HN Explorer

Ask HN: Would you guys visit a purely hacker-oriented version of HN?

84 points by jcapote ↗ HN
A friend and I are sitting on tailrecursion.com wondering what to do with it. I suggested it would be a cool name for an HN-like site that catered specifically to those who spend 8 hours a day behind an emacs or vi session (and no less!), rather than the marketing/sales/non-hacker-founder types (which HN perfectly addresses). What do you guys think?

87 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] thread
grandalf
you mean employees of startups / non-founders? Or founders of startups for which marketing is irrelevant?
jcapote
Either. Just wanted to emphasize that the discussions are going to be deeply technical in nature and not business related in any sense.
PieSquared
I would enjoy an HN-like site with a greater focus on algorithms and other more complex material.

HN sometimes gets these posts on things like closures, functional programming, monads, y combinators, etc. A lot of these are just posts from Wikipedia or such, but they're interesting and generate a lot of discussion.

Similarly, I enjoy the more physics and chemistry oriented tech articles.

To summarize: I'd love an HN for theoretical CS, physics, chemistry, etc, more focused on the actual sciences than on marketing, sales, deployment, etc. I'd be there in an instant.

jcapote
Exactly! The closest I have found to this is reddit.com/r/compsci, but the comments are nowhere near as valuable as when those threads make it to HN
johnnybgoode
I don't actually know for sure, but isn't this what reddit programming is for?
jcapote
It was for that, but it's caliber has definitely lightened over the years. Compare:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/...

http://reddit.com/r/programming

cubicle67
agreed, although it seems to have not deteriorated to the same degree and the main Reddit
sjf
Gosh, I remember reading those stories on progreddit that day. I was beginning to wonder if I had just imagined the decline in quality or if instead my tastes had just changed considerably.

All the haskell, lisp, FP, compsci stories are gone, the comments are complete drivel. I rarely see a story that is worth reading (and I read reddit compulsively several times a day). I think a lot of the blame can be placed on including progreddit on the main page when the subreddits were introduced. Suddenly there were a lot of non-programmers on progreddit.

To the OP, yes I would like to see a hacker version of hackernews.

kailoa
Absolutely. I'd even expect some cross-pollination as well.
lyaunzbe
Good idea...but its been done already by Academic Hacker News: http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/
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iron_ball
Do you have to ask? The tenth result was posted 88 days ago. Clearly not active in the slightest.
russell
The problem is that not much is being posted over there and even less discussion.

Edit: I would be all for a more active site. And good discussions of technical issues a step above, "how do I fix this problem?"

burke
Agreed, but I don't see how starting yet another site will fix the problematic lack of discussion.
trevelyan
One would imagine posting MORE to the existing site would solve the problem more readily than starting a new one with even less users.
jcapote
Maybe the catchier name will help? Also it wouldn't simply be an HN clone, it would have features specific to its use case.
swombat
I doubt it. Perhaps the interesting discussion and activity comes precisely from the fact that this community does not suffer from programming tunnel vision.

One-dimensional minds are rarely interesting to converse with, no matter how far they go in that one dimension.

spectre
Academic Hacker News may be suffering because the term academic in the name scares a lot of people away.
SapphireSun
Maybe it's just solving the wrong problem. AHN only discusses CS, but I'm sure the discussion would not devolve if you included other subjects (ie Physics, Biology). A potential problem is that though you might have read something interesting, it might not quite fit.

Perhaps because the articles are dense and require time to read (a prof. told me to expect to take at least three hours to read an academic paper properly as an expert in the field), it would help a lot if the original poster would help jump start the discussion by talking about the interesting features of the experiment or study. I'm not sure if this can be forced though.

AHN (completely) aside, I had another idea for a news site that addresses a pain point of mine. I'm not sure if it belongs in this thread, but it seems as good a place as any. Many, if not most, articles in the mainstream media are horribly devoid of content, information, and context. An aggregator that posts stories and has a historian annotate them and add links to documents (especially primary source!) describing previous relevant events (sorted by importance and date) might be really cool and useful. I am stumped as to how to actually make it work though as if you do it with personnel, your labor costs would be enormous. On the other hand, there may be a ready supply of liberal arts doctorates who missed out on professorships (I understand there is a major discrepancy between the supply and demand). The real trick of this would be that if you managed to realistically rate historical events according to how they impacted the world, then you could sort your front page by both newness and importance score, thus mining the gems that are misplaced in regular papers. However, this would be susceptible to gaming by writers - which is unavoidable in the long run.

Automation would be much better. However, it becomes a classification problem along waaaay too many dimensions, and assembling a supervised learning dataset would be a giant task that I'm not even sure how to do as these labels can be very uncertain.

The rewards would be great if some sort of system like this could be devised on a reasonably sized scale.

mynameishere
It seems to me that, with business, things are constantly changing, thus making it suitable for "news", whereas programming itself is a slow-moving craft. I mean, your text editors are from the 1970s.
GeneralMaximus
Not really, no. Programmers deal with tools. Programming languages, IDEs, text editors are all tools. Hammers haven't changed much in the last 100 years, so why should our tools change radically? There are people who have been using Emacs for 10+ years. Making radical changes negatively affects programmer productivity.

Hackers embrace new programming paradigms whole heartedly. Learning new programming languages or grokking a new library/framework is fun. Suddenly replacing the tools that have become muscle-memory with something completely different is definitely not fun.

IMO, revolution is favored when it comes to programming languages, frameworks and libraries. Evolution is favored when it comes to tools of the trade (text editors, commandline tools, etc.)

mynameishere
Hackers embrace new programming paradigms whole heartedly

I guess. But I've seen so many fawning articles on Lisp (birthdate: 1958) that I'm tempted to stand by my original point: It's a slow-moving craft.

EDIT: By the way, I was shocked to look at my own username's created date. 842 days. Jesus christ, time flies. Anyway, most of you probably don't realize that this forum was originally called "startup news" and was designed mainly for business, not "hacking" whatever that is.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...

cpr
Heck, there are old-timers among us (blush) who have been using Emacs for 30 years!
GeneralMaximus
Yes, please!

I crave programming news, and I find none. Proggit is full of Techcrunch-esque crap these days, and meme threads dominate the discussions. HN is food for thought, but it caters to a broader audience these days. If you can build and maintain a community with the same standards as HN, do it.

Since I have too much free time on my hands, I'm even ready to lend a hand :p

andreyf
Ugh, this is such a web1.0 problem. Instead, why not write a greasemonkey plugin that cross-submits posts to Academic Hacker News when you upvote them, and only upvote academic articles?
0xdefec8
It has as much to do with the community it attracts as the articles themselves.

Every social news site has it's unspoken core values that can't be parsed out (easily :) with a script. HN has it's libertarians, reddit has it's contrarian only-I-took-the-red-pill mentality, and 4chan has its poop and kiddieporn. Go against the respective grain, and get ostracized.

geuis
Absolutely. Build it, and I will come. HN is awesome for its variety of startup/programming related news but I would love to see a site dedicated to nothing but programming, front-end(html/css/javascript), and science news. Would you even consider curating the content somewhat? Definitely have a voting system in place, but be compelled to remove content that doesn't match the purpose of the site.
jcapote
We plan to aggressively (but openly) moderate submissions. Another idea we were kicking around was instead of using forms to submit comments or stories, you would do it solely via the API.
karanbhangui
Why not just use the reddit codebase?
mnemonik
Or the HN codebase if you plan to go down this route.
pg
Which articles currently on the frontpage of HN would you not include?
jcapote
--I would exclude these:

Why Amazon Vine is a Threat Worth Talking About (jonbischke.com)

Facebook | Username (facebook.com)

MySpace Is In Far Worse Shape Than Its New Executives Thought

Does It Matter If The Future Isn't Available In Canada? (techvibes.com)

Authors, poets replace reporters at an Israeli newspaper for one day

All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours (techcrunch.com)

Heyzap (YC09/USV) looking for a flash contractor.

Humans prefer cockiness to expertise (newscientist.com)

Should you move your startup to the Valley? (tonywright.com)

Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address (newyorker.com)

All my games are now free (toucharcade.com)

How to find new startup ideas? The answer is in the question. (dashnine.org)

More Ways to Sell Out of Your Startup Stock (wsj.com)

A post college memorandum (alexjmann.com)

The TV industry is where the newspaper industry was five years ago: In denial. (businessinsider.com)

The Economics of the HDMI Cable Ripoff (marginalrevolution.com)

Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming [scribd] (maps.org)

Tagged: The World's Most Annoying Website (time.com)

--I would include these:

Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC

The hairy ball theorem

Celery: A Distributed Task Queue for Django

Linus Torvalds on some good git development practices

Offline Processing on Google App Engine [scribd]

Why "next-gen games" went gray, brown, and grey.

What is RubySpec?

Great talk on the Python GIL [video][slides in comments]

CodeMage
Hell, yeah! I'm sold. Not only do I hope you build it, I also hope it lasts a long time without declining in quality.
paulgb
Where do you draw the line? I see the pattern for most of those (things that directly relate to code), but it seems arbitrary to include The Hairy Ball Theorem but not Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming.

I realize the answer is probably "I know it when I see it" - but then, how do you make sure other people know, too?

zkz
Two comments:

- bug here, the reply button wasn't in your message until I refreshed the page

- I agree... I think maths is extremely hackish (maybe not a wikipedia link though)

jcapote
Good question, I thought about those twice when compiling the list. The Hairy Ball theorem however did generate a great discussion on how it applies to game programming, so that's why I added it. As for the LSD article, while interesting, I didn't think that it was enough about code to matter. The key here isn't that we are trying to replace proggit and HN, but merely trying to organize the scope of the posts better (naturally there will be some overlap); So you should be able to still visit those sites for the lighter programming articles.
paulgb
Fair enough, but how would a user decide whether a story is on topic? For Hacker News, the one-liner is anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I guess what you have in mind is anything that will foster interesting discussion about programming?
quoderat
If those stories were excluded, I'd be very uninterested in visiting here. This sort of tunnel-vision is why hackers and engineer types often seem completely out of touch with society -- and not in the good way. It's engineer-itis.
wooby
I enjoy the engineering tunnel vision that good days on HN provide me. On the bad days, HN, for me, is sort of only the culture and pieces of society that those who don't know much about either are interested in. To learn about people, places, and things I don't know anything about that aren't hacking related - I go outside.
aswanson
If you don't have engineer-itis, you probably shouldn't come here. If I didn't, I wouldn't. The discussions that veer off of technical tracks (like politics, economics, social issues) are full of so much noise and emotional opinion that they make good stuff harder to find.
sker
Count me in. Sometimes I go to dzone for my fix of programming news but they have pretty much zero discussion, which is essential in order to debunk the crappy articles.
invisible
I believe greatly that being a "hacker" is more than being a great programmer (although that is an important aspect). It means (as a job title) you can take an idea, transform it into a working business based on programming and profit both monetarily and through experience.

Many of those are "learn by others' experience." Others have great tidbits of hackerish potency that, once exposed to, may give you an "ah-ha" moment when you're trying to figure out a problem. Others, even, expose you to new technology or different technology you may be interested in learning or using in a project.

markbao
You know, I actually feel the contrary: Hacker News has gone the way of more hacker than startups. shrug
jcapote
It makes perfect sense, hacker news should be more for startup/business news than really hacker news.
alex_c
HN started out as (hacker) startup news, and it HAS been moving from that focus (part of it intentional, such as the name change to Hacker News). Your sarcasm falls a bit flat :p
northwind
Actually, no, said sarcasm does not fall flat. A good friend of mine described the articles displayed here as a "rat's nest" which does not lead anywhere. At first, I thought he was crazy; then I began critically looking at said articles.

I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud.

Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded?

In conclusion, I would be VERY interested in being involved with the community type proposed by jcapote (in any capacity: contributing member, developer, beta tester, et cetera).

davi
Agreed. I'm a biologist, but my project has a lot in common with a startup. Back in the Startup News and early Hacker News days, I felt I had something in common with the community, and I derived inspiration and consolation from it.

I still visit HN a lot but get something different from it: closer to early reddit.

fauigerzigerk
I agree. But what I really wish to see more of is startup ideas/stories/projects that are based on deeper domain knowledge. What I'm interested in is how long standing business practices or social patterns can be disrupted by the right mix of creative business models and solving tough technological or scientific problems.

I'd rather hear something about solving waste management in Naples or interesting software ideas for the upcoming smart grid than about accessing some social network on the iPhone. To be honest, I just don't need any technological solution to keep in touch with the few friends I have. And I'm utterly bored by CSS 3-liners and MySQL sharding.

In general, I wish there was more cross-pollination between people with technology competence and people with domain knowledge. This may not be the worst time in history to find people with valuable domain knowledge who are looking for new opportunities and would like to join forces with hackers.

I realise that this is difficult and it's obviously not HN's fault that it's so rare. Maybe ycombinator could do more to break out of the pure web dev space.

[dead] gilesgoatboy
Dude, there's no point asking them. They don't know the answer. The only thing is to do it and see how it goes.
Eliezer
No. I'll be first to say that I would not, in fact, visit it.

Or so I expect. I could of course be proven wrong.

jhancock
I couldn't handle yet another site to check regularly. I sub-hn might be more appropriate.
lyime
No need.

Every time I have wanted a to know about a specific topic on HN, I have used search (searchyc.com) and found plenty of success. I think HN/similar would become rather stale if it was ONLY about programing/CS concepts. I think a variety of discussion topics keeps this forum healthy and well balanced.

rms
Good luck; starting a social news site is hard.
10ren
Great idea, but "tailrecursion.com" is biased towards functional programming. Not all hackers are lisp/fp-hackers.

Of course, I understand that that's the domain you have, and your starting point is "what to do with it' - so you have to use it! And it's quite alright with me if your site is targeting lisp-hackers only. And it may be that the interests of lisp and non-lisp hackers substantially (or maybe totally) overlap. And, for example, the name "Y-combinator" doesn't seem to have done any harm.

PS: I do about 3-6 hours vi per day when typing, but most of my "coding" is done on paper or in the shower. Do I count as a hacker? Can I join?

Raphael
What? I thought nearly all languages supported tail recursion.
blasdel
Yes, but in language implementations without TCO, it's just recursion.
chanux
OK, If it's really good I'll make it the secondary home page.
grinich
You need to write an experimental dialect of a functional programming language first.
stuntgoat
If I could subscribe to other HN members' posts and upmodded links, I could, in theory be able to preemptively sort the posts that I liked in common with those users. All it would take is a new menu item at the top of the page- called 'peers'. When a HN user posts a link I find most appropriate to my lifestyle, I have the option to subscribe to future links posted by that HN user; all of the links ( or even comments ) of the peers I subscribe to would be listed in chronological order on the 'peers' page.

If a similar functionality was enabled and the link posting member was able to tag the submitted link, I think it would make it more efficient for the subscribing member to get the appropriate content listed first- that is, if the subscriber could choose to subscribe to the links that were relevantly tagged by each peer.

Simply put: if you ( yes you ) submitted a link that was tagged 'emacs', and I had subscribed to your links tagged as such, I would see it listed on my peers page ( likely near the top, even if I missed a few days ). If you submitted a link tagged 'founder inspiration' and I did not subscribe to that tag of yours, I would only see that link on the front page ( if it made it; and I saw it in time ).

Sorta like a collective intelligent RSS feed, hosted on HN!

jcapote
Very into this. I twitter most of the things I find interesting in the same vein.
wooby
That's a really, really awesome idea. It's like combining the best of twitter with the best of social news.
almost
The problem with this is that it fragments the community, you now no longer read "Hack News" but instead read "Stuntgoat News" which has a readership of 1. It may have some crossover with "Almost News" but I think it would be deferent enough to remove the feeling of community that a site like this engenders which I think is one of the reasons people take the time to write long interesting comments (like yours here).
stuntgoat
I was thinking of simply adding a link at the top of the main page between 'new' and 'threads' that was 'peers' and I could subscribe to multiple HN users' tagged links. I believe it would allow a closer connection between the members of the community that have interests in common. Seemingly, there is a sub-culture of people interested in mostly programming news; so, instead of moving them to a new site altogether, allow them to maintain a connection to this site, at the same time as giving them a tool to build community.
joshu
I think delicious will do all that.
timothychung
I think we need a multi-view HN in which we can filter out all non-hacking related news.

In that way, you cater both technical users as well as non-technical ones.