
Ask HN: Hacker News style site for programming tutorials - gurisingh
I am thinking of creating a new site and was wondering who thinks a hacker news style site where people post programming tutorials instead of news would be useful?
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duiker101
I think it would be a wrong approach because with a style like HN, articles
disappear from the main page and are hard to retrieve very soon. While in the
case of a tutorial it might remain relevant for a long time and the order in
which they are submitted is not important. While with news, how fresh a news
is, is important.

~~~
yebyen
That might be a function of the incredible volume of new posts that get
submitted to HN, rather than being simply the effect of the algorithm. (If
you're not getting 30 new posts each day, many articles will undoubtedly live
on the front page for longer than a day.)

The algolia search seems very good in my opinion, I rarely simply can't find a
post I remember and want to look up again days or even months after noticing
it. Of course that is a proprietary search, isn't it?

At least it's a separate problem than the one solved by HN software / news.Arc
(and probably Telescope, too).

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random42
Hackr.io is pretty close to what you are thinking about.

~~~
lucasmorano
Just adding another similar/relevant
[https://dzone.com/links](https://dzone.com/links)

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golergka
Although this site has "news" in it's name, people post articles, tutorials
and other stuff here all the time, which is welcomed by the community. I don't
think there's a need for a separate HN clone for a specific topic.

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SanderMak
Something like [http://pineapple.io](http://pineapple.io) ?

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petercooper
It's not mine but a guy emailed me a week ago about something like this called
[http://www.tutzpro.com/](http://www.tutzpro.com/) that he launched. I think
there are a lot of similar sites though.

The major flaw with most of these sites (and especially the "curated X Y Z"
versions) are they go out of date or just don't build up a community and
wither and die with out of date information. That's the real trick.. not just
delivering the information.

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unixhero
Why not just do it. You could set up a Telescope instance, in an instant!

~~~
yebyen
Maybe, but if there's an existing effort that just needs some additional
community members, why not highlight it and join up?

Looks like hackr.io is pretty close to what he's asking for, but the first
category I picked to look into I found only four articles, with none having
more than two points from upvotes.

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brudgers
One of the features of HN is story churn. On the other hand, to be useful,
tutorials typically require extended commitment on the part of the user. Even
a very trivial tutorial is going to take ten minutes to digest _and_ require a
context switch from browsing the internet to programming. At the very least, I
will be hitting F12 in the browser.

A good tutorial might take hours, days or weeks of my time. In that time, I am
not engaged with your site.

Good luck.

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tmaly
I have wanted to do a more general learning concept for my kid with my site
[http://nextlesson.com](http://nextlesson.com) its just been a little busy. My
idea was to build curated list of videos/tutorials by category/ topic / users
age populated by social likes sort of like how ranker does it with for movies
etc.

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galfarragem
I think a site like HN will be always a good direction to follow but beware of
some 'issues':

\- HN hasn't annoying ads. (How will you monetise it? Because you must
monetise it somehow in the near future and we have already a lot of 'code
schools' where people pay a fee to access).

\- HN is his community. No community and your site will die. Many clones of HN
have already died.

Anyway good luck!

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hluska
I love the idea. I wonder if 'Teach HN:' (or similar) might be an easy way to
solve the problem within this community.

~~~
inflam52
+1 to this idea. I'm going to try and start using 'Teach HN:'.

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krapp
I think you might have difficulty getting regular content with a site that
focused only on tutorials. You might want to broaden the scope to programming
projects or programming in general.

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arikrak
One could post such tutorials to here and Reddit. I think it might be worth
offering more organization, curation and features though.

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gauravgupta
@gurisingh - I'm the founder of Hackr.io and we need plenty of help in running
this site :) How about working on it together?

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wingerlang
Not really, seems too dis-organised.

~~~
gurisingh
What if we add tags or categories to make it more organized?

~~~
golergka
I suspect that then we'll either have a system that is misused, or a team of
draconic moderators who will ban half of the posts because they don't fit any
of pre-created categories. Sorry for being pessimistic, but I've seen how
efforts to categorise community-driven content have played out too many times
in my life.

Is there a real problem that we're trying to solve here?

~~~
hluska
I'm not sure if you're talking about the original idea (ie - a curated list of
tutorials) or the parent's idea (ie - adding tags and categories), but I have
a couple ideas.

The original idea could (if a community formed) solve the PHP problem. If a
true beginner programmer decides to learn a language (I pick on PHP but it can
happen with any language), the true beginner has no context with which to
evaluate learning resources. Hence, you end up in the situation where
beginners learn from bad code.

Categories and tags worry me because it sounds chaotic, but it could go a long
ways towards solving the problem Zed Shaw articulated in Early versus
Beginning Programmers.

([http://zedshaw.com/2015/06/16/early-vs-beginning-
coders/](http://zedshaw.com/2015/06/16/early-vs-beginning-coders/))

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marknadal
I like the idea.

Or we could just post some of our tutorials here! This is an introductory one
I wrote covering the basics of HTML, jQuery, and making a ToDo app with my
database [http://gun.js.org/web/think.html](http://gun.js.org/web/think.html)
.

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noer
Not so much programming tutorials, but there's www.growthhackers.com for
marketing article sharing. It's divided into categories (Paid, SEO, Content,
etc.) though the content of the posted links usually isn't too great. I'm not
sure what potential users would be looking for? Quick tutorials for the "Gee,
I've always wanted to try that and have an hour" crowd or something more in
depth that someone would come specifically looking for. If it's the latter, a
directory supported by a voting system might be a little better. Just my $.02

