Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

[Xcelerate]

Is there a website out there that's more technical than HN, has less negativity, and leaves out the "social" aspects of technology?

What I'm looking for is a site where I can discuss things like:

-Programming language design (functional languages, different type systems, point-free style, etc...)

-Interesting mathematics (deeper understanding of statistics, implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem)

-Interesting science (advances in quantum mechanics, optical gyroscopes, etc.)

-Other technical oddities (Turing complete systems, global illumination on GPUs, supercomputing)

-News on start-ups that solve technical rather than social problems (DE Shaw instead of Socialcam)

I'd like to avoid:

-Tech products

-Heated arguments that make me feel bad after reading the comments instead of enlightened

[thaumaturgy]

I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're looking for.

I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN habit while still feeding me stuff I might be interested in. Because I built it, I can make it do anything I want. I've started to turn it into a slightly broader search engine so that I can find the things that I'm looking for; I got sick of seeing search engines brag about the hundreds-of-thousands or millions of search results they were returning when I was trying to find something (really, what's the point of that?), so I'm building my own. I got sick of feeding some psychological trigger in my brain that made me nervously check the HN front page numerous times throughout the day, and I'd find myself clicking on items that had lots of comments and activity even if the subject was something I wasn't interested in. I guess I was thinking, "wow, lots of people over there, I should go check that out."

What did it for me was a bit of foggy nostalgia one day. I was thinking about "the good ol' days", how I -- we, all of us if we were lucky enough to be born at the right time in the right environment -- used to modify the crap of out of programs, change their interface, tweak their colors, cheat at games even when we were the only ones playing. We used to take things we didn't like and turn them into things we did like.

But nobody, or very few people, do that for the web, even though there are piles and piles of tools that make it easy and doable.

So I did it.

And it is glorious.

It's some of the most fun I've had at programming in years. Now when I'm feeling like a wet cat, I'll just go tweak my little reader-search-engine-toy, and then I feel better. Now I never feel like I'm missing out on something on HN, because my little toy is keeping an eye on it for me and saving the stuff I might care about it.

And if you're looking for a new community ... well, build that too! It's clear from numerous threads on HN and other places that people are ready for something new. Make what you want, share it if you feel like, if enough other people like it maybe they'll join in and you'll have your community.

[sgdesign]

If anybody wants an easy way to set up their own HN, may I suggest taking a look at Telescope?

http://telesc.pe/

It's a real-time, open source HN clone built on Meteor, with features like invite-only mode, notifications, and a lot more stuff.

And since it's open source, if something is missing you can always code it yourself and contribute it back to the project.

[jlgreco]

I've done similar.

Bayesian filtering seems to work great on HN headlines. I trained mine with about two years of data scrapped from http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ (apologies to whoever runs that), then just basically wrapped that with some code that grabs hacker news's main page and displays the filtered headlines to me. It nails politics and startup crap with stunning accuracy.

The only problem is that now I find myself using both that system and the website itself.

[VMG]

And if you build the next HN, please add an API

[anthonyb]

Sounds interesting, can you give us more details on how it works? I had a quick look at your homepage, but couldn't see any links for it, or a github profile.

[krapp]

I've thought about designing a community with script hacking in mind (a simple initial layout with an api) and then letting users be able to script it themselves through their accounts. If it could even be done safely and sanely, everyone could have the features they wanted by writing their own.

In lieu of that of course there's always greasemonkey.

[zgembo]

http://www.pivoted.co/

[dakrisht]

Sounds interesting. Would love to check it out.

[heed]

Would you be willing to share this tool?

[kungfuton]

Yes, I agree, build it.

However, please do not make it like HN or you will fail.

Be different. Brand it. Have a personality.

[ChuckMcM]

A fairly transparent bit of rhetoric there :-)

In answer to your non-question question, yes that site exists, there are literally hundreds of them. They get a few users, then they don't get new news, they get a few 'bad' things (people get scolded for being negative, or chastised for being 'off topic' or 'social') and then no one wants to post because they can't really tell what is "acceptable" and what isn't. People stop going there. It fades into obscurity.

My suggestion is that what your looking for isn't a web site its friends. Get together once a week and hang out. You can talk about programming languages, mathematics, science and other oddities. Invite people who stick to the program, shun people who keep wanting to talk about tech products.

[dreamdu5t]

This is the real answer.

[georgeorwell]

I'd possibly like the same thing, but I don't have much in the way of hope that it will materialize. I see you're a Chem Eng grad student. I'd say for programming language design, read the computer science papers from top conferences that interest you, starting with PLDI:

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2254064 (click on Table of Contents)

If you want to discuss them, send email to the authors, try and find some grad students or professors in your CS department, or find a way to attend some CS conferences.

I don't think you'll find deep research-quality conversation in a news aggregator, mostly because the people who are interested in having and also able to have research-quality conversations are for the most part busy doing research, and also because coming up with a reasonable opinion about something complicated that you're not an expert in takes a lot of work.

There are specific blogs, mailing lists, and (maybe defunct) newsgroups where you can discuss more focused topics, e.g. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

[riffraff]

I can't believe noone mentioned LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

Also, try Prismatic maybe.

[ajdecon]

I think Hacker News is as close to a "non-social" discussion forum as you're going to find, while maintaining high engagement.

The cliché is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and I think one of the primary ways we maintain the high engagement in a discussion thread is by becoming interested in the other participants, not just the topic. That's usually a good thing, because it motivates us to respond and care about the discussion, but it also means that people will go off-topic, get into heated arguments, or bring up memes and social topics.

If it were possible to strictly enforce rules against off-topic or non-technical discussions, I suspect engagement would drop very quickly. Learning is a strong motivator, but I doubt it provides the same semi-addictive feedback loop that the social aspects of a site do.

(I don't have any evidence beyond my own gut feelings based on web forums over the years --- happy to be proved wrong! A high-engagement non-social discussion forum would be an interesting place.)

[JonnieCache]

I think he means social in the buzzword sense.

[jacquesc]

http://lobste.rs seems like exactly what you want. It's a good community, give it a try

[zalew]

reminds me of http://hackful.eu - good links, good idea, good intentions, but almost no engagement, and the only link with more than 3 comments is a meta-discussion.

[riffraff]

on the topic, I dare ask for an invite to lobste.rs if someone has one lying around. I promise I won't be an ass.

(Cause a week ago I reached the threshold of wanting to leave a comment enough times)

[aw3c2]

That site has even less information about itself than HN. Who runs it? What are the rights/licences on content? What is it about?

[apas]

Speaking of Lobste.rs, has anyone an invitation? That'd be amazing.

[olalonde]

http://lesswrong.com and http://forrst.com come to mind. There are also a few subreddits that might interest you: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci http://www.reddit.com/r/types

[aerique]

No mention of Usenet :-(. It scores on many of the points you mentioned (Reddit subreddits come close.)

I'm sad this part of the net has been fading into obscurity the last ten years especially since its alternatives have proven to be inadequate. Its greatest power was it being decentralised and thus couldn't be policed by anyone, the variety and custom readers.

Its greatest weak point was perhaps the trolls. Maybe others can supply more weaknesses?

Really, what does Hackernews as a website have over f.e. a newsgroup alt.news.hackers?

[DanBC]

I agree that Usenet was fantastic.

> what does Hackernews as a website have over f.e. a newsgroup alt.news.hackers?

Communal voting?

> Its greatest weak point was perhaps the trolls. Maybe others can supply more weaknesses?

A rigid definition of what counts as spam (Breidbart index)?

People using all kinds of domains in the From: header. That's a problem because bots scrape the from header for sending spam, and there's nothing to stop people using valid domains that don't belong to them.

[stared]

No up/down voting (so when a discussion get's longer you can track only the most valuable posts).

<nostalgia>But otherwise... I miss Usenet so much. I was raised by Usenet, it shaped my life philosophy, I found my best friend there, not to mention knowledge I got.</nostalgia>

So, maybe time to write a "Usenet 2.0", with: - up/downvotes, - markdown, - tags?

[aw3c2]

Voting, a threaded display that does not break, no insane quoting, some markup, karma

[zalew]

> has less negativity

what do you mean by that?

ironically I'll probably sound negative, but are you looking for a place which enforces PC to an ubearable point where the only accepted state is, you know, people standing in a circle smiling while performing a certain activity?

[alanctgardner2]

HN is definitely not the most supportive place on the internet. I've gotten some really good feedback from people who know what they're talking about, and read some discussion which was more interesting than the linked article. But then, I've also seen some people with a lot of karma who just bicker about insignificant things. Also, the fact that the community rules and best practices are ridiculously opaque, and every new person is initially viewed with hatred/mistrust for being 'from Reddit' or 'from /.' makes the place seem a bit hostile.

[michaelt]

If you take a look at the thread "Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?" [1] I saw that title and thought great, a discussion of the economics and technical side of building out a FTTH network. I was wondering how feasible it would be to start something like Google Fibre in my city.

I was disappointed. There's about three reasonable quality posts, and even they are short on technical and financial details. All the other top-level posts are basically noise.

I don't think HN needs "enforced PC" but I do think it would be improved if instead of just posting "it won't work" people posted "it will be difficult because of a, b and c which you need for x, y and z and which will cost i, j and k"

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893776

[anonymfus]

Does any RSS/Atom client exist which can subtract feeds? So you can for example add HackerNews feed and subtract feeds from /r/politics and /r/worldpolitics so only link mentioned on HackerNews and not mentioned on /r/politics or /r/worldpolitics would pass?

[jhund]

We have designed and built intigi.com for this exact purpose: a secret weapon for hackers to consume news.

This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant results.

You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for precision or for recall...

[6ren]

fp: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

[manish_gill]

I usually follow a big mix of subreddits I'm interested in. This is one of my bookmarks: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webde...

[DanBC]

One suggesting is to visit new and upvote good stories; flag unsuitable stories; and submit excellent articles.

What you're looking for can be found in HN, and is appreciated by many people, but does perhaps need a bit of support and encouragement.

[tuturu]

https://lobste.rs/ maybe.

[hsmyers]

Wouldn't mind an invite myself. While I was wandering the site I thought I had a break through idea only to discover that such a thing already existed. What I wanted was the pushd (dos command---dating myself) Then I realized that if I only would right click on a link and open it in a new window, then I have exactly what I want :)

[ComputerGuru]

Can I get an invite, please? Email in profile.

EDIT: Got it. Thanks. (So no one double-sends)

[antidoh]

One thing is they show scores on comments, as HN used to do. I really miss that.

[pallinder]

Check out lamernews http://lamernews.com/

[dokem]

If you ever find this site, let me know. HN is this closest site to what you're looking for that I can think of. We could possibly improve on this by adding subsections, but then that would just turn into reddit.

[rpm4321]

Maybe not subsections, but allow users to create and up-vote tags on stories, or maybe have a simple dropdown on story submission with a dozen or so tags the submitter could apply. That way you could still narrow your focus when you don't want to miss certain content (ex. #Python, #AI, #Business, etc. at news.ycombinator.com/tagged/Python, etc.), but you wouldn't disrupt the current community feel of HN too much.

[p_sherman]

You see, about a year and a half ago this was what HN was actually like.

[polshaw]

Very sad to see all the 'HN competitors' (lobsters, hackful, lamernews) are all essentially dead (at least extremely dormant).

To me, all they needed were a small handful of dedicated posters/commenters (and to be open, i'm looking at you lobste.rs) to start to catch on; i'm very much reminded of the story of the reddit founders sockpuppeting to make the site not look like a ghost town; this kind of 'forced' activity doesn't seem to be necessary for long until the site would take on it's own life.

[polyfractal]

Lobsters isn't dead, just not as noisy. I check it once a day and usually walk away with one interesting tech article. Discussions are less lively, but that's because every site follows the 90:10 law (90% lurk, 10% comment)

[ampersandy]

I totally agree. It would even be easy to find old, well-received HN submissions that have likely been forgotten and to queue them up for resubmission to your new service.

[patdennis]

A well set up Google Reader account can do wonders... but it takes a while to get to that point.

[jhund]

Yes, that's a good start. And if you want to take it a step further, you could use a tool like intigi.com (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders) which allows you to not only aggregate feeds, but also run Lucene queries on them to filter out the noise.

[antidoh]

Disrupt Hacker News! Come help change the way that we Hacker News Hacker News! :)

I'm not near as focused as you are, but I understand your discontent. I have two suggestions.

One, the easy thing (easy as in less work and commitment), which a few others have suggested. Help make HN better, make it what you want. It's probably already closest to what you want, among the alternatives.

Read /newest and upvote good content and good comments. I personally rarely downvote bad comments, I just avert my eyes. I do flag spam, it's like picking up litter. But downvoting is an option, and part of the deal. Just don't "be a downvoter," it will probably make you feel worse, and make reading HN like a burden. Don't carry a cross, just watch the parade. (Worst metaphor you'll read today.)

Write good comments. Respond seriously and helpfully to the occasional lame or hostile comment. Be the change you want to see, and all that.

But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to like.

Two ... this will take some work and time. You can do it in parallel with HN, or wherever you go from HN. Curate your own discussion group. Look around in your current social, academic and work circle, and talk to a small handful (less than five-ish, more than one), who you think might be interested in discussing what you're interested in. Establish some broad but focused discussion topics.

Set up a mechanism for you all to discuss privately. If you're all local, beer is a great mechanism. Otherwise the easiest and simplest thing would be email, and you should probably stop at that; don't focus on the tools (fun though they are, especially the beer), start discussing as quickly as possible; like, this afternoon. Really, this afternoon. If you like, one of you can maintain a forwarding address, so you don't have to each maintain lists. But you don't need that this afternoon, let that emerge naturally. I've been a member of exactly such a list for ... 15 years? Dayam.

Every once in awhile, invite a new individual in. Do it slowly and deliberately. Don't obsess or agonize over whether someone is right for the group; if you thought of them, they probably are. If they aren't, they'll stop participating. New people will change the dynamics and focus, and that's a good thing. Just do it slowly, not as a focus.

Be generous and engaging with your fellow list members. Accept heat, and let it dissipate quickly. The fewer rules you have, the less they'll be broken.

Over the years, your group might grow to five, or ten, or a hundred, it's up to you.

As you communicate with people you know personally (or online personally), there's a danger that the group might take on some social aspects. You may even become friends with some or all of them. That's a risk that you'll have to take. It's not so bad. :)

[scott_s]

But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to like.

I think this advice is crucial. I try to follow it.