

Ask HN: what about a mailing list for HN community? - btw0

Mailing list may have a cleaner interface than web, every email address subscribed to the mailing list is associated with a handle on HN web site, which can be ensured by some way. What do you think about this?
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jacquesm
That would just fork a bunch of threads from HN onto the mailing list, without
the benefits that the site offers.

HN is currently 'pull', a mailing list would make it 'push'. I think one of
the great things about the website is that you get to choose when you go
there, a mailing list (especially a busy one) gets in the way of work pretty
quickly.

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btw0
Almost all good email clients are able to manage mailing lists nicely, even
gmail have a mailing list filter which can be set to make emails from the list
go directly under a folder, skipping your inbox. So with a sane email client,
a mailing list doesn't necessarily get in the way, you can check it once a
day.

~~~
jacquesm
I think mailing lists are great and have a purpose, I'm subscribed to several.
Btw, mail clients are a matter of preference, being able to handle mailing
lists does not qualify a client as 'good', and not being able to do so does
not qualify one as 'bad'.

I just can't see the case for essentially moving HN off-web to a mailing list.

If there was a sufficiently narrowly scoped mailing list I might do it (say,
one for announcements for startups looking for seed funding, or a mailing list
for 'it flies' announcements for startups that make a certain benchmark, say
profitability, or a successful exit).

Generalized stuff not so much.

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mahmud
I want to be able to "pitch" an idea to a group of people and have some of
them accept to implement it for equity, or choose to fund it for investment.

I feel like I latched on the first successful idea, mainly because it was
'ramen profitable' from the first instant, but I have done the market research
for plenty of Plan Bs and Cs and would love to see some of them come to
fruition NOW, and not wait for me til I have the time. The good part is that
my Plan A is 'advertising', and it can carry all others on its back free of
charge. Everything piggybacks on everything else.

Or maybe I should just hunker down and get this one rolling then come back for
the others one at a time.

Too many bright minds and too much time is being wasted on "web 2.0" utilities
and single-serving crap. Corporate intranet software is where "we" need to be
at.

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btw0
What are you talking about? I was suggesting a mailing list for Hacker News
community to hang out.

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mahmud
You have an audience like this and all you wanna do is "hang out"? I wanna put
their time and mine to better uses.

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idlewords
Hard to think of a worse use of everyone's time than a constant stream of
pitches.

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mahmud
Call me a masochist, but I find the "Comment on our startup" posts the most
inspirational and useful on this site.

~~~
jacquesm
Agreed, but why split that off to some other medium, that works well enough as
it is.

That just gives you two places to look for the same information, once in the
mailing list and once on the site.

The one really big advantage I think to mailing lists over the current HN
setup is that you'd get rid of those ridiculously small pageback limits.

There is plenty of good (make that great) stuff on HN but you are not going to
find it by browsing around.

The only way to do that is to use a search engine and search engines do not
work well unless you have something specific in mind.

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hassy
I would subscribe to a list with "Ask HN" type of discussions.

~~~
kirubakaran
I use this for the same purpose: <http://ask.searchyc.com/>

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ErrantX
There is a chatterous group - which you can recieve/send updates from/to via
email (or web, Gtalk etc).

<http://www.chatterous.com/hnyc/>

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btw0
A mailing list is different from a chat room in that emails are typically
longer, insightful and doesn't need instant response chat room needs.

~~~
ErrantX
I know (though I have found chatterous to be somewhere between the 2 extremes)
but it seemed to suitable for what the OP was suggesting.

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jacquesm
gp = op.

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ErrantX
huh?

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jacquesm
btw0 posted the original article.

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ErrantX
oh, sorry. I couldnt figure what gp meant :)

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woid
let's wait for google wave ...

