If you are interested in lobste.rs invitations send me an email with your "keybase profile" and at least 1 public network identification that will let me know that you're not a self-destructive troll and I'll be happy to help you.
UPDATE: Since I received a lot more emails than I thought and it's time consuming, my offer stands for another 24 hours.
Looks interesting, and an invite would be nice :) Unfortunately I have so far not seen the need to do anything with keybase.io - that is not an official requirement, is it?
I was going to offer an invitation, but I don't know you, and I cannot get enough information about you to ascertain that you are not going to be an unpleasant fellow.
How about this: tell me what you think about women in science and technology. That is an important question to me.
Ok. I'll try to describe my point of view as detailed as I can - you shall know I'm not an Anglo-saxon, but a Pole. So, coming to the real question:
Looking at women and science - I know some great woman that were succesful in science. I can note one. I don't know if she would be pleased, so I'll refer to her only with name. So, her name is Zosia. She is going to represent Poland at International Olympiad of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She is also a very timid person. And what I want to say - I really like working with her. Not to say I'm an astronome (cause I'm not), but every single piece of work in class is really enyoing. And only because of her traits of charactere and knowledge. What was that example for? To point out that working in science with women is not really different that work with men who are on some intellectual level that I can accept.
I must say, that women in technology are a rare fration of the spectrum (at least in Poland). Since I'm 17, I have not really worked in a real environment full of various people. However, what I can thing of this affair is that being to work well is working without looking at gender of co-workers.
Maybe, if you'd like to ask me some others questions, I could answer. I really like issues from cognitive theory, formal logic and pure Maths.
Cheers! And I hope you can believe I'm a human being!
As keybase is an invite only alpha system right now this flagged in my mind as a decently disguised advert. Seems interesting but can you really require someone to have a profile on an invite only system?
Anything that can prove that you are a adequate for lobste.rs community and not a troll will do.
Keybase offers a quick way to identify someone. I know it's not perfect, but my time is limited. However, feel free to drop an email and that I'll see what I can do.
Could someone please explain this statement? I know Keybase is a way for people to publish public keys, but is there any cost for a troll to create an account on Keybase with a pseudonym? Does creating a Keybase account require a lot of un-automatable steps or a waiting period or something?
So I had never heard of lobsters, and just checked its front page and a couple of comments and ... is it Stockholm syndrome to say I prefer the HN design / look and feel?
And is it unfair to lobsters to say the posts all seem very very familiar? Just asking as one is always worried about missing out on the next great thing, but the HN niche seems pretty well filled?
Lobste.rs is a curated, invite-only site where you can get banned if anyone you invite (or anyone they invite) causes problems, because those relationships are graphed. Every new member is a burden and every post a potential risk. Obviously, such a community would self-select for safe, uncontroversial content, and tend towards reposting things which have proven uncontroversial elsewhere.
That said, I personally prefer their layout to HN, it maintains simplicity while allowing for a better feature set.
To me, this is a (major) downside. Among other reasons: I'd want a website where people like me felt welcome. And I know that for me, personally, I do not feel welcome at any site that didn't even allow me to join.
Slashdot is differently moderated, but the overall comment quality (and s/n level within threads in general) is considerably lower than here. The editorial policy is also very different (in that it exists): Submissions are curated rather than solely bubbled by user moderation, so the submission s/n ratio is perhaps better (if you get article by feed rather than just surf the respective front pages), but we don't just come here for submitted links, do we?
Here, you can find expert level commentary on pretty much any field from philosophy to economics to law enforcement (aside from the technology experts that are a given), whereas in /. you generally have to dig deeper in a comment stream to find anything approaching the same value.
Sadly not. I was #203094. One of the funniest things I remember about /. were the times someone would post that they had a lower ID than a previous commenter, and that would spark a chain of decreasingly low ID posters replying to say theirs was lower still. You probably had to be there. It was a simpler time.
"better moderated"? Isn't that a bit subjective? I left slashdot.org because I found their moderation to be horrible. Hell, in my opinion, the vast majority of reddit's mods are better than slashdot's mods.
The issue is something everyone overlooks when making these kinds of judgements: adaptability. You have to be able to evolve and adapt to the changing times and, most importantly, adapt and evolve with your user base. This is where reddit really shines and one of the big reasons why places like Fark, mefi and slashdot stagnated and quit growing (relatively speaking).
Large online communities are highly dynamic. There is user churn, as well as the obvious cultural evolution that takes place. Places like fark and slashdot never evolved and adapted with their users and the changing times so people eventually get bored and leave. It's one of the reasons for their stagnation. Mods have to be adaptable and evolve with their communities.
Reddit is evolution and adaptability personified. It's the culture itself running the show over there (anyone can create a subreddit), so the new users with their new ideas, interests, memes, etc all have a place. When something gets boring, old or loses popularity (like FFFUUU comics) it doesn't hurt the site, just the subreddit. People just move from one subreddit to another instead of moving from one website to another.
And that's the problem with slashdot's mods (and fark's mods too). They're the same people and rarely do they let new blood in. And the new blood instantly conforms to the old guard's way of thinking and policies. The way content gets moderated always remains the same. This might be good short term (some people don't like change) but people do eventually get bored of the same old, same old.
Lots of HN articles are not about the web, we have lots of science and technical items. I'm not sure what you mean by "professional", I think many if not most people on here do software development for a living. It sounds like most of what you're looking for may already be here. Upvote articles that interest you and comment on them, that should help shift the focus in the direction you want.
I guess what I meant by "professional" was more people with a formal education in computer science and some years of practical experience. It is just my impression that this is not so much the case here at HN.
This being said, I do not mean to be disrespectful towards someone who "only" has practical training (they may be older so that when they studied there was no formal computer-specific education).
> "I guess what I meant by "professional" was more people with a formal education in computer science and some years of practical experience. It is just my impression that this is not so much the case here at HN. This being said, I do not mean to be disrespectful towards someone who "only" has practical training (they may be older so that when they studied there was no formal computer-specific education)."
I have to admit this reply does leave me a little speechless. On many levels. Anyway, good luck finding what you're looking for!
My impression may very well be wrong.
Maybe the (education of the) people behind are even less relevant.
The community I am looking for should focus on professional software development. The occasional "look at this new framework" and such is ok but HN is just bloated with posts around web startups, becoming a web developer and finding out about computer science basics.
You've made a few submissions. None of them seem to be relevant to what you're asking for in this post. (Maybe the mature software one does?)
I suspect that HN would like some deeply technical post. Perhaps you could try writing one and submitting it? Or find your five favourite blog posts by other people and submitting those?
I think it boils down to this: Hacker News is a "news" site and what I am looking for is a discussion forum where people discuss software development topics.
>
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Software development topics seem to be solidly on-topic.
Try submitting a few software development articles and seeing if they get any discussion?
To get to the top in forums that use voting (HN, reddit etc) articles have to get upvotes - and as each user only has one upvote to give, to get lots of upvotes an article needs to appeal to a lot of people and get upvotes from them.
That means articles need broad appeal. If you write a great article, but readers have to already know about <topic foo>, only a small fraction of readers will upvote it. If you go into fewer technical details but include more introductory content, and focus on topics that have broader appeal, you'll get more upvotes.
You also don't want the article to be too long - most forums rank, in some way, on votes-against-time and some readers don't have time to read a lengthy article. If the user doesn't get back to the forum they don't upvote, and if they decide to save the article and read it later, it's off the front page before they read it and upvote.
Forums like HN and Reddit rarely link to arXiv papers because it's just the nature of the system.
NB I get the impression that there are a fair number of people on here with CS education at all levels...
Edit: At this moment the top article is "A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boolean Satisfiability" - which seems pretty CS to me...
they may be older so that when they studied there was no formal computer-specific education
The reality is likely to be the other way around - older people will have taken fundamental computer science stuff, wheras younger people do not have such a need to.
Yes, I would love to find that. Less web, less startup, less silicon valley, less brogrammers, but more C++/Fortran/Java, more depth, more performance, more BigCorp, more career. With people who are not impressed by the latest fad, because they have seen the same ten years ago.
Unfortunately, the interesting guys to fill such a forum do not hang out on social platforms and bikeshed a lot. They are busy. Usually you can find a few on project specific forums/mailinglists.
Career stuff is ok on HN, just very focused on startups and the valley. The embedded world is underrepresented for example, but afaik pretty big.
BigCorp other than Google and Apple is underrepresented. Where are the guys who produce 5 billion lines of COBOL each year hanging out? Where are the SAP and IBM programmers?
Not talking about programming outside of their workplace, in my limited experience. At least for the ones I know, programming is not a lifestyle, it's just a job that pays the bills - they care about doing it well, then leave to meet their (non-programmer) friends and talk about anything else (sports, politics, etc). As far as I know, none of them frequent community sites.
Probably running the big-ass ERP systems [0] on big-ass IBM mainframe iron on behalf of Apple and Google....their dirty little secret no-one is allowed to talk about.
Hi, IBM software engineer here. Myself and most of my colleagues frequent HN and many of us either have or contribute to open source projects. We generally can't divulge anything at all about our work. I, personally, contribute under an anonymous account and stay out of conversations where I'd have to back up my comments by citing specific experiences related to my workplace or work in any way.
Many of us also highly value work-life balance. As another commenter suggested, after 5pm I'm probably not on HN and am instead traveling, out to dinner with friends, playing sports, reading some good fiction, or whatever else is interesting this week (and before 5pm, I'm working...) Personal projects take up only some of my time. After a little while, much of the conversation here has become annoyingly tepid and it's only the rare tech-related post that I give more than a quick skim.
Edit: I will take issue with the sibling comment that for us, it's just a job that pays the bills. At least in the office I work, there is a very high professional level; we take pride in doing good work and maintaining that level, in keeping up with the state of the art, and implementing best practices. Myself and all my colleagues are all passionate about our work and it is definitely not "just a job". In my personal case, I'm fulfilled enough with my day to day work and develop as a programmer enough to take pleasure in having a varied and full personal life.
I suppose Quora could have filled this niche - real people providing candid, real life answers. But for whatever reason, Quora is full of fluff and unfriendly business practices
The problem for "interesting" people is discussing those topics with you or me, isn't that interesting to them. That's the problem with discussion forums - I'd find discussing Linux with Torvaldes fascinating, but his side of the conversation wouldn't help him solve his problems or forge new ground. It wouldn't just be a waste of his time but it would be boring.
I've seen all of those topics you mention gain traction, probably with the exception of "climbing the career ladder at big corp", but that's the broader Zeitgeist not just HN.
The way to get more C++/Fortran/Java discussion on HN is to submit good relevant content. If you post something really really good, sometimes the James Gosling of X shows up to comment because HN's diversity keeps them around. But any really good topic is likely to draw comments from people who worked with the James Gosling of X because HN has a lot of those people.
HN has grown large enough that there is an audience for just about any tech topic so long as the resource is reasonably good...in fact, that's been the case for a long time, and this from someone who was posting articles about Windows and Microsoft in the days where every time the Macbook got a new 8% faster Core 2, the front page of HN was dominated by the press release and Ask HN was full of "are you upgrading?" treads.
In the end, finding or creating good content is the way to increase discussion of the topics one finds interesting and to influence the direction of the community.
Your question is far too vague. For example, how do you personally
define "web-focused" or "technical" or "professional"? All of those
definitions matter a whole lot. Also, you left out an important aspect,
namely if you're looking for a discussion forum or an aggregator?
Since I'm blindly guessing at what you mean, the following suggestions
might not be what you want, but they're the best I can do.
Lastly, on HN you can see the submissions from a given HN user, so if
you find someone who regularly submits stories that interest you, you
can check their submission history. For example:
- I am looking for a discussion forum, not an aggregator.
- By "web-focused" I meant posts about website development technology used on client and/or server side. Some of this technology is still interesting, like databases, but there is a lot more, e.g. desktop sw technologies, algorithms etc.
- By "technical" I meant in-depth technology reviews and discussions. More posts by people that are not about "how to use x" but "how x works inside".
- By "professional" I meant posts not about computer science basics (stuff a person knows when going through formal education and/or long years of practical experience).
Thank you for your suggestions. I looked through the websites you posted.
Do you know what the purpose of http://www.datatau.com/ is? They do not really tell on their website (or do they?).
The problem with discussion forums is endless September. I find the database forum because I want to discuss CAP. I post "Let's talk about CAP" thread. The discussion forum has had 1500 CAP threads over the last ten years. It's boring answering the same questions and getting into the same arguments, so either all the experts have moved on, or they find entertainment in inside jokes or political discussions or flaming the freshman.
What I don't see mentioned is behavior. That's the hard problem for discussion. Reddit, StackExchange, and the Linux kernal mailing list all have different norms. For me, their behavioral norms don't make them viable alternatives to HN. Lambda-the-Ultimate seems to be generally well behaved when I've encountered it, but it may be more technical and narrower than the enterprisey topics and level of depth you describe.
I'd encourage you to check out some of the subreddits in the previous
HN discussion link I posted. I think they might be your best bet.
Though Lambda The Ultimate (LtU) is officially a blog, it does have
comments and it might be interesting for you. From their FAQ:
>"Mostly this site deals with issues directly related to programming
languages, and programming language research. However, we allow
ourselves moderate forays to bordering issues like programmability and
language in general."
Your desire to avoid "web-based" stuff suffers from the fact that such
large swaths of tech today are "web-related" in some way.
Your desire to avoid "compsci basics" suffers from the "News-To-Me"
problem.
Your desire to find "how X works inside" type content seems quite
similar to "how X works _in_ _practice_".
Given the above, I'd suggest reading current research papers. The
trouble with research papers on HN is, papers take more time and effort
to read, so they rarely get significant attention or useful discussion.
Using Algolia HN Search can uncover some research. Stuff like "[pdf]"
files, common sites, organization names, journal names, and even
conference names can be useful:
The trouble with "Papers We Love" is you need to live in one of places
where the physical meetings happen, and you need to be able to get to
said meetings. If you're home bound, then you're pretty much stuffed.
I've been wondering about this as well. I mean, there's lots of interesting stuff here on HN, but the deeply technical stuff is far and inbetween. And due to the way topics very quickly drop of the first two pages it's hard to discuss more technical stuff.
More often than not I find there was an interesting discussion on some entry, but all the discussion ended 8 hours ago, and nobody will read it now.
I found this too. This is probably due to the fact that Hacker News is (mainly) for sharing news not discussing topics. The discussion part is not supported well by the mechanics of the site.
> The discussion part is not supported well by the mechanics of the site.
It's actually discouraged. Non-URL posts are penalized and greyed out by default to discourage lengthy discussion, because pg was worried that would lead to blog-posting.
Hm, limiting the frontpage stuff could be an interesting twist to links aggregators.
For example, only drop things off the frontpage, if nobody made a comment for 24 hours. Obviously, this builds up a queue of content. Now we could let people vote on these for ordering the queue, but comments are only allowed for frontpage stuff. Hm, sounds very similar to plain old web forums, though.
Install selfoss[1] on your own server. Then add RSS feeds of authors you like to read. Many sites with RSS feeds have their own commenting system for discussions.
I wish there were something similar to Hacker News for IT. I work at a small nonprofit, and I handle both the web side and the hardware side. One day I'm making a data visualization with D3, the next I'm trying to understand why the printer won't print random chunks of a PDF. One day I'm configuring a new VPS, another I'm trying to figure out why the ClearOne in the conference room hates our VoIP system. I've found tons and tons of resources for web development anything. Similar resources for IT have been practically non-existent by comparison. Maybe I just don't know where to look?
Something worth checking out (partly because the cost of checking is so low) is simply the "new" section here on HN.
I find a lot in there in the areas you're looking for that the general populace here doesn't vote up. At a minimum, it's similar to the front-page but it moves faster (so you don't have to see the "pong written in go" type posts more than once)
102 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 63.4 ms ] threadAnd you need an invite to post iirc.
If you are interested in lobste.rs invitations send me an email with your "keybase profile" and at least 1 public network identification that will let me know that you're not a self-destructive troll and I'll be happy to help you.
UPDATE: Since I received a lot more emails than I thought and it's time consuming, my offer stands for another 24 hours.
regards
How about this: tell me what you think about women in science and technology. That is an important question to me.
Looking at women and science - I know some great woman that were succesful in science. I can note one. I don't know if she would be pleased, so I'll refer to her only with name. So, her name is Zosia. She is going to represent Poland at International Olympiad of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She is also a very timid person. And what I want to say - I really like working with her. Not to say I'm an astronome (cause I'm not), but every single piece of work in class is really enyoing. And only because of her traits of charactere and knowledge. What was that example for? To point out that working in science with women is not really different that work with men who are on some intellectual level that I can accept.
I must say, that women in technology are a rare fration of the spectrum (at least in Poland). Since I'm 17, I have not really worked in a real environment full of various people. However, what I can thing of this affair is that being to work well is working without looking at gender of co-workers.
Maybe, if you'd like to ask me some others questions, I could answer. I really like issues from cognitive theory, formal logic and pure Maths.
Cheers! And I hope you can believe I'm a human being!
ps. I'm not affiliated with 'keybase' in any way.
Could someone please explain this statement? I know Keybase is a way for people to publish public keys, but is there any cost for a troll to create an account on Keybase with a pseudonym? Does creating a Keybase account require a lot of un-automatable steps or a waiting period or something?
More about me. http://blog.harshillodhi.co.in/about-me/
And is it unfair to lobsters to say the posts all seem very very familiar? Just asking as one is always worried about missing out on the next great thing, but the HN niche seems pretty well filled?
That said, I personally prefer their layout to HN, it maintains simplicity while allowing for a better feature set.
Sounds odd to punish the inviter
A community run on the premise that the Eternal September effect must be avoided at any cost, inevitably, will come to see new membership as toxic.
As a guy born in Serbia, I have to say that this is the first creative domain I saw with .rs extension.
To me, this is a (major) downside. Among other reasons: I'd want a website where people like me felt welcome. And I know that for me, personally, I do not feel welcome at any site that didn't even allow me to join.
Here, you can find expert level commentary on pretty much any field from philosophy to economics to law enforcement (aside from the technology experts that are a given), whereas in /. you generally have to dig deeper in a comment stream to find anything approaching the same value.
:(
The issue is something everyone overlooks when making these kinds of judgements: adaptability. You have to be able to evolve and adapt to the changing times and, most importantly, adapt and evolve with your user base. This is where reddit really shines and one of the big reasons why places like Fark, mefi and slashdot stagnated and quit growing (relatively speaking).
Large online communities are highly dynamic. There is user churn, as well as the obvious cultural evolution that takes place. Places like fark and slashdot never evolved and adapted with their users and the changing times so people eventually get bored and leave. It's one of the reasons for their stagnation. Mods have to be adaptable and evolve with their communities.
Reddit is evolution and adaptability personified. It's the culture itself running the show over there (anyone can create a subreddit), so the new users with their new ideas, interests, memes, etc all have a place. When something gets boring, old or loses popularity (like FFFUUU comics) it doesn't hurt the site, just the subreddit. People just move from one subreddit to another instead of moving from one website to another.
And that's the problem with slashdot's mods (and fark's mods too). They're the same people and rarely do they let new blood in. And the new blood instantly conforms to the old guard's way of thinking and policies. The way content gets moderated always remains the same. This might be good short term (some people don't like change) but people do eventually get bored of the same old, same old.
Ten or more years ago it was a great site, then I noticed a gradual and general decline. Nowadays I follow it just sometimes.
This being said, I do not mean to be disrespectful towards someone who "only" has practical training (they may be older so that when they studied there was no formal computer-specific education).
edit: nice typo "sad" -> "said" ;)
I have to admit this reply does leave me a little speechless. On many levels. Anyway, good luck finding what you're looking for!
The community I am looking for should focus on professional software development. The occasional "look at this new framework" and such is ok but HN is just bloated with posts around web startups, becoming a web developer and finding out about computer science basics.
edit: clarified "education"
I suspect that HN would like some deeply technical post. Perhaps you could try writing one and submitting it? Or find your five favourite blog posts by other people and submitting those?
Software development topics seem to be solidly on-topic.
Try submitting a few software development articles and seeing if they get any discussion?
A long time ago I submitted this, which got some traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4898691
Is that the kind of thing you're talking about, or more technical software computer science stuff?
That means articles need broad appeal. If you write a great article, but readers have to already know about <topic foo>, only a small fraction of readers will upvote it. If you go into fewer technical details but include more introductory content, and focus on topics that have broader appeal, you'll get more upvotes.
You also don't want the article to be too long - most forums rank, in some way, on votes-against-time and some readers don't have time to read a lengthy article. If the user doesn't get back to the forum they don't upvote, and if they decide to save the article and read it later, it's off the front page before they read it and upvote.
Forums like HN and Reddit rarely link to arXiv papers because it's just the nature of the system.
NB I get the impression that there are a fair number of people on here with CS education at all levels...
Edit: At this moment the top article is "A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boolean Satisfiability" - which seems pretty CS to me...
The reality is likely to be the other way around - older people will have taken fundamental computer science stuff, wheras younger people do not have such a need to.
Unfortunately, the interesting guys to fill such a forum do not hang out on social platforms and bikeshed a lot. They are busy. Usually you can find a few on project specific forums/mailinglists.
I'm genuinely interested about topics you would like to read about/discuss in these areas.
BigCorp other than Google and Apple is underrepresented. Where are the guys who produce 5 billion lines of COBOL each year hanging out? Where are the SAP and IBM programmers?
Not talking about programming outside of their workplace, in my limited experience. At least for the ones I know, programming is not a lifestyle, it's just a job that pays the bills - they care about doing it well, then leave to meet their (non-programmer) friends and talk about anything else (sports, politics, etc). As far as I know, none of them frequent community sites.
Probably running the big-ass ERP systems [0] on big-ass IBM mainframe iron on behalf of Apple and Google....their dirty little secret no-one is allowed to talk about.
:)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning
Many of us also highly value work-life balance. As another commenter suggested, after 5pm I'm probably not on HN and am instead traveling, out to dinner with friends, playing sports, reading some good fiction, or whatever else is interesting this week (and before 5pm, I'm working...) Personal projects take up only some of my time. After a little while, much of the conversation here has become annoyingly tepid and it's only the rare tech-related post that I give more than a quick skim.
Edit: I will take issue with the sibling comment that for us, it's just a job that pays the bills. At least in the office I work, there is a very high professional level; we take pride in doing good work and maintaining that level, in keeping up with the state of the art, and implementing best practices. Myself and all my colleagues are all passionate about our work and it is definitely not "just a job". In my personal case, I'm fulfilled enough with my day to day work and develop as a programmer enough to take pleasure in having a varied and full personal life.
If you are more prone to be personally expossed trends start to matter more and influence which stacks you'll get involved into.
Sadly that has a self-serving foundation but, what can you do about it? In the other hand, happily, disruption is healthy.
I've seen all of those topics you mention gain traction, probably with the exception of "climbing the career ladder at big corp", but that's the broader Zeitgeist not just HN.
The way to get more C++/Fortran/Java discussion on HN is to submit good relevant content. If you post something really really good, sometimes the James Gosling of X shows up to comment because HN's diversity keeps them around. But any really good topic is likely to draw comments from people who worked with the James Gosling of X because HN has a lot of those people.
HN has grown large enough that there is an audience for just about any tech topic so long as the resource is reasonably good...in fact, that's been the case for a long time, and this from someone who was posting articles about Windows and Microsoft in the days where every time the Macbook got a new 8% faster Core 2, the front page of HN was dominated by the press release and Ask HN was full of "are you upgrading?" treads.
In the end, finding or creating good content is the way to increase discussion of the topics one finds interesting and to influence the direction of the community.
Since I'm blindly guessing at what you mean, the following suggestions might not be what you want, but they're the best I can do.
https://lobste.rs/
http://slashdot.org/
http://www.datatau.com/
http://skimfeed.com/
http://hackurls.com/
http://filll.com/news/
http://talll.com/news/
A similar question to yours, with lots of subreddit answers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254884
There have been other "Alternatives to HN" type posts over the years, and a quick search will find them
If you're in the mood for skimming to find interesting titles, you can even skim the big HN rss feed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss
Lastly, on HN you can see the submissions from a given HN user, so if you find someone who regularly submits stories that interest you, you can check their submission history. For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jcr
- I am looking for a discussion forum, not an aggregator.
- By "web-focused" I meant posts about website development technology used on client and/or server side. Some of this technology is still interesting, like databases, but there is a lot more, e.g. desktop sw technologies, algorithms etc.
- By "technical" I meant in-depth technology reviews and discussions. More posts by people that are not about "how to use x" but "how x works inside".
- By "professional" I meant posts not about computer science basics (stuff a person knows when going through formal education and/or long years of practical experience).
Thank you for your suggestions. I looked through the websites you posted. Do you know what the purpose of http://www.datatau.com/ is? They do not really tell on their website (or do they?).
What I don't see mentioned is behavior. That's the hard problem for discussion. Reddit, StackExchange, and the Linux kernal mailing list all have different norms. For me, their behavioral norms don't make them viable alternatives to HN. Lambda-the-Ultimate seems to be generally well behaved when I've encountered it, but it may be more technical and narrower than the enterprisey topics and level of depth you describe.
Though Lambda The Ultimate (LtU) is officially a blog, it does have comments and it might be interesting for you. From their FAQ:
>"Mostly this site deals with issues directly related to programming languages, and programming language research. However, we allow ourselves moderate forays to bordering issues like programmability and language in general."
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
Your desire to avoid "web-based" stuff suffers from the fact that such large swaths of tech today are "web-related" in some way.
Your desire to avoid "compsci basics" suffers from the "News-To-Me" problem.
Your desire to find "how X works inside" type content seems quite similar to "how X works _in_ _practice_".
Given the above, I'd suggest reading current research papers. The trouble with research papers on HN is, papers take more time and effort to read, so they rarely get significant attention or useful discussion.
Using Algolia HN Search can uncover some research. Stuff like "[pdf]" files, common sites, organization names, journal names, and even conference names can be useful:
Since you want stories with _discussions_ use the "comments>?" filter.https://hn.algolia.com/?experimental&sort=byDate&prefix&page...
https://hn.algolia.com/?experimental&sort=byDate&prefix&page...
One of the better efforts I've seen so far on the research paper front is "Papers We Love":
http://paperswelove.org/
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love
The trouble with "Papers We Love" is you need to live in one of places where the physical meetings happen, and you need to be able to get to said meetings. If you're home bound, then you're pretty much stuffed.
Good Luck
http://postatic.com
Disclaimer - I run this site - shameless plug, I know.
but that the actual product could be using another stack
This looks awesome, I would love to talk more, I have been looking for something like this
You could use code which powers HN itself [0]. Or you could use Telesco.pe [1].
[0] - https://github.com/wting/hackernews
[1] - http://www.telescopeapp.org
We do have a simple ranking algorithm. Hmm, how could we allow our users customize this... that's a good question.
`User your own domain name` should be `Use your own domain name`
Anyways great product! I wonder if there's a demo or something to check how this works.
You can check out our own Q&A site (eating our own dog-food). We use Postatic to run our own community.
http://self.postatic.com
http://planet.clojure.in/ and especially https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/clojure
I suppose there is something similar for most languages
More often than not I find there was an interesting discussion on some entry, but all the discussion ended 8 hours ago, and nobody will read it now.
It's actually discouraged. Non-URL posts are penalized and greyed out by default to discourage lengthy discussion, because pg was worried that would lead to blog-posting.
For example, only drop things off the frontpage, if nobody made a comment for 24 hours. Obviously, this builds up a queue of content. Now we could let people vote on these for ordering the queue, but comments are only allowed for frontpage stuff. Hm, sounds very similar to plain old web forums, though.
1. http://selfoss.aditu.de/
These days usenet is either a paid service, or Google Groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
I find a lot in there in the areas you're looking for that the general populace here doesn't vote up. At a minimum, it's similar to the front-page but it moves faster (so you don't have to see the "pong written in go" type posts more than once)