"laarc is a tech mashup of Hacker News and Reddit by two long time fans of both forums.
The initial impetus behind the site is a desire to try to recapture the early spirit of Hacker News. HN currently has about 5 million visitors a month. It's different than it was back in the day when it was a much smaller group of people.
We're aiming for a cross between Pinboard and HN: a central place for all your bookmarks, with the ability to make private submissions. (pg mentioned that he used HN for all of YC's internal software in the early days; it's handy to have a place to keep all of your notes!)"
It's going to fundamentally be a different group of people and that will make it different.
Some technical differences:
It uses tags to try to categorize stuff somewhat. Unlike on HN, your threads page also has links to your posts, a feature I requested probably at a point where it was basically me and the guy coding it up kicking around ideas for a forum.
It's grown substantially in a short period of time, but it's still very new and if you want to shape a forum into a place with the kinds of discussion that interests you, it's an opportunity to do that.
2. Submissions go straight to the front page. This won't last, but everyone has shown restraint and good taste so far. If something catches your interest and teaches us about the world, it's probably a good fit for the site; go ahead and submit it.
3. You can tag stories as whatever you want. Some of my favorites are:
4. We have an active feature requests thread, and it's not uncommon for features to be implemented within a few hours after being requested: https://bit.ly/2THTgrb
5. Easter eggs!
- We just launched /l/place, a clone of reddit's old r/place. It's written in Arc: https://bit.ly/2UNwwpP
(Every pixel is a form with a submit button. Arc is awesome.)
- Terry Davis used to post to HN with "God says... {a bunch of random words}." One of his last comments revealed the script he used to generate those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15609972
#!/bin/bash
#This prints random words from the Linux dictionary.
echo "$(shuf -n 32 /usr/share/dict/words --random-source=/dev/urandom | tr '\n' ' ')"
I listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY33uoBSw3w a lot. I wish I'd started the site sooner, so that Terry would've had a place to chat with people. Even youtube nuked his account.
The app is pretty great for reading HN as well, so we're hoping to maybe offer both a site reader and an HN reader.
We have an Android plan too.
7. Much of the community hangs out in our Discord server: https://bit.ly/2URZcOx (There are some top-shelf programming memes in the #silliness channel. Feel free to append to it.)
8. Private submissions. If you submit to /l/private, no one can see the submission except you. I've been using the site as a personal bookmarking service, and I find myself using it more often than Pinboard nowadays. https://bit.ly/2WURqW0
(There's still the question of how to import 4,000 bookmarks from pinboard. not sure yet. https://bit.ly/2BulZsu)
3. A vibrant community with quality conversation. You might like burntsushi's comment about his two-way string matching studies: https://bit.ly/2TE6VPT
4. You can show your projects and ask the community whatever you want. (The only threshold for a Show submission is that you have to have put significant work into whatever you're showing. That said, you don't need to have something for people to play with. It can be an idea you've been working on, an unfinished side project, or a full product launch.)
"laarc is a tech mashup of Hacker News and Reddit by two long time fans of both forums.
The initial impetus behind the site is a desire to try to recapture the early spirit of Hacker News. HN currently has about 5 million visitors a month. It's different than it was back in the day when it was a much smaller group of people.
We're aiming for a cross between Pinboard and HN: a central place for all your bookmarks, with the ability to make private submissions. (pg mentioned that he used HN for all of YC's internal software in the early days; it's handy to have a place to keep all of your notes!)"