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Ask HN: Favorite websites for intelligent discussion?
44 points by lunchbox on Aug 30, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments
I like the rational, smart tone of discussion on HN. What other websites do you go to for these kinds of discussions, particularly on non-hacker topics? Like most people here I'm interested in various areas -- technology, economics, politics, psychology, and mathematical modeling of all kinds -- and enjoy discussing them with other analytically/quantitatively minded people.

Some blogs, such as Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution, and Overcoming Bias have interesting commenters. Metafilter is full of smart people, but is a bit too heavy on the arts & humanities for my taste. Apart from HN, where do you get your fix for smart discussion?



I highly recommend Unqualified Reservations ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ ) and Unenumerated ( http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ )

Both are incredibly smart blogs, with very smart commenters. Their main shtick is bringing historical perspective to contemporary problems of government and economics. The result is fascinating and eye opening. I've learned more history from these two blogs then I learned from majoring in history at Yale.


Were you majoring in Sahara dessert history or what?


Topcoder Forums [forums.topcoder.com]

Though the discussion is chiefly about algorithms and programming, it attracts brilliant people from top universities and research organizations around the world.


The discussions look interesting, but I wish the forum wasn't so hard to read. Surely they can't be having problems getting phpbb to work...


It used to be a lot better.


That looks good. I'm interested in chatting with people about crawling, data processing etc - so if anyone else on here is into the same stuff, contact me :)


slashdot. (no, I am not joking ;-)) Almost every article I am interested in contains several very informative comments plus a few really funny ones. It has it's own unique culture I like.

For non-hacker topics I don't have any I would visit regularly, so I am also looking forward for another comments.


We've found that Slashdot people are "our people" when it comes to our products and projects. A mention in the comments on reddit or digg or HN brings a handful of clicks to our site and no difference in sales...a mention in a Slashdot comment brings a deluge of traffic, and a big sales spike for the next couple of days. I guess it makes sense: We're heavily involved in Open Source software (which is far more important to Slashdotters than redditors or diggers or HN'ers), we're building systems management tools (again, Slashdotters are more likely IT guys than any of the other sites), and our projects are less shiny but still have a lot of Linux/UNIX credibility that newer Web 2.0 sites generally lack. Priorities seem to fit what we're doing better at Slashdot. I'm having trouble imagining what a front page Slashdotting would be like for us (though I'm always trying to imagine what story we need to tell to get one...and figuring out what I'd need to do to our sluggish Joomla site to make it weather the load).

And, of course, I read Slashdot regularly, and enjoy it quite a lot. I think it's the only news site my co-founder reads.


You do get knowledgeable posts on Slashdot. But there is a lot of noise and a lot of snideness. You still get posts implying Smalltalk is slow, though it's actually one of the faster pure-OO languages at this point, and one of the commercial implementations (VisualWorks) has an unbelievably good implementation of generational GC. (Seriously, I put an infinite background loop that just allocated memory into the petro trading client I was maintaining, and it was hard to notice!)

A lot of the population there doesn't have a CS degree, and hasn't bothered to give themselves an equivalent education by reading, and so find basic stuff like the "Sources of Disk Latency" to be "Interesting" and "Informative." But the site works for real signal, because eventually some expert is pissed off enough to post a page long in-depth spiel.


One thing to keep in mind is that IT professionals are different from software engineers which seem to be the majority of the technical backgrounds that HNers have.

I'm surprised there aren't more sysadmin related posts actually. (Wiring Servers? How do YOU do it?)


I've been watching Slashdot since it came out.

Over the last 2-3 years, it's went into the crapper. More political ranting from the left, more pointlessly provocative articles, and more anti-MS bashing.

It's just a cesspool over there. I blame the new editors.

I will say that it's good for jokes. Also there is a very small percentage of posts which are ranked interesting and are actually interesting.


I agree. Those guys have in-depth knowledge.


/.

Yes, you come across some ignorant and rude comments at times, yet I find that when taking into account the number of posters and posts, the number of quality comments - which is why I have been reading it almost daily for over three years now - is actually quite high . . .

. . . and the humor. I don't laugh that easy, but I find some of the comments to be incredibly humorous, and that has value to me, a good laugh can make a difference in one's day.


HN is enough intelligent discussion for me. The problem with intelligent discussion is that its very time consuming, since the people are both knowledgeable and passionate in what they are discussing.

HN is just the right mix of it, because you have intelligent people giving their view points, but they are all busy people, so there is no 5 page replies.


What is HH?


I always mess up and spell HN as HH, no idea why


I love the forums over at Ars Technica( http://episteme.arstechnica.com/ ). To me, HN and Ars are head and shoulders above the level of conversation on the other sites I visit.


I don't think that the conversation level on Ars is close to what we have here. There are a few blowhards there that really do make some threads painful to read.


I usually go to a few IRC channels to get my intelligent discussion. Freenode is great =D


Which?


#ubuntu, #jquery, #tuxhacker

lulz you can tell where my interests lie...


reason.com/blog and distributedrepublic.net have intelligent commentators, though reason tends towards the smart-allecky side. You would probably enjoy both blogs if you like the Marginal Revolutions and Overcoming Biases of the world. Oh, and Cafe Hayek.

For legal issues, there's the Volokh Conspiracy. I believe that Eugene Volokh is a libertarianish law professor somewhere.

Is the Becker/Posner blog still around? I believe that both of them have a Nobel prize in Economics.

Greg Mankiw has a good blog, with a good community.

Most of the internet sucks for intelligent discussion. That's what happens when you let any-old-body in.


2+2's Science, Math, Philosophy (SMP) forum is really good:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/forumdisplay.php?f=47

A couple recent threads: - Is my vote mathematically meaningless? - Intelligence, intelligence tests, and psychology - What is space made of? - Professors, Doctors, Lawyers, who's smarter?

Atheism discussions are a particular favorite (which should generally indicate it's the type of forum you're looking for).


http://www.perlmonks.org

http://use.perl.org


willmott is the best place I've seen for quant/finance discussion: http://www.wilmott.com/ Nb. has a (required) delayed login before you can post. Very little (if any) noise in the comments - makes freakonomics look like jerry springer.


http://nuclearphynance.com , too

lots of ridiculously scienc-ey,mathy, yet pragmatic finance dudes there. Some humor when trolls/know-it-alls arrive.


Is there demand for a discussion site that has nothing to do with blog or news posts? Comments and threads could still be monitored and ranked by users. Discussions could be split into topics and subtopics (philosophy might be interesting, because some of the arguments would concern where to make the splits).

The hard thing would be to make sure people voted up and down for the right reasons.


The Straight Dope Message Boards and plastic.com can be fun and worthwhile. Some finance and econ types like iTulip I hear.


I enjoy http://ask.metafilter.com more than the main Metafilter site.


http://freedomainradio.com/board/


i'll go ahead and put the SA forums (forums.somethingawful.com) out there. A ton of IT pros, most of the subforums are not filled with the cliché'd "SA goon" crap, and it costs $5 per user account, keeping many many morons out.

And yes, I have stairs in my house.


http://www.plastic.com : an old fave


Believe it or not, sensibleerection.com has some of the best intelligent and witty discussion I've found on the web. Sure there's the occasional pornography post, but most all of the people there offer intelligent debate.


metafilter.com is full of esoteric posts and people from all sorts of different backgrounds post on it with surprising amounts of wit and candor.


overcomingbias.com


iTulip forums, about economics:

http://www.itulip.com


Newsvine.com


usenet


www.tickerforum.org


reddit

ducks


For me, the reddit main page sucks, but I do find interesting stuff on programming.reddit.com


in 2006.




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