Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?
What unique or high-quality content only exists outside the English-speaking web? Is there a Chinese equivalent to Hacker News? A Hindi StackOverflow? I would love to broaden my horizons :)
291 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 95.6 ms ] threadEksi Sozluk(Sour Times) is a community driven wikipedia without the moderation. Most tech-savvy Turkish people I know visit it atleast once per day.
It's like eBay, but for wholesalers who are ~selling "ghost shift" parts~ offloading excess inventory to small-time consumers.
There are brokers for international customers; they communicate with the sellers and consolidate orders into a single parcel for ~10-15% commission.
But it's harder to browse these days; less is available without an account which you need to provide a mobile number for, and you have to jump through hoops to avoid getting only "international" listings.
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/
also its parent site PC watch
https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/
Small selection of things that I found interesting:
1. Turn your old Dreamcast VMU into a modern game console: Would never have thought of it but in hindsight its the perfect device to mod given its form factor! https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/news/1306197....
2. Combine a Raspberry pi with a Famicom cartridge to provide the Famicom the ability to run DOOM. Given all the other Famicom related releases listed there, its amazing to see the Famicon still alive and kicking. Wonder how the N64 scene is like over there. https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/news/1297530....
3. IPS Screen mod for Wonderswan (granted we have seen lots of IPS mods so this one for Wonderswan makes sense given its Japan)
The story about Akihabara stores being vacant seems sad though. Even they cannot escape COVID/the future of shopping being online it seems.
They also posts new PC parts rumors relatively early.
It’s a massive forum with an area for almost any topic.
Taringa used to be the Reddit in Spanish (well, at least for South America), with really interesting content. Microsiervos.com was probably the best tech/curiosities blog in Spanish, and a few days ago I visited and it is still active (from 2006 I think).
I could try to contribute too: My cache is full of eels, how do I set the death timer for the evictings of my tenants?
Nobody bothers to use them.
Same for Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu
Video works because Hinglish is how tech-talk in (many, not all) companies works.
But you’d never see a technical doc in any of the these companies in Hindi, because you can’t even translate simple terms like Server or package-management. Even if you find acceptable translations, they aren’t immediately obvious, because nobody has heard them before.
In a Python video, you might hear: “मेरा code requests library से Google server को HTTP request भेजता हैं” (My code uses the requests library to send HTTP requests to Google”.
It works on video, but it doesn’t on text because nobody is used to reading this in Hindi in the first place.
When I was young I used to play some MSX games in Japanese, the language doesn't really matter for a lot of these 1980s games, and you would frequently see English words and terms written in Latin characters used all over the place.
Why won't this work for Hindi? Are people not familiar with these characters? Or is there just no tradition of doing so?
It's just that another phenomenon is the alphabeticising of Hindi (as in actually Hindi words) like 'namaste aap kaise hain? Mera naam Ollie hoon' (IAST āp, nām, olī, and hūñ) is a contrived sentence but the sort of thing someone might text if they didn't have the keyboard for नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा नाम ओली हूँ or whatever reason.
It happens in casual text - WhatsApp forwards, SMS messages. But for official writing - you pick a language and stick to it, as much as possible. This made more than a few notices impossibly hard to read when I was in college, because the Hindi felt archaic, even if it wasn't.
Other countries had a rich culture of research and scientific literature published in native languages. India never got that to a national scale, because India has hundreds of languages[0] so any efforts were local. A paper published in Tamil would be unreadable by folks a hundred miles away, so English became the technical lingua-franca of the nation (The colonial imposition didn't help either).
When a developer searches stack-overflow for an answer, english works better because it serves all developers in India.
[0]: India scores 0.914 on the Linguistic diversity Index, which ranges from 0 (everyone has the same mother tongue) to 1 (no two people have the same mother tongue)
In Dutch, I would just say "de server is kapot" ("the server is broken"). There is no attempt to translate words like "server" to Dutch. You see the same in Indonesian (standard Indonesian, Bahasa, there are many Indonesian languages) where these kind of words are just copied ad-verbatim from either English or (for older words) Dutch. For many technical terms in the IT world there are no "Dutch words": just the English ones. The exceptions seem to be the ones where there are Dutch words that are close enough to the English ones ("function" → "functie", "variables" → "variabelen"). Both languages having similar Germanic roots with Latin/Greek influences helps I suppose.
And in those cases all the languages use the same Latin script, so it's easier to include loanwords and technical terms.
So it seems to me, unless I'm misunderstanding something, that it's at least partly an issue of script translations? Adopting the example someone else posted, why shouldn't "नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा server ओली हूँ" be considered acceptable Hindi?
We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs :)
> We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs :)
This depends on the regional accent; the south (and Belgium) has a "soft G", whereas the north (including Amsterdam, for example) has a "hard G".
This is a nice video on the topic with some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNOebbyUgI4
The "R" is also less hard in southern Dutch. Basically, it sounds a bit more like French rather than Klingon :-)
It's quite annoying as a learner, since it can make it difficult to map back to devnagārī (resp. devnagari) to look up a new word, for example. (It's almost entirely true to say that devnagārī script is phonetic, so if you write कुछ and I don't know the word, I know how to pronounce it without knowing what it means, and can ask someone or look it up, which is a great feature that English of course doesn't have at all, and while Hindi phonetic approximation in the alphabet might get closer, it's still non-standard and different typers will spell words differently.)
• https://enwp.org/My_Hovercraft_Is_Full_Of_Eels
• https://enwp.org/I_Can_Eat_Glass
• https://enwp.org/Omniglot
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g
It's basically just a large catalog of products, filled by third-parties a-la Amazon now, only it didn't sell anything itself (until recently). Instead, it had detailed characteristics for a lot of products, with corresponding filters in the catalog; and good user reviews. Since Yandex is good at dealing with unstructured text, even poor data exports by vendors end up organized decently on the service. Since Yandex had millions of users on its other services, they all could leave reviews without much hassle. And since Yandex is primarily a search engine, it knows when a bogus review is spammed across the web.
Alas, it's only available in Russian since it works with Russian shops. Every time I need to look for a product on the English web, I lament that there's no service that is quite that solid. Amazon has filters, but search results usually look like simply a bit better Aliexpress. In regard to Google Product Search I don't even know anything particular—I tried to use it a couple times, and my general impression is that it... exists. Not much else.
It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same two products with different fake brand names. The sorting options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying reviews.
It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.
Amazon attempts to do some product categorization but it doesn't work at all - even when they have the category you want to filter on the results are usually wrong, and the sort options are bad and marred by their ads and recommendations.
What I like most about Prisjakt is that they don't try to second guess what I want given a basic search phrase. Instead, Prisjakt gives me the categories to drill down into tables. Sortable and filterable tables with product name, price, rating, and category-specific columns (like storage size and $/GB for hard drives). The filters run DEEP. If you're looking for a HDR display, you can be happy with a "HDR" filter but also opt into DisplayHDR 1000 certified displays with 120+ Hz. For the entire Sweden because every decent Swedish retail chain and store is on this website, and they have everything between solid state drives and shoes in their database. If you look for watches you have filters and columns for e.g. automatic, solar powered watches, etc.
Amazon is very, very different. They're also a front to various stores but try to make it appear like THEY are the store when they are really not. Prisjakt instead just has this razor sharp focus on making you in charge of the data and forming decisions based on that, and then when the decision is made, presents you a list of the stores with that product and their respective prices. You are in control and maybe you prefer a certain one because you're a long time user there and like them.
So Amazon becomes a "fake store front" (like Sweden's CDON) and Prisjakt is more like just a database. One optimized for usability and presentation.
That is a wonderful feature, not a bug. I wish all websites would go back to 2010 era.
The usability alone of Prisjakt is incredible. It's not in-your-face like the shit that's being invented in 2020s.
Why?
although I can't seem to find the followup post that actually discusses how the Yandex search quality decreased following the publication of the original article
And then there was the genomics or DNA database or something that a couple of people were running out of their garage (well, a bit more than that) but then had to shut down after law enforcement discovered it, found it incredibly useful, and everything rapidly went sideways as "things aren't supposed to work that way"... but I'm having the hardest time finding the link for this one sadly ._.
EDIT (just within the 1hr window :): I think the second one was GEDmatch. A quick search of https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gedmatch didn't relocate what I remember reading, but I think this was it.
forum.hardware.fr is a big one (it's not just about computer hardware, there's a decent section about news/world events, etc.)
What I assume is the equivalent, forum.hardware.no, used to be huge in Norway in the 00s too, but then the community more or less got swallowed by Reddit. Did the French one survive?
The real interesting thing is that there are a lot of threads for very specialized topics (e.g. bikes, mattress, pizza oven or torch lights). Before buying something I usually check if a thread exists and read it / ask questions. You however end up having to revise upwards your budget to buy the stuff they recommend.
[0]: https://www.laquadrature.net/
Around 2005 there was a very cute php generalist forum called kopikol.net but I still lament that they had to close around 2008
is a 20 years old French audio/music gear website featuring an exhaustive product database, reviews, newsletters, forum, social network, and marketplace.
Most musicians / producers in the country will be aware of it, including probably some famous ones.
I don't know of an equivalent in the Anglosphere (gearslutz.com would be the closest thing in terms of forum/community, but lacks most of the other features).
Audiofanzine does have some English content, but I don't think that ever really caught on.
Often when I am really interested in something I read the article and four different languages, because most often each language offers different aspects and images.
also it's a great way to learn languages.
is ebay but cooler and from Latino America.
its like a cool mixture of stack overflow + reddit + twitter ... all in japanese
Zenn has been trying to sell paid article for profit. That's not so cool for tech perspective but it's looks good for me if they succeeded. Zenn was operated by single person but it has been acquired by IT(AWS) service company Classmethod very recently. Maybe they also work for the company's advertisement.
Social networks largely unknown outside of Russia? We have'em (vk.com, ok.ru). Reddit equivalent? See pikabu.ru. IMDB? See kinopoisk.ru.
There's a Russian browser (Yandex.Browser), Russian map service (Yandex.maps), tons of Russian e-mail, hosting and cloud services, Russian Spotify (Yandex.Music), Russian Netflix (several of them, actually), Russian Uber (Yandex.Taxi, which actually owns Russian Uber).
You'll see lots of Yandex services here, it's sort of Russian Google (except it predates Google by a year or so). Yandex's primary business is search and advertising, but just like Google, they diversify a lot. And even in primary area, they sometimes manage to beat Google. Yandex's reverse image search (when you upload the image to search for similar ones) is FAR superior to Google's.
And there's a lot of unique Russian content on global sites like Facebook, Livejournal (owned by a Russian company nowadays) or Wikipedia.
The Russian Internet seems to be an overall great place to find information on old devices, old software, and the like. http://sht-rajvo.narod.ru/index.htm is a retro-looking site about retrocomputing, it has many articles from computer magazines circa 1990. Also worth noting that due to Russia's traditionally "relaxed view on copyright" it's not hard to stumble upon a site that has direct download links to e.g. versions of MS-DOS or Windows 3.1.
dic.academic.ru allows you to search through several dozens encyclopedias. And bigenc.ru adds onother one (the largest and the most recent).
fantlab.ru is the best site dedicated to sci fi/fantasy literature (it is IMO 10 times better than goodreads or librarything). There are also a lot of site dedicated to literature like proza.ru lib.ru litres.ru feb-web.ru www.obshelit.su etc.
Besides habr, forum.ru-board.com ixbt.com cyberforum.ru overclockers.ru 3dnews.ru are very popular sites dedicated to hardware/software/coding.
There are a lot of sited about video games like old-games.ru goha.ru stopgame.ru riotpixels.com as well as a streaming platforms like goodgame.ru
rutube.ru exists for many years now but it's crap.
There are several sites dedicated to popular science like elementy.ru arhe.msk.ru gramota.ru histrf.ru
www.intoclassics.net and www.classicalmusicnews.ru are popular for those interested in classical music. www.darkside.ru and rock.ru for rock music.
forum.awd.ru and otzyv.ru are popular travel sites.
There several general purpose forums like forum.rcmir.com www.e1.ru/talk/forum/ In general, classic forums are still very much alive in runet (hell, even LJ is still alive) and there are a lot of niche forums you could visit.
There are more than 100 news sites, but the quality is quite average (like everywhere else). meduza.io ria.ru rbc.ru tass.ru inosmi.ru for example. sports.ru and championat.ru for sport-related news.
ozon.ru is now a russian version of amazon.
And obviously there are a lot of pirate sites from rutracker to flibusta to libgen.
But I do love the old usenet-like interface with thread trees. I wish more message boards still used a similar interface (although it is a pain to use on mobile).
[1] : https://www.youtube.com/user/deutschewelle
[2] : their other channels are listed at the bottom of [1].
https://youtube.com/c/dwnews
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/user/Zefar91
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/abglazov
Best resource for Korean language when approached from the Anglosphere.
Both very useful to understand what people really think in Spain about all kinds of topics.
Baidu Wangpan (百度网盘): file-sync service like Dropbox, but gives you 2TB (terrabytes!) of free storage
Tengxun Ketang (腾讯课堂): similar to edX/coursera, they have a lot of free courses on programming, machine learning, and technical topics
Wanmen Daxue (万门大学): similar to edX/coursera, they have a lot of free foreign language classes and lectures on economics/social sciences
HKGolden (香港高登): Hong Kong forum on tech and software, similar to reddit
Huxiu (虎嗅): tech news site
Toutiao Xinwen (头条新闻): news aggregator site, has categories and comments
Zhihu (知乎): QA platform, similar to Quora
Zhihu Zhuanlan (知乎专栏): blogging platform, similar to Medium
Ximalaya FM (喜马拉雅 FM): podcasts app
Duokan (多看): ebooks app similar to Kindle
Douyin (抖音): Chinese version of Tiktok
iQiyi (爱奇艺): video site with tons of movies and dramas
JD (京东): amazon-like marketplace with same-day delivery
Taobao (淘宝): ebay-like peer-to-peer marketplace
Weibo (新浪微博): microblogging site like Twitter
Zhifubao (支付宝): peer-to-peer payments app that works by scanning QR codes, very widely accepted in China
Wechat (微信): messaging app that also has tons of micro-apps and payment functionality built in
I'm assuming you're probably more interested in the new digital RMB wallet technology which supposedly works even if your phone doesn't have internet access, but I'm not familiar with how that is implemented (I'm guessing it uses blockchain and broadcasts the transactions later when you connect to the internet). There's some info about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Digital_Renminbi
A few things to add about some of the items:
- Baidu Wangpan's sharing model is more like the file locker sites of the early 00s: when you share a file or folder, the recipient gets a 'copy'. It's not like Dropbox where you collaborate and sync changes with each other.
- Baidu wangpan can download torrents server-side.
- Toutiao is by Bytedance, which readers here will know for their popular Tiktok product.
- Readers here may know Tengxun by its international name Tencent
- Zhifubao's English name is Alipay.
- Taobao is more than a peer-to-peer marketplace. I'd guess that over 50% of e-commerce goods purchases in China (by volume, not value) are via Taobao/Tmall. There are many 'mom and pop' stores, but also many with 10s of employees.
- Tingting FM is another good one for audio content. e.g. it has Peppa Pig episodes in Mandarin, and each episode has some commentary at the end explaining the key lessons from the story. (You can watch Peppa Pig in Mandarin on YouTube for free, but there's no commentary at the end.)
Bilibili Manhua (哔哩哔哩漫画): webcomic site adjacent to the Bilibili video platform https://manga.bilibili.com/
Qidian (起点): webnovels https://qidian.com/
Zhanse Nileyuan (战色逆乐园): discussion forum attached to another webnovel site with female-skewing readership, maybe slightly similar to r/twoXchromosomes https://bbs.jjwxc.net/board.php?board=20&page=1
SegmentFault: StackOverflow-like https://segmentfault.com/questions
V2EX: the closest thing to HN, except more like a traditional forum https://v2ex.com/
Tiktok is literally chinese??
It is not uncommon that Chinese firms have separate, parallel versions of their applications within / outside China.
So it is accurate to say that Douyin is a Chinese (meaning, available in China; not meaning made by a Chinese company) version of Tiktok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#E...