Ask HN: What sources like HN do you consume?
3 days ago
I appreciate HN for staying up-to-date with technical news.
For my side hustle I have to ramp-up on other areas like marketing, legal, sales, ...
So I wonder if there are similar high-quality sources like HN for these areas.
This question comes up every year (I've seen it for the nearly 2 decades of HN), and the answers are never satisfying.
Other industries just don't have an HN equivalent, either for lack of trying or because hackers are good making and using things like HN when others aren't.
A psychologist told me a few days ago that they would love having an equivalent for their domain of work.
That's precisely why we had forums back in the '00s. there were forums for basically everything under the sun - unfortunately they mostly died nowadays. HN is basically just a forum with a single board that got enough recognition - your average forum had more boards than users and was so fragmented it mostly ended up in instadeath after a few months,maybe years
You could build a HN clone for them for that purpose, but I tell you the problem would be onboarding users.
I built a HN clone for someone who wanted it focused on just E-Commerce discussions, but it failed to take off. Also didn't help that the person wanted to monetize it using a pay-to-use model. It never took off.
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Of course: for psychology, various other medical fields, and plenty of creative fields a HN-equivalent would be gold.
But it's impossible without their equivalent of @dang managing their equivalent of a forum of smart people who have a deep allergy to being marketed to/advertised at/BS'd or enshitified at. They need a HN-like immune system, often grossly overzealous and way too self-serious, that actively polices things like this.
That's why there's no HN equivalent elsewhere.
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I vibecoded a clone of HN, for philosophical topics, which I'm very fond of. However, I have done a terrible job of marketing it, so that is still on my list: http://forum.philosofriends.com
Right now is basically a repository of philosophy-related links I find interesting, but it would be awesome to find a way to start generating philosophical discussions of the quality I find in HN for tech/AI
There's nothing like HN, but the closest is Reddit.
If you're interested in programming then r/programming
If UFC, for example, then
r/ufc
r/mma
r/python
Just whatever it is you're interested in, there's likely a subreddit for it. The more niche it is, the better the quality of the sub.
Reddit is deteriorating by the day.
The Fediverse (specifically Lemmy and PieFed) have much higher signal to noise ratios and are frequented by the same folks you see here in a lot of cases. Additionally, their APIs are open and free.
As a frequenter of Lemmy (and I suppose PieFed because it's federated), it's really the opposite of HN culturally for better and worse. The only thing that feels the same is that most Lemmy users only look at the "All" feed so it basically becomes one feed like here on HN. I haven't browsed Reddit since the API issue, but I remember it being a lot more usable in the way GP suggests, i.e. subscribing to individual communities to engage with. I've found the SNR on Lemmy to also be poor for quite a few reasons, so if you're right about Reddit's being worse then I have to wonder how it's still as popular as it is.
Reddit is deteriorating every day like China's economic model is ever-closer to collapse each day - oft-repeated claims that become ever harder to believe when they've been trotted out, on the daily, for fifteen years whilst seemingly never getting any truer.
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I'm on HN mainly to keep up with surveillance and privacy news and tech. I have a number of sources I pull from, including:
OSINT blogs and resources like indicator news, Bellingcat 404 Media Individual Blogs like michaflee.com, Zach wittackers "This week in security" Courtwatch.news Privacy related forums like privacyguides.org Academic sources like Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society, etc etc.
I'll spin up an n8n instance at some point to sift through everything I find.
I notice a lot of the suggestions are news-oriented. However, the thing I like about HN are all the non-news gold nuggets about tech. I'd love to find such gold nuggets for other industries as well.
NASA Space Flight [1] is the forum for anything and everything space industry related.
[1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/
X.com is my new go to especially after I found enough interesting accounts to follow.
Punchbowl News is a great source for American congressional politics. They have a newsletter for free that goes out every weekday at 6 AM.
GitHub trending is one that comes to mind
Unsure why @Nathanf22's comment was downvoted to death. I would also suggest Lobste.rs and Reddit. But then again, RSS seems to work quite well in my case.
Probably because it seems AI-generated, and suggesting dev.to is in line with that - that place is actually an absolute cesspit of slop (SNR 1:100), as far as I have seen.
Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware that dev.to is of such low quality.
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Can you recommend some of your favorite RSS feeds for non-technical topics?
Sure. Here is an older list that I shared a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
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And bots
Account created 16 hours ago, negative karma. Four comments fearmongering about brigading, praising Trump, Israel, right wing politics and one criticising Reddit for being leftist.
You decide how to interpret this.
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I know those pesky workers and people without capital are so annoying asking for Healthcare and consumer protections... I wish they just worked for the billionaire oligarchs without compliant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
Lobste.rs for the more technical deep-dives — smaller community but higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Dev.to and Zenn for longer-form technical writing, though the quality varies a lot.
For architecture and system design specifically, the Software Architecture subreddit (r/softwarearchitecture) has surprisingly good discussions.
HN remains the best for the intersection of tech + business + ideas.
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