

Ask HN: What website(s) do you think are great? - dave1010uk

I'd like to know what websites HNers consider <i>really</i> great. Sites that are leagues above their competition and may even evoke emotion. Sites you'd be proud to have your name associated with or sites you go back to every day.<p>They can be great in terms of a beautiful design, usability, performance, simplicity, showing off modern techniques, openness, interaction or anything else which makes you consider them "great".<p>For example, I consider HN itself great as it combines quality with currency: it's a great place to get up-to-the-minute news but at the same time the quality of discussion is much higher than most other sites.
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simba-hiiipower
8tracks [8tracks.com]

As a hardcore music enthusiast I absolutely love 8tracks. Its tagline,
'handcrafted internet radio' sums it up pretty well. It's a service similar to
Pandora, but where all the mixes are created by users of the site. This
‘handcrafted’ element is what really makes the site shine and differentiates
it from others. It’s an incredibly open site and has a very diverse and active
community that makes for a really interesting discovery experience. As someone
who is pretty plugged-in to the music scene I’m always amazed at what I find
through other people’s mixes and love sharing my own.

FFFFound [ffffound.com]

FFFFound is a pretty cool site for discovering amazing imagery. There are a
lot of similar sites that compete, but (and I really don’t know exactly why)
FFFFound is the first one I’ve ever really followed. It is an incredibly
simple and bare site, but the quality of the submissions are top-notch. And,
though there’s essentially no user interaction, you get an interesting sense
of community from just browsing around as ‘posters’ are few and tend to be
fairly active. Only complaint (though this probably goes directly to the
quality of submissions) is the fact that the site has been in a closed beta
for years now. The only way you can get an invite is by knowing someone who’s
on the site, and they each have just one invite (since we’re on the subject,
and in a complete act of self-promotion, if anyone reading this is registered
and has an invite they’d care to share I’d really appreciate it!).

life + times [lifeandtimes.com]

One of the best looking sites around. It’s a music/general lifestyle blog
originally founded by Jay-Z. Though it’s not the most active one out there,
the quality of posts is great (and with many exclusives by way of Mr.
Rockafella himself). All in all, what I love most about the site is the layout
and design. I just think it looks cool; plain and simple.

Noisey [noisey.com]

Shocker: another music site. Noisey is a pretty cool, still growing, ‘video-
driven music discovery platform’. It has a fair bit of content and a nice
(though frequently shifting) design. It’s a great place to check-out new
talent from around the world and watch live shows and interesting interviews.
The site is run by digital lifestyle magazine, VICE.

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mhd
Besides imdb, wikipedia and the search engine du jour?

Probably the original wiki (<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki>), aka. the "Portland
Pattern Repository". This is where the whole idea of wiki's started - and if
you only know the term from Wikipedia, there's quite a bit to learn.

In the end, a lot of everyone's network usage boils down to two bits:
information and communication. Just having that actor you forgot the name of
at your fingertip, or quickly looking up the detailed history of literacy is
just great. This is what Hitchhiker's Guide promised. Nowadays some people
probably have a hard time thinking about what they'd do in those cases without
their mobile devices, but considering that previously you had to go to your
encyclopedia, probably find it inadequate and then head to the library, even
for rather trivial use…

For communication, we sadly left the more interesting technology behind and
now are shoe-horning everything into the web. Which is why I'd find a hard
time calling any kind of forum, whether it's a PHPBB one, reddit or HN
"great". A wiki probably comes closest to actually using the web to its
advantage - and if remember correctly, user-editable pages for almost
everything were part of the original WWW idea. (Don't have anything like the
HHGTTG to compare it to, here. Shadowrun's inline comments maybe ;) )

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Wilduck
Hipmunk [<http://www.hipmunk.com/>].

This site is by far the best translation of information into a visual format
that I've seen. Where most flight search sites present you with hard to
interpret text, hipmunk gives you visual clues. For example, it's much easier
to find a shorter flight, when the flights are represented by bars (oh, that
bar is really long, I don't want to be on airplanes for 5 hours) as opposed to

Additionally, it's very clear that a lot of thought went in to designing the
process of revising your search. For example, you select each leg
individually, you can open multiple tabs of searches, things load quickly,
it's easy to flip between legs, etc.

Before hipmunk, finding a fight was a pain, since I like things laid out
visually and am usually more sensitive to price than to departure and arrival
times (but still want to take them in to account). I would say that I have an
emotional attachment to this website. It has truly solved some of my problems.

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iamjonlee
Persona [<http://www.grooovy.me/persona>]

A bit of shameless plug, but I really do sincerely think we've outdone
ourselves this time. It's fun even for us after playing it a hundred times.
We've tried to really push the limit for interaction while keeping it relevant
to our site by turning our homepage into a game.

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ankitchugh
google

