Ask HN: Other Sites Like HN?

9 points by aodj 1 year ago | 11 comments

I find myself in a generally US-centric tech bubble and want to break out of it; what other websites do people use to find interesting global tech and science news?

Yawrehto 1 year ago |

https://restofworld.org sounds like what you're looking for - its mission is basically to report tech news from the non-West. Some good reads to get a taste of what they do (note: often fairly long):

https://restofworld.org/2024/riders-in-the-smog-gig-workers-..., about air pollution.

https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-stereotypes/. They analyzed 3,000 images generated by Midjourney and found strong biases in them.

https://restofworld.org/series/china-shopping-cart/. A series on China and how it influences shopping globally.

https://restofworld.org/2023/internet-most-used-languages/. The most used languages online vs in the real world. Most of the overused ones aren't surprising (eg, English, German, French) but some are (eg, Persian, Indonesian, Vietnamese)

https://restofworld.org/2023/chatgpt-problems-global-languag.... Basically, ChatGPT does really, really, badly at a lot of languages.

https://restofworld.org/2022/welcome-to-the-ambaniverse/. An exploration of how one guy, Mukesh Ambani, influences the life of many Indians. Not just through tech, but through shoes, mattresses, gas for their car, and a cricket team.

https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/. Internet censorship globally.

082349872349872 1 year ago |

Computer tech is sufficiently US-centric that many people here order US-American keyboards for their dev boxes. (I just embrace the suck and learned to use option-shift-5)

There was an attempt several years ago to get a francophone free-software news aggregator going, but I don't find it anymore.

https://habr.com/ru/articles/ ?

https://www.toutiao.com/ ? (I did manage to navigate to what, judging from the screenshots, was some kind of tech aggregation, but as with big US platforms, I have no idea how to link directly there)

jgrahamc 1 year ago |

Maybe not quite what you are looking for, but I made a site using the (Arc) HN code that is about retro-computing and gaming: https://twostopbits.com/news

infotainment 1 year ago | |

Wow neat, I wasn't aware of any true HN clones using the actual source! Was it difficult to get it up and running?

jgrahamc 1 year ago | | |

Not really. I had a harder time implementing new functionality (e.g. Two Stop Bits allows tags to be associated with a story: https://twostopbits.com/tags). In the past I'd done a bunch of Common Lisp stuff so was just a question of remembering that and dealing with the Arc syntax.

My fork and enhancements are here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/twostopbits

aodj 1 year ago |

For some context, I'm using sites like https://www.theverge.com/ and https://www.wired.com/ for more general browsing. Wired had a UK domain with some different content, but that appears to have ceased operation and now the .co.uk domain redirects to the general .com

stephenr 1 year ago |

I find Lobste.rs generally has more nuanced discussion about tech (and only tech, non tech stories are removed) and fewer hot takes, but it's also a heck of a lot "quieter" (i.e. much less volume of both stories and comments - the current #2, #3 and #4 articles on the homepage are 12+ hours old)

It also isn't intrinsically linked to the VC scene like HN, which may or may not be a plus/minus, depending on your views.

aodj 1 year ago | |

I tried getting access to the site once but gave up as the invitiation thing was a bit of a gatekeeper for me (by design)

stephenr 1 year ago | | |

There are people on HN (or probably other sites, maybe Reddit?) who will invite "strangers", but typically we want to have some idea what the person is like, as an invite creates a permanent link (on the site) between the inviter and the invitee.

If the invitee turns out to be a spammer, or posts a bunch of hate speech etc, the inviter may be held responsible for the invitee's actions. This isn't a hypothetical, it's explicitly explained in on the invite form, and I've seen cases where people were banned because they invited people who then acted spammy.