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.
unsupp0rted2 days ago
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.
LollipopYakuza2 days ago
A psychologist told me a few days ago that they would love having an equivalent for their domain of work.
chisteva day ago
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.
LollipopYakuza6 hours ago
This makes sense. Community driven websites need... a community. Same reason why it is hard for subs to move away from Reddit.
h4ch1a day ago
https://github.com/wting/hackernews
Or use this, rebrand it; but I don't know if people in other fields would be turned off by the aesthetic and simplicity (?)
I remember seeing some green themed website that used Arc as a forum but I completely forgot what it was. Pretty active as well.
unsupp0rteda day ago
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.
1atticea day ago
This is the sort of a smug self-satisfied hot take that makes many non-SWEs recoil from this community.
Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.
What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.
You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.
Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.
But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.
It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.
This is both good and bad.
unsupp0rteda day ago
You’d think so, but then what’s the HN for those various fields?
Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day.
I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.
chisteva day ago
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.
thal3sa day ago
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.
kartoffelsafta day ago
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.
detritusa day ago
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.
nitwit005a day ago
Personal theory is, you can get into a state where you'd still growing due to network effects, as you're the main location for some topics, but new communities go somewhere else, so you're losing that traffic.
Some of Discord's largest servers are for AI tools, as it seemed like the logical choice when they were getting going. A couple years earlier I'm sure it would have been reddit.
mejutoco12 hours ago
Reddit is infested with bots. Hn is not immune to astroturfing either.
rithdmca day ago
The Eternal September is live and well.
detritusa day ago
And it's barely even March.
Not even a Long March.
Just to entirely mix metaphors.
DriveTimea day ago
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.
DavidHaereropa day ago
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.
bilsbie11 hours ago
X.com is my new go to especially after I found enough interesting accounts to follow.
somenameforme2 days ago
NASA Space Flight [1] is the forum for anything and everything space industry related.
doublet00th2 days ago
Punchbowl News is a great source for American congressional politics. They have a newsletter for free that goes out every weekday at 6 AM.
coip21 hours ago
GitHub trending is one that comes to mind
robtherobber2 days ago
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.
jaena day ago
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.
robtherobbera day ago
Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware that dev.to is of such low quality.
theorchid10 hours ago
Perhaps this is because programmers know how to use AI. And they thought it would be a good idea to generate content using AI.
But other programmers who see this content immediately realize that it was generated and stop reading it.
DavidHaererop2 days ago
Can you recommend some of your favorite RSS feeds for non-technical topics?
robtherobber2 days ago
Sure. Here is an older list that I shared a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28911253
In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069
rmm782 days ago
[flagged]
AbstractH242 days ago
And bots
poly2it2 days ago
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.
rmm78a day ago
that's a typical reddit-style ad-hominem response
whattheheckheck2 days ago
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.
CodeBit26a day ago
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Nathanf222 days ago
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.
aaron6952 days ago
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