes is 51%
of viewers on the politics subreddit to turn the the /r/politics frontpage
into a pseudo fox news where every single post praises democrats and slanders
republicans.

It strikes me as disgusting that some people actually consider reddit to be a
good place to have a controversial discussion when it's so pathetically easy
to censor opinions that you don't agree with.

~~~
theorique
Each subreddit has different character, depending on the mods and the
community that it attracts. Some skew one way, some skew another.

------
frozenport
Hacker news needs categories.

------
wilfra
stackoverflow or lobste.rs

~~~
motoford
Sadly stackoverflow has gotten to mean for anything but the most difficult
questions, worded perfectly. They need to also be solved in the same paragraph
to escape the wrath of stack.

------
sami36
>Heated arguments that make me feel bad after reading the comments instead of
enlightened

1-There is bound to be heated arguments whenever two rational people with
different circumstances & a different thought process are asked to opine on
any issue with less than an obvious resolution. If you're uncomfortable
watching a rigorous back & forth. Try North Korea.

2- You do realize you're asking a question of a social nature. you're
contributing to making HN less of a technical forum.

3- Nobody forces you to read comments. The community does a pretty good job
both down-voting comments rife with negativity or without any value. (maybe
even this one)

I'm sorry, but it seems to me you're trolling.

~~~
lclarkmichalek
How on earth does anyone think this is trolling? Anyway, I disagree with your
points.

1) There is a very big difference between a heated argument and an argument.
Maybe it's just a side effect of the medium we are using, but everyone seems
to have so much trouble being civil. For example, instead of suggesting that
OP go look to North Korea, you could have said "For me, the heated discussions
are a good thing" or something similar.

2) OP realizes that HN isn't a technical forum, and isn't asking for it to
change.

3) Comments are a massive part of the value that HN provides, and even if OP
were to stop reading the comments, he'll still see the same mix of articles on
the front page.

~~~
mylittlepony
Everyone is suggesting Reddit, but there too you will find heated arguments
[1]. In general, HN comments are way better, and trolls are kept in line.

[1]:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/135b5z/yes_the_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/135b5z/yes_the_fbi_and_cia_can_read_your_email_even_if/c716b7f)

~~~
im3w1l
No on is suggesting /r/technology though. There are subreddits out there that
are a lot better.

