

Ask HN: Where should one go to discuss the higher topics of CS/programming? - olliesaunders

I know there are a lot of obvious answers to this question but so far I don’t like any of them.<p>The biggest seems to be Stack Exchange: don’t like that because it’s totalitarian and only handles precise questions with specific answers.<p>Next is IRC which is great except you’ve got everybody in one big room all talking over each other and it keeps interrupting you because it is realtime and not offline.<p>Mailing lists seem to be full of good programmers but I don’t really like the way everything is delivered to you to be stored locally and there’s no distinction between conversations you are involved in and the rest. On a busy mailing list that is a big problem. This seems to just be an interface problem so maybe there is a good client for mailing lists out there?<p>Then there’s newsgroups. My ISP doesn’t provide newsgroup servers any more so I have to pay to access these now. And aren’t they all full of spam?<p>Lastly you have normal forums which are my favorite in terms of their interface but seem to be full of novices now. Is there a web forum for programmers who want to discuss design, methodology, programming language design, computer science, etc.? Or has that era of the Internet ended now?
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hga
There are mailing list clients that will (try to) thread conversations for
you. The Google Groups based ones display that way, you can (generally) read
them without signing up. And doesn't Gmail attempt to thread conversations?
Nothing says you have to use one mailbox for everything ... I use three, a
main Fastmail one, a backup Hotmail one that gets one type of traffic that
tended to not get through Fastmail or whatever vendor I used before them, and
another Hotmail one for a thinly disguised _nom de guerre_.

Serious newsgroups of the sort you'd be interested in should be covered by
[http://gmane.org/](http://gmane.org/) , and when I last subscribed to a
professional newsgroup service, they and the general netnews community were
good about blocking most spam. Look at this one I just picked mostly at
random:
[http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.prolog.swi](http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.prolog.swi)

Don't know about forums, but presumably there _might_ be some out there. Spend
some quality time with gmane and you might find links to some.

Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities. And of course
you'll be able to engage some of them in their comments sections.

Good luck!

~~~
olliesaunders
Thanks for the useful reply. I’m giving MailMate some serious consideration
depending on whether the smart mailboxes feature can distinguish between
threads I’m involved in and threads I am not.

> Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities

Yeah that’s quite a good point. Twitter too I guess. The trouble with blogs
and twitter is that you can’t ask a question unless you have a blog or a
twitter account that is popular.

~~~
hga
The latter for blogs would depend on patience, and effort and/or luck. I.e.
find a relevant blog, and either the blogger brings up the subject you're
interested in, so you can ask a question, or---and this is probably the most
important thing you can do, whatever forum type you do it in---become part of
that blog's community. After a certain point you'll be able to ask the author
directly and perhaps have it become the basis of a blog positing.

If you can find a community you'll be a long ways towards being a position to
get your needs satisfied.

------
kennethtilton
I mind Lisp meetups to be astonishingly good:
[http://lisp.meetup.com/](http://lisp.meetup.com/)

I imagine meetups for other languages are proportionately as good relative to
how little they fall short of Lisp as a language. :)

~~~
olliesaunders
Yeah. I want to learn Racket and my Haskell is very slowly advancing so I’m
definitely down with Lisps etc.

------
memracom
Seems to me that your question is quite precise and that you are asking for
specific answers.

So why did you post it here rather than on
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/)
??? According to you it is the perfect place to find venues for discussing CS
topics.

~~~
olliesaunders
I never said Stack Exchange websites were “perfect” for anything. I’ve just
been using it today and I hate it. Stack Exchange websites use competition to
achieve answers to questions a paradigm that is completely at odds with
collaboration and understanding necessary to actually have conversations in
which multiple opinions can coexist and learning can occur.

