HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are the most reliable tech sites in east and south Asia?

89 points by greggsy ↗ HN
Almost all of my tech news comes via HN, SubStack, Twitter and Reddit, but they only occasionally cite blogs or reports from China, Japan, South Korea or India - countries where a significant proportion of technology is built, designed, or supported from.

While there is a lot of tech news related to what is going on in those countries (often for the wrong reasons), it’s hard to gage what the tech ecosystem is up to without knowing where to look.

Language barriers aside (which are becoming less of an issue anyway), where would one go for reliable and direct news around semiconductor developments in Taiwan, or the weird products that emerge out of Shenzhen through AliExpress?

Is there an HN of India? Or Indonesia?

35 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 84.5 ms ] thread
firstbabylonian
https://restofworld.org is a good place to start.
TheRealHB
Interesting news aggregator (looks like), nice one!
donohoe
Not a news aggregator - all original reporting
umeshunni
I found the site too 'Western'. It feels like reading a NYT or BBC article about what's going on in Asia rather than reading a local paper.
donohoe
Fair, but most (if not all) of the reporters are in (and often from) the countries or regions they report in.
KRAKRISMOTT
Eric Schmidt's daughter's pet project is hardly an unbiased source.
rouslyrunn
https://fossbytes.com/ is India's equivalent of The Verge
pdevr
Home page is full of thin affiliate pages. I clicked the "News" link at top, and it seems to be a page with links to affiliate pages of movies.
SenHeng
Japanese tech news site sort of like Gizmodo from the 90s.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/

vasili111
How popular is this website in Japan?
notjulianjaynes
There's a disclaimer about the stories being machine translated, but I'd still like to know how "Elon Musk" became "Earon Mask."[1]

[1] https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20230529-elon-musk-cut-twit...

jezzamon
Japanese is limited in what phonetic sounds can be written, so I'm guessing that's just a direct translation of what his name becomes in Japanese
notjulianjaynes
Ah, yes that makes sense. I wasn't considering that the translation would have been from a completely different alphabet.
fomine3
Gigazine (jp) is now too much article translated from HN headline. It seems to re-translate to English. Not much worth to read. Its quality isn't good.
arsdragonfly
DigiTimes Asia has some decent semiconductor industry coverage.
fredgrott
I have some Asian and Asiatic ones from my medium blog traffic notes:

zk.com apptractor.ru awayvk.com

zk stuff usually is in English.

alephnerd
For India+ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore) I recommend The Ken.

It's basically Stratechery but much more informed about the India+SE Asian technology business. It doesn't hurt that most of the writers for it are ex-VCs and PEs who have worked in the India+ASEAN sector for over a decade.

Inc42 is decent as well.

That said, I'm honestly not impressed with Stratechery anymore. I personally feel the quality of analysis has kinda gone down (sort of feels like he's grasping at straws). But maybe I'm just feeling Dunning-Kruger effect

avemuri
It's quite far from Stratechery. The Ken is more reportage, investigative at times, but clickbaity at other times.
searchableguy
+1 to The Ken. It's well worth the subscription.
muzani
@ecommurz on Instagram for Indonesia. They communicate in the language of meme, but they do have the latest updates and a strong community. Leaks somehow get there within a day; we joke that you shouldn't share anything on social media that you don't want to see on murz.

Malaysia has multiple communities, but Developer Kaki on Facebook is the most representative of the tech community now. https://forum.lowyat.net/ is more for tech enthusiasts but there's similar overlap without the elitism.

Also I think it's interesting to expect a tech community to look like Blind or HN, but in much of the world, it could be a Telegram group or a SMF forum.

fomine3
Impress Watch and ITMedia to read general tech news, reviews, and some analysis. https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/ https://www.itmedia.co.jp/

Hatena bookmark is now a toxic community in general, but its search feature is useful. Watching good bookmarking user is also interesting. https://b.hatena.ne.jp/q/Ruby?target=title&sort=recent&users...

zenn.dev and Qiita are like dev.to/substack community.

Japan's HN/Reddit equivalent is Twitter but hard to follow/filtering.

I'm also interested in Mainland China tech websites.

pdevr
Some of these are excellent recommendations, while some are horrible (sorry!). Rather than replying to multiple posts, here is an alternative to consider.

Add Google Alerts for the keywords you want - "AliExpress", "taiwan semiconductor", or with wildcards in between as needed. Keep monitoring the alerts for several weeks. You will find a lot of general news sites, but you will also find who really publishes things that are useful and interesting to you.

Bonus tip: Once you find these sites, keep monitoring them. Find out where they get their news from. Mostly, they will quote or link to the original source. Go to those places. Those are the pristine sources you want.

ydnaclementine
Any korean sites? (even if it's in Korean?) interested as a language learner