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Ask HN: Favorite mailing lists, IRC channels

81 points by MichaelAza ↗ HN
I've recently come to appreciate true veterans of technology hang around mailing lists and IRC channels.

What are some of your favorite programming/security/sysadmin mailing lists and IRC chaneels?

50 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] thread
cjbprime
The liberation-tech list is interesting sometimes: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech

The rest of the mailing lists/IRC channels I read are all related to specific software projects, though.

I feel like I should add something here about how spending a lot of time on IRC can be inversely correlated with being someone who's doing a lot of work, in some cases. The veterans you're seeing might be people who now spend more time talking about technology than creating it, unless they're using IRC to coordinate their contributions to a project with its other members.

shiftpgdn
I would love to see some sort of service that logs an IRC channel and condenses down the most popular topics, keywords, users, etc.
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davidw
Some of us are on #startups on Freenode.
petercooper
There are a lot of good channels on Freenode generally, but it's a bit like saying one's circle of friends are good.. they're not so great until you know them, etc. #startups is probably one of the better ones for strangers, but it's certainly worth branching out into several at a time, particular technology specific ones where newcomers are expected and frequent (e.g. #redis, #rubinius, #ruby-lang). You can then get invited or drawn into the more cliquey but interesting channels that no-one talks about as much.
epochwolf
The best channels are the invisible ones no one talks about.
LukeHoersten
#haskell on Freenode. Great group of smart hand helpful people.
lelf
+ haskell café maillist
uzqlbrm
##c on Freenode. If there's one channel to visit, it's that one.
Kelet
Last time that I tried being a regular in ##c, regulars over-zealously referred people away (That's GNU C, go away!) and most often responded by using a bot to deliver an automated message. People scolded me for answering questions sincerely. Maybe just a one off experience, but not a big fan.
octo_t
I'm a fan of scala-lang/scala-internals both of which are very interesting.
suhair
This is my list of favs. http://suhairhassan.com/2013/04/17/newsletters-for-hackers.h...
fizzbar
Nice list, thanks for putting it together & sharing.

Slightly OT, for people with email sending experience: I've noticed that some of these lists require you to confirm an email subscription ("double opt-in"), which afaik is standard operating practice for any email list these days.

Yet a couple (Bootstrappist, Web Design Weekly to name a couple at random) don't, they just send a welcome email. Are those two able to avoid the double opt-in requirement by virtue of being larger/older/more established lists, or are they assuming their open rates will keep their deliverability % high, w/o needing the extra confirmation step?

Has the double opt-in requirement become a relic?

davidbrent
#slicehost on freenode. I know the company doesn't exist anymore, but I learned so much about setting up my first debain box from these guys/gals. It is still going strong 6 years later.
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lowglow
#Techendo (http://techendo.co) on freenode -- a lot of good people there from the SF tech scene, but I'm biased because I started the channel.
beat
My favorite mailing list is closed and private (no, I'm not inviting you), and has been running since the 1990s.
pi18n
This added nothing but arrogance to the conversation.
mrilhan
I thought it was funny, kudos to him. I thought it might even motivate someone else to start their own private list. Public things are rarely easy to regulate for quality.
beat
Yes, exactly. Public lists can suffer tragedy of the commons very easily. People SHOULD set up private lists. This one has been going since 1999 as a formal list, and was an informal cc chain for a couple of years before that.

There's usually an inverse relationship between quality of discussion and welcoming environment for newbies. If you want to have deep discussion about, well, anything, and you have newbies (or worse, people who think they aren't newbies) asking basic questions and failing to RTFM beforehand, you'll lose.

A few years ago, I was on a panel about intellectual property with Cory Doctorow at a science fiction convention. It COULD have been a really fun conversation - Cory and I agree on enough for common ground, and disagree enough to be interesting, and we both understood the topic really well. But the standing-room-only crowd just wanted to ask obvious question after obvious question, or go on rants that were demonstrably naive at best. It was really frustrating.

Tragedy of the commons, man.

MetaCosm
Wow... in a few comments, you have gone down a spiral of embarrassment.

First you post an arrogant self-serving "members only jacket" style post that literally does nothing for anyone. You didn't mention how to get into such groups, no tips for finding such groups or anything else remotely useful to anyone.

After that you intentionally go down the nonsense pedantic path of 'The OP didn't say "open".' ... which means you either (1) thought the OP wanted absolutely useless feedback to his question or (2) you are an asshole. Not sure which is worse to be honest.

Then, in a transparent trick to try to dig yourself out of the hole you had dug... you try to act like a victim of the commons. Just cause everyone hates you don't mean you are a victim in any sense, you might just be an jerk.

In a final, desperate pathetic attempt, you drop "Cory Doctorow" into the conversation and try to peer link to borrow his reputation because you have NONE of your own. Another pathetic, transparent, embarrassing tactic.

Realize that you might be the tragedy.

beat
I'll fully own up to my initial comment being not very useful - not because it was "arrogant", but because I didn't provide the backing reasoning. I'm not whining about the downrating there.

The flaming, however, was unnecessary and inappropriate. Downrating reasonable responses was inappropriate, too. Community behavior IS problematic here (and that includes my own community behavior, and yours as well), and that's the "tragedy of the commons" for public forums. A lot go so far down the newbie/flamewar rabbit holes that they become effectively useless. I know people who already consider HN useless for those reasons.

I'm not the victim here. The community is the victim. This shouldn't be so hard to understand.

beat
Not arrogance, practicality. Closed groups are a fantastic way to maintain quality. No need for moderation, no newbies, no stupid questions, very high signal/noise ratio, comraderie of many years together.

There's a great deal to be said about the value of exclusive clubs. That's why they're so popular.

nullymcnull
Maybe there's an interesting discussion to be had about that. But OP asked:

> What are some of your favorite programming/security/sysadmin mailing lists and IRC chaneels?

He is looking for open channels, and you leave a pointless comment about some elite closed channel you're a part of. Then you further crapped up the thread trying to rationalize this with some chin-stroking about the 'tragedy of the commons'. That being the case I think it's totally fair (if not charitable) to characterize your response as arrogant.

beat
The OP didn't say "open". And frankly, the closed ones are often the best sources. Getting involved in a really high-quality closed list can solve a lot of problems.

Downrating my response? I can see that. Bitching about how "arrogant" it is? So WHO crapped up the thread, exactly? You're not exactly being fair here. I don't think it's unreasonable for me to respond to getting flamed.

Or alternately, you can view this whole unfortunate affair as the sort of tragedy of the commons that undermines the quality of discussion in public forums. You can close your mind to the point, or you can open it. Your call.

pi18n
Ok, I agree. But that's not what you wrote. If you had written the exact same post but concluded with a suggestion the OP start one it would have changed the tone immensely. What you wrote above was nothing more than boasting.
beat
It wasn't intended to be boasting, but that's how it came off. You're right, it was a lousy comment, and should have been more thorough.
swah
Bilderberg?
soapdog
irc.mozilla.org and then #webdev #webapi #b2g #developer and others. Keeping the web free and open to all ;-)
justinlilly
Shameless plug, I've written a small piece of software which will send you daily aggregates of github activity via email. There are also weekly / monthly options as well.

http://gitstreams.com/

tlongren
Cool! I've been searching for something similar to this.
lvh
#python on Freenode. If you can live with being asked questions when you're asking something funny long enough to convince regulars you usually know what you're doing, it's an excellent congregation of some hella smart people.

(Disclaimer: I'm a regular of the channel myself. I also run the official Python channels on Freenode.)

the_cat_kittles
thanks for the help getting started! you helped me out a ton 2 years ago!
ishbits
Is #python not the official channel?
Sephr
#oftn on freenode is a great open source programming channel.
usaopp
IRC: Freenode: #security, ##freebsd, ##hardware, #debian - all good Rizon: #baot As for mailing lists, Full Disclosure for sure, Bugtraq, all the big name security ones have really interesting posts.
the_cat_kittles
aside from all the obvious #<language>, #scikit-learn is really good for general ML and obviously good for more specific questions about scikits.learn machine learning libs
TamDenholm
I run a small IRC channel for webby types, mainly UK based and theres not many of us but anyone's welcome. irc.chatwebdev.com #chatwebdev
Sealy
I'm a fan of digital currencies so I frequently visit Freenode channels: #bitcoin #litecoin #bitcoin-dev #mtgox

Its interesting to observe the growth of the channels during bitcoin's hype cycles.