
Ask HN: Favorite websites for intelligent discussion? - lunchbox
I like the rational, smart tone of discussion on HN. What other websites do you go to for these kinds of discussions, particularly on non-hacker topics? Like most people here I'm interested in various areas -- technology, economics, politics, psychology, and mathematical modeling of all kinds --  and enjoy discussing them with other analytically/quantitatively minded people.<p>Some blogs, such as Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution, and Overcoming Bias have interesting commenters. Metafilter is full of smart people, but is a bit too heavy on the arts &#38; humanities for my taste. Apart from HN, where do you get your fix for smart discussion?
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bokonist
I highly recommend Unqualified Reservations ( <http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/> ) and Unenumerated (
<http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/> )

Both are incredibly smart blogs, with very smart commenters. Their main shtick
is bringing historical perspective to contemporary problems of government and
economics. The result is fascinating and eye opening. I've learned more
history from these two blogs then I learned from majoring in history at Yale.

~~~
peregrine
Were you majoring in Sahara dessert history or what?

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VarunGupta
Topcoder Forums [forums.topcoder.com]

Though the discussion is chiefly about algorithms and programming, it attracts
brilliant people from top universities and research organizations around the
world.

~~~
Herring
The discussions look interesting, but I wish the forum wasn't so hard to read.
Surely they can't be having problems getting phpbb to work...

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greyman
slashdot. (no, I am not joking ;-)) Almost every article I am interested in
contains several very informative comments plus a few really funny ones. It
has it's own unique culture I like.

For non-hacker topics I don't have any I would visit regularly, so I am also
looking forward for another comments.

~~~
stcredzero
You do get knowledgeable posts on Slashdot. But there is a lot of noise and a
lot of snideness. You still get posts implying Smalltalk is slow, though it's
actually one of the faster pure-OO languages at this point, and one of the
commercial implementations (VisualWorks) has an unbelievably good
implementation of generational GC. (Seriously, I put an infinite background
loop that just allocated memory into the petro trading client I was
maintaining, and it was hard to notice!)

A lot of the population there doesn't have a CS degree, and hasn't bothered to
give themselves an equivalent education by reading, and so find basic stuff
like the "Sources of Disk Latency" to be "Interesting" and "Informative." But
the site works for real signal, because eventually some expert is pissed off
enough to post a page long in-depth spiel.

~~~
litewulf
One thing to keep in mind is that IT professionals are different from software
engineers which seem to be the majority of the technical backgrounds that
HNers have.

I'm surprised there aren't more sysadmin related posts actually. (Wiring
Servers? How do YOU do it?)

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vaksel
HN is enough intelligent discussion for me. The problem with intelligent
discussion is that its very time consuming, since the people are both
knowledgeable and passionate in what they are discussing.

HN is just the right mix of it, because you have intelligent people giving
their view points, but they are all busy people, so there is no 5 page
replies.

~~~
lunchbox
What is HH?

~~~
vaksel
I always mess up and spell HN as HH, no idea why

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nick5768
I love the forums over at Ars Technica( <http://episteme.arstechnica.com/> ).
To me, HN and Ars are head and shoulders above the level of conversation on
the other sites I visit.

~~~
comatose_kid
I don't think that the conversation level on Ars is close to what we have
here. There are a few blowhards there that really do make some threads painful
to read.

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kajecounterhack
I usually go to a few IRC channels to get my intelligent discussion. Freenode
is great =D

~~~
qqq
Which?

~~~
kajecounterhack
#ubuntu, #jquery, #tuxhacker

lulz you can tell where my interests lie...

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Prrometheus
reason.com/blog and distributedrepublic.net have intelligent commentators,
though reason tends towards the smart-allecky side. You would probably enjoy
both blogs if you like the Marginal Revolutions and Overcoming Biases of the
world. Oh, and Cafe Hayek.

For legal issues, there's the Volokh Conspiracy. I believe that Eugene Volokh
is a libertarianish law professor somewhere.

Is the Becker/Posner blog still around? I believe that both of them have a
Nobel prize in Economics.

Greg Mankiw has a good blog, with a good community.

Most of the internet sucks for intelligent discussion. That's what happens
when you let any-old-body in.

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matt1
2+2's Science, Math, Philosophy (SMP) forum is really good:

<http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/forumdisplay.php?f=47>

A couple recent threads: \- Is my vote mathematically meaningless? \-
Intelligence, intelligence tests, and psychology \- What is space made of? \-
Professors, Doctors, Lawyers, who's smarter?

Atheism discussions are a particular favorite (which should generally indicate
it's the type of forum you're looking for).

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systems
<http://www.perlmonks.org>

<http://use.perl.org>

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sharp
willmott is the best place I've seen for quant/finance discussion:
<http://www.wilmott.com/> Nb. has a (required) delayed login before you can
post. Very little (if any) noise in the comments - makes freakonomics look
like jerry springer.

~~~
cellis
<http://nuclearphynance.com> , too

lots of ridiculously scienc-ey,mathy, yet pragmatic finance dudes there. Some
humor when trolls/know-it-alls arrive.

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nsrivast
Is there demand for a discussion site that has nothing to do with blog or news
posts? Comments and threads could still be monitored and ranked by users.
Discussions could be split into topics and subtopics (philosophy might be
interesting, because some of the arguments would concern where to make the
splits).

The hard thing would be to make sure people voted up and down for the right
reasons.

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AlfaWolph
The Straight Dope Message Boards and plastic.com can be fun and worthwhile.
Some finance and econ types like iTulip I hear.

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lsemel
I enjoy <http://ask.metafilter.com> more than the main Metafilter site.

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david
<http://freedomainradio.com/board/>

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slater
i'll go ahead and put the SA forums (forums.somethingawful.com) out there. A
ton of IT pros, most of the subforums are not filled with the cliché'd "SA
goon" crap, and it costs $5 per user account, keeping many many morons out.

And yes, I have stairs in my house.

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adrianwaj
<http://www.plastic.com> : an old fave

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rosary
Believe it or not, sensibleerection.com has some of the best intelligent and
witty discussion I've found on the web. Sure there's the occasional
pornography post, but most all of the people there offer intelligent debate.

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litewulf
metafilter.com is full of esoteric posts and people from all sorts of
different backgrounds post on it with surprising amounts of wit and candor.

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GavinB
overcomingbias.com

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gasull
iTulip forums, about economics:

<http://www.itulip.com>

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reborndead
Newsvine.com

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rtra
usenet

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gills
www.tickerforum.org

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river_styx
reddit

 _ducks_

~~~
arockwell
For me, the reddit main page sucks, but I do find interesting stuff on
programming.reddit.com

