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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=655711

by jcapote • 17 years ago

84 84 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

grandalf• 17 years ago

you mean employees of startups / non-founders? Or founders of startups for which marketing is irrelevant?

jcapote10• 17 years ago

Either. Just wanted to emphasize that the discussions are going to be deeply technical in nature and not business related in any sense.

PieSquared• 17 years ago

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.

jcapote10• 17 years ago

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

nothingmuch• 17 years ago

LtU

cubicle672• 17 years ago

try http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

I don't actually know for sure, but isn't this what reddit programming is for?

jcapote10• 17 years ago

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

cubicle672• 17 years ago

agreed, although it seems to have not deteriorated to the same degree and the main Reddit

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

Ah, that's not surprising. Thanks.

sjf• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

Absolutely. I'd even expect some cross-pollination as well.

lyaunzbe• 17 years ago

Good idea...but its been done already by Academic Hacker News: http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/

russell• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

Agreed, but I don't see how starting yet another site will fix the problematic lack of discussion.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

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.

GeneralMaximus2• 17 years ago

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.)

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

GeneralMaximus2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

anc2020• 17 years ago

Unfortunately it looks like Academic Hacker News ran out of steam (no new entries) :(

http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/

geuis• 17 years ago

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.

jcapote10• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

Why not just use the reddit codebase?

pg• 17 years ago

Which articles currently on the frontpage of HN would you not include?

jcapote10• 17 years ago

--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• 17 years ago

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.

paulgb2• 17 years ago

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?

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

IOW, you would evict the userbase.

quoderat• 17 years ago

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.

sker• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

You know, I actually feel the contrary: Hacker News has gone the way of more hacker than startups. shrug

jcapote10• 17 years ago

It makes perfect sense, hacker news should be more for startup/business news than really hacker news.

alex_c• 17 years ago

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

davi• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

ewiethoff• 17 years ago

May I suggest http://www.artima.com/, although not just anyone can post news there?

cdepillabout• 17 years ago

I'm also working on something similar at http://swooshnews.org/. I'll post more info later when I have something to show.

Eliezer• 17 years ago

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.

mariorz• 17 years ago

I think that description fits with the content you find on http://programming.reddit.com

hooande• 17 years ago

I bet you could build one in about 5 minutes and see what people think. http://slinkset.com/

jhancock• 17 years ago

I couldn't handle yet another site to check regularly. I sub-hn might be more appropriate.

lyime• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

Good luck; starting a social news site is hard.

10ren• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

What? I thought nearly all languages supported tail recursion.

blasdel• 17 years ago

Yes, but in language implementations without TCO, it's just recursion.

chanux• 17 years ago

OK, If it's really good I'll make it the secondary home page.

grinich• 17 years ago

You need to write an experimental dialect of a functional programming language first.

stuntgoat2• 17 years ago

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!

jcapote10• 17 years ago

Very into this. I twitter most of the things I find interesting in the same vein.

wooby2• 17 years ago

That's a really, really awesome idea. It's like combining the best of twitter with the best of social news.

almost2• 17 years ago

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).

stuntgoat2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

I think delicious will do all that.

timothychung• 17 years ago

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.

caffeine• 17 years ago

Yes! Do it. I want to read gory articles from the hacking fronts.

Better yet: write some nice content?

jyothi• 17 years ago

Slightly off-topic. An alternate idea for tailrecursion.com: how about creating a service which would provide 'unlimited' tail keywords. - the 'unlimited' part is just for the pitch to go with recursion.

This is of great interest/need to marketers and does involve recursion in a way that you use a seed to generate few keywords and then in turn use them to generate more. People would pay for it.

juliend2• 17 years ago

I feel this need for purely hacker oriented news too. That's why i started a little feed aggregator for blogs by Montreal hackers : http://montrealhackers.com .

That said, if you start a purely hacker-oriented version of HN i will watch it. :)

Zarathu• 17 years ago

"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!)"

I like the idea, to be honest; even though I use TextMate. :D

mroman• 17 years ago

Yes!

known• 17 years ago

It depends on the definition of "hack".

almost2• 17 years ago

Go for it, it might work. I think there's a little more to creating a good site then just building and letting stuff happen. There needs to be something that binds the community and some way of keeping the focus. Otherwise it will just drift to the lowest common denominator.

I for one will definitely give it a good try though.

Love the domain by the way, definitely sounds like a site I'd like :)

hs• 17 years ago

i would not. i have a lot of interest outside typing.

i prefer news site for 'creation' -- not showing often in hn: from bits (how to make buttons, logos, diet, health, pets, hobbies, etc) to physical (how to make soap, ink, fert, shoes, clothing, carpentry, masonry, housing, bomb, cooking, sport, etc)

also news for alternative living is interesting (like how to live in desert, mountain, sailing, around-world-air travel, live under $1usd/day, etc)

these stuffs are of course a google away (as is everything else), but rarely shown in hn maybe because chemistry (and physics?) is not the prerequisite for CS / EE

or maybe those are 'not hackers news' shrug

drRoflol• 17 years ago

Actually, I find HN to be the perfect mix of world news, economics, math papers and programming stuff, so no. And I don't fall into any of the "types" listed, I'm a CS-student (at least in one month I am), and don't have any serious plans of starting a company;)

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

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