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http://wwww.librenews.us

by thisisdallas • 13 years ago

64 56 13 years ago

wwww.librenews.us

MarcScott• 13 years ago

While there is no post limit, please be respectable and do not submit so many posts that the front page is full of your submissions.

All but 9 of the submissions on the front page are from ACN.

eksith3• 13 years ago

I'm suspect this will be the case until they achieve critical mass. Of course, posting it here will likely help.

vehementi• 13 years ago

From 10 days ago... probably test / dummy posts

klrr• 13 years ago

Too hard to read the text! :P

jere2• 13 years ago

How about an About page or FAQ so I know why the site exists? Here are a few questions to get you started:

1. Was this created by pg?

2. If not, why does everyone have an obsession with cloning Hacker News?

joshuahedlund• 13 years ago

3. What is the value-add of this site compared to existing subreddits on this topic and/or a potentially creatable subreddit on this topic?

TylerE• 13 years ago

I suspect the value add is "Isn't reddit". Reddit is the new myspace. There are a few (mostly musty) corners that are still decent, due to herculean moderation efforts such as /r/AskScience, but the bulk of it becomes less worthwhile every day.

eksith3• 13 years ago

The comments alone make /r/politics nearly unusable for me. And I honestly tried! /r/WorldNews Isn't much better in that regard and I'd much rather see a forum with limited or no comments than either of those. I still get access to the news and get to avoid the trite in the comments.

sillysaurus22• 13 years ago

No, this wasn't created by pg. This is a clone of hacker news because that's what ships with Arc.

thisisdallas2• 13 years ago

This is a great idea and one that will happen in the near future. To answer your questions:

1. No it wasn't created by pg and it's not associated with him or ycombinator. Of course Arc is definitely associated with pg, Libre News is not.

2. Personally, I created this site because I am interested in Arc and wanted to experiment with it. I also wanted to provide a service for others (one that I was also interested in) and a non-censored news source that encouraged discussion seemed like a good idea.

yogo• 13 years ago

It can be powered by Arc but did you have to use the same crappy table-based layout? I'd have to think these kinds of sites would save some bandwidth by simply trimming all that fat.

jere2• 13 years ago

OK. Fair enough. I wasn't trying to be negative, but was genuinely wondering why so many HN clones are made. As a learning experience, it makes sense. Anyway, definitely do the About page because otherwise it won't be obvious that it's meant to be a "non-censored news source."

gknoy• 13 years ago

Would you be interested in blogging about any changes you made, or particularly interesting/tricky things you found in the sources, while creating this?

I haven't looked closely at ARC, so perhaps this is a foolish question, but was this as turn-key as unpacking the distribution, changing some names and colors, and running it on some server, or did you need to make substantial changes in order to make it your own, or even to get it to run?

devx• 13 years ago

I don't think cloning HN is bad. But has PG open sourced his code, or will the voting algorithm not going to be as good?

C1D2• 13 years ago

It's shipped with Arc, a programming language pg made. So yes, it is open source.

petercooper4• 13 years ago

From what I understand based on HN comments over the years, HN proper has lots of special secret sauce to prevent spam, voting fraud, etc.

stevekemp• 13 years ago

I've just posted my onw HN-inspired forum:

https://github.com/skx/gathering/

This is written in Perl, and has some interesting features. But I was inspired by HN because it works well, in its minimal fashion.

ing33k• 13 years ago

only reason I checked the site was because the submission included Powered by Arc in the title, but any how found some interesting links and bookmarked the site .

petercooper4• 13 years ago

Yay, somewhere all the NSA/Snowden/Wikileaks/New World Order/bombing stories can go instead of HN. Huge thumbs up to this.

dmix• 13 years ago

After ~5yrs on here, I've seen at least a hundred attempts at creating a second HN strictly for politics, but none of them have been successful.

rubyn00bie• 13 years ago

Of course none have been! :) ... and none will be. Because 90+% of online politics discourse is dominated by trolls. People who want to have actual discussions, and listen to differing opinions, will be driven away en masse.

Leaving the trolls to troll each other. Unfortunately, dog-fooding isn't very popular in the troll world-- so the site dies et voila! Here we are.

mcphilip3• 13 years ago

Huge downvote to this. Saying that a hacker community shouldn't be interested in the Snowden revelations is ridiculous, and listing him alongside New World Order conspiracy theories is just insulting.

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

Chill out. He didn't try to insult you, he said it's somewhere else for those things to go. He didn't claim it's actually unimportant, and frankly, Hacker News wasn't intended for this kind of discussion - the guidelines support him.

Whether or not that means it shouldn't be here at all is up for debate, but don't act as though he's being insulting when he's just supporting something that's reasonable. He can voice his reasons just as you can voice yours. You're the one being more insulting.

jasonkester• 13 years ago

First, downvotes aren't for disagreement here. Comments are. Thus...

Second, I disagree, and agree with the grandparent that that other place (or any other place, really) would make a perfect place for discussing all those things you list.

Actionable articles about the business of software and technology to help build same. That's what we're here for. If you'd like more stuff to talk about, there's lots more internet out there. You're free to hang out at more than one place.

petercooper4• 13 years ago

From the guidelines for "off topic":

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

And for "on topic":

anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Mainstream US-centric political news is not particularly intellectually gratifying and not what this site has ever done well. Reddit and Twitter had all the same pointless arguments.

And I say "mainstream" because perhaps the only hacker-specific part of the story was Snowden being a sys-admin. His revelations and the impact of the story were felt across all of society and were not specifically related to hackerdom (the follow up stories about DEF CON or protecting your own privacy by technical means, however, were clearly hacker oriented and well suited to HN).

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

I've recently decided that aversion to political discussion is a very bad thing. Sorry, it's the price you have to pay to live in a country without warrant-less surveillance, prior restraint, secret laws, and wars on drugs, journalism, hackers, free speech, random oil-rich countries of brown people, etc.

TelmoMenezes• 13 years ago

NSA, Snowden and Wikileaks are real instances of entities that previously exited only in the sci-fi stories that inspired hacker culture from the beginning. Claiming these stories to be off-topic in a hackers forum is absurd.

coherentpony3• 13 years ago

True, but people posting them to the front page 3e200 times is also absurd.

contextual• 13 years ago

There's also https://www.plantdietlife.com that posted here not long ago. Both are interesting and worthy topics. It's getting users engaged with the content, that's the challenge.

pmelendez• 13 years ago

I remember read last week about someone suggesting to grab HN code and putting it on an EC2 instance. It was for a business news site if I recall correctly. It seems somebody took the idea, this is actually hosted in AWS.

Houshalter2• 13 years ago

Kind of off topic, but I've been thinking about building a site like HN/reddit, but instead of ranking stuff based on how many votes it has, use machine learning to predict how likely a specific individual is to upvote it.

That way everyone's front page is based off what they tend to like, and what people who like similar stuff to them liked. That way you don't have to fracture stuff into 50 different communities and try to figure out what kind of content is acceptable in each, and what ones you want to subscribe to.

helloTree• 13 years ago

But probably you get stuck in local maxima. E.g. if I am on Hacker News I want to find new and exciting stuff and not things I already know ...

Houshalter2• 13 years ago

Ya you'd have to take that into account somehow. If 50 other people that are also interested in "technology" or whatever vote for something, then it's likely you will like it as well.

There is no reason you have to select content purely based on the website it's from, or the words it contains, but it's a really good filter for getting rid of stuff you definitely don't like. I.e. if you filtered reddit this way, most images and memes would get ranked way lower for me. Someone else might have articles or news stories ranked lower.

But mostly I'm looking to automatically find people who have similar interests or voting patterns, and then selecting based on what those people voted for to see what you might like.

antocv• 13 years ago

I cant read anything on that page without squinting hard and tilting my screen up and down.

Please, this is 2013, #000 on #ccc, not #ddd on #ccc.

thisisdallas2• 13 years ago

I'll definitely make note of this and get it changed. Thanks for the feedback.

coherentpony3• 13 years ago

HTML Tables? Really?

ksrm• 13 years ago

HN also uses tables.

coherentpony3• 13 years ago

That was my point.

Todd• 13 years ago

It would be nice to get an SSL cert on the site as soon as you're able. For the time being, passwords and political interest (as demonstrated by clicked URLs) are being passed as plain text.

bradleysmith• 13 years ago

Shameless plug for a related non-revenue project. I built a similarly inspired hn clone here:

http://news.intelmap.com/

This was really just done for tinkering's sake, not trying to make a successful "second HN strictly for politics". I actually built it to feed a news map here:

http://www.intelmap.com/

Thanks for the share, would love to compare notes. I'll sign up for LibreNews and check in every now and then.

vinceleo2• 13 years ago

Is it down?

grepthis• 13 years ago

Seems to be down.

vinceleo2• 13 years ago

that's right

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