Slashdot, if you don't mind a heavy dose of Internet Meme along with your Interesting Discussion.
There are also sites which focus more on specific topics... if you're into server-side Java stuff, there's http://theserverside.com, if you're into programming language research, there's http://lambda-the-ultimate.org, etc., etc.
And a lot of the more niche subreddits are actually pretty good. Stay away from /r/funny, /r/politics and the other "big" ones and check out /r/machinelearning, /r/compsci, /r/systems, /r/math, or /r/compscipapers, etc.
Slashdot is ad-plagued and not at all the techie site it once was, IMHO. You used to get the big names in the field discussing their topics on there. Now it's mostly fanboy flamewars.
It's definitely not the same site it was in 1998, that's for sure. But I've (for whatever reason) been finding myself wandering back over there more and more lately, and I've been surprised to find there's still some good discussion to be had, but - as always - you have to pick around the GNAA stuff and the "In Soviet Russia" stuff or whatever the meme of the day is.
It's really too bad, in a way, that the founders of /. didn't take a more aggressive stance towards eliminating the silly bullshit. That used to be my absolute favorite site on the 'Net, back in the day.
I switched to here from Slashdot but I still read it the way I always did: via a newsletter. I just skim over items that I already read on HN. Its also useful if I miss a few days and feel like catching up (Yeah I know about Hacker Newsletter).
The level of discussion though is much better here.
There are some other worthwhile tech communities on G+ - just visit https://plus.google.com/communities and do some searches, e.g. for your favorite programming language, platform, or framework.
I find the posts and discussion in G+ communities (in general, I am no referring any specfic community) to be in general to be terrible in quality.
For programming related communities, there are too many newbies who don't bother googling asking the same stupid question over and over. For some others, many are reposting the same thing that made it to the front page of HN or Reddit, to earn 'creds' I guess. There are a few obscure ones that post high quality content that I wouldn't discover otherwise, they usually lack lively discussions.
I contacted the founder the day it was released, 4 days after and 2 weeks after, all with well thought out emails which I spent some serious time on. Unfortunately he didn't respond to any off them, not even with a simple "fuck off."
Hi, I'd like an invite if you still have one (my email is on my account page). What is the history of https://lobste.rs ? Or maybe how would you describe the focus and character of the community?
This is extremely belated, but the NSA overload is making it impossible to find content. If you still have any invites I would appreciate it. My email is in my profile.
It looks cool but it's impossible to get an invite if you don't know someone already on it. I tried to contact an active member to ask for an invite and didn't even get a response, then I tried a second one and same thing… Since then I think that either it's that kind of community and I wouldn't fit in anyway, or maybe I was just unlucky and randomness didn't make me contact the right people.
That's an alternative, but not a particularly good one, IMO.
The Comic Book Guy is strong over there - meaning that a significant number of conversations carry that sort of condescending, unfriendly tone as the Simpson's Comic Book Guy; intending to show that the author is clearly a superior human being due to their knowledge of ARM opcodes and their interaction with GCC or whatever else the subject is.
The biggest risks I see for HN are:
* Simply getting too big. Not much to do about that.
* Noisy political articles (like, say, about China...) that attract people who like noisy political discussions.
* Outrage articles. There are a lot of horrible injustices in the world. Enough to completely drown out tech and startup news, and in the grand scheme of things, often much more important than, say, Scala vs Clojure.
I'm finding I have to check HN around 10-15 times a day, lest I miss some of the more interesting submissions.
I really enjoying a lot of the ShowHN, Startup news, and discussions around programming languages/libraries.
I primarily come to HN to learn. This seems to be the place that many clever people congregate to share opinions and ideas. I really just like to listen to what they have to say to each other.
However, it seems that a lot of the good submissions drop off the front page after just a few hours. The ones that tend to stick around seem to be more "political" than anything else. I guess it's easier to voice an opinion on an outrage-article as you don't need any real expertise.
I do wish we could just get back to talking mostly about development/tech stuff. There is so much to learn in this industry and HN is one of the few places where it all comes together.
> "The Comic Book Guy is strong over there - meaning that a significant number of conversations carry that sort of condescending, unfriendly tone as the Simpson's Comic Book Guy; intending to show that the author is clearly a superior human being"
Wait, are we talking about /r/programming or HN? ;)
Seriously though, I see a lot of that here, it's frustrating. Lots of rude, condescending ad hominem shit. Lots of Alpha Geek posturing and (to borrow pg's term) middlebrow dismissals to seem smarter.
Like any time somebody shares anything. You're guaranteed to have a few people rip apart the color choice, or layout, or whatever.
I get that HN commenters are the pinnacle of the design industry, but there are better ways to remind people of it than ripping apart something unique based on the color of the buttons on the web page.
It's not even the crappy, nitpicky criticism that bothers me, it's how it's so frequently presented with zero tact, and an overdose of aggression.
Reading some of the threads around here you'd think we're giving points for being rude, condescending, assuming everyone else is a complete idiot, and utter and complete verbal evisceration of other posters.
In short, there are an awful lot of people here that behave like complete assholes to everyone else, and when called out on it they'll yell loudly about how they're being oppressed for expressing valid opinions in vitriolic ways, and then follow that up with some variation of "well, the world isn't nice, wuss".
+1. When I started learning to develop for the web in 2001 I was part of a list with an iron-clad list mom (of some repute). I fell foul of him numerous times, but it kept the discussions good and on track. I learned a lot, the feedback I got improved my coding no end, and everyone kept a level of respect for each other.
Yes, it's not like it's absent here, but there's more of a presumption against it, and the guidelines do ask that the tone is one of talking in person.
It's interesting to compare the HN[0] and Reddit[1] comments for the same article.
The second highest voted comment on Reddit is "this is high levels of bad ass." at 276 points. I guess HN is still far ahead of other communities after all (if you're interested in serious discussion).
Nice sample size you have there. There are many extremely insightful comments on the programming subreddit, and there are also many empty, predictable comments on HN. I bet many people here can guess the top comment on particular threads based solely upon the submission title. (There's a high probability the top comment has the phrase "Am I the only one, or ...")
So is HN ahead of /r/programming? At times, definitely. However, anyone who frequents both will attest to the fact that /r/programming is much better at ignoring linkbait, while HN seems to fall for it on a daily basis.
I bet many people here can guess the top comment on particular threads based solely upon the submission title. (There's a high probability the top comment has the phrase "Am I the only one, or ...")
The comment is indeed funny but I don't come on HN to get my daily dose of humour just like I don't go out to a bar to debate the latest HTML5 specs. Yes, I do enjoy humour, drinking and debating HTML5 specs but each has its own time and place.
Most of the subreddits dedicated to a specific language or technology are nice, although it usually takes at least 1,000 subscribers to reach a critical mass, with the sweet spot between 10,000 and 100,000 subscribers. If you are doing front-end web development, for example, /r/webdev, /r/javascript, and /r/html5 are pretty good places to keep on top of interesting projects and exchange ideas.
/r/javascript is full of basic questions, small simple libraries and otherwise not really interesting content. I feel that signal/noise rate was much lower on /r/javascript than on any other subreddit I'm subscribed to. I have unsubscribed half a year ago, and I would never recommend it as an interesting read.
But for me the people on proggit are too communist. If you show the slightest bit of evidence that you're (at least somewhat) in it for the money, they hit the downvote button hard.
> Google+ - also quite good, but one needs to do some work, namely to find the right communities
could you link? I subscribed to some lang/framework/os ones, but didn't find much value there and found it's better to follow people. if you got some it would be nice.
> reddit - here, you have to subscribe to the right mix of subreddits according to your interests
Can you recommend some subreddits beside /r/programming and the subreddits mentioned in the sidebar of /r/programming)?
I have not found a generic software engineering subreddit (probably without any web development content), which is quite strange.
I built a tongue in cheek tool to keep track of communities like HN that might be relevant to other interests. However, I'm the only one that has ever used it, and I think all the things I've submitted have already been mentioned here.
The Op asked for a HN alternative. (Arxiv is great, I subscribed to all rss) But I bet you can't comment on a dissertation/tehsis/publication like you do on HN/reddit. hehe :)
It is not complete yet, but I could use some feedback. Specifically regarding a commenting system. I am thinking about rolling my own, but that comes with a lot of issues. Any ideas on how you would like it to look?
The site has the ability to curate posts, and then as you follow topics or even other users, you can start to build out a custom stream of news by sources that you like or are interested in. Both curated items and stream items are ordered based on the amount of likes that they receive. There is no down voting.
Each user also has a profile page showing where they typically "like" items and where they post them.
http://TheChaosEngine.com focuses on video game development (art, programming, design, general topics). To get full access you would need to send an work email to confirm that you are from the industry. There are also some indies, educators, and ex-video game folks (so it's not a strict order).
I wrote a Chrome extension designed to filter HN down to the more technical posts. It might help. You need to download/load it as an unpacked extension, due to the new Chrome security policies, sadly
There's also a moderately good russian http://habrahabr.ru
It's mostly translations of what you can see on hackernews, but there's a lot of original content which is oftentimes interesting. Of course, it's in russian.
https://news.layervault.com/ Designer News is quite good for design discussion. It's an invite only site though ( I don't have an account so I can't invite - sorry! )
Yeah, it's gone through changes over the past year, and it's pretty much all but dead. There used to be a decent blend of development/designer articles, but it's completely dominated by design articles now.
There are also sites which focus more on specific topics... if you're into server-side Java stuff, there's http://theserverside.com, if you're into programming language research, there's http://lambda-the-ultimate.org, etc., etc.
And a lot of the more niche subreddits are actually pretty good. Stay away from /r/funny, /r/politics and the other "big" ones and check out /r/machinelearning, /r/compsci, /r/systems, /r/math, or /r/compscipapers, etc.