Howdy! I run the site.

We see ourselves as complimentary to HN. HN is a wonderful community and I've made some dear friends for life here.

That said, some diffs:

1. The codebase is MIT licensed (per pg) and freely available: https://bit.ly/2E318hq

2. Submissions go straight to the front page. This won't last, but everyone has shown restraint and good taste so far. If something catches your interest and teaches us about the world, it's probably a good fit for the site; go ahead and submit it.

3. You can tag stories as whatever you want. Some of my favorites are:

essays|classics: https://bit.ly/2BrIoqo

!dev&!programming&!news: https://bit.ly/2GgGw7O

videos: https://bit.ly/2UPPagM

4. We have an active feature requests thread, and it's not uncommon for features to be implemented within a few hours after being requested: https://bit.ly/2THTgrb

5. Easter eggs!

- We just launched /l/place, a clone of reddit's old r/place. It's written in Arc: https://bit.ly/2UNwwpP

(Every pixel is a form with a submit button. Arc is awesome.)

- Chess easter egg: https://bit.ly/2thqlPc

- HTTP status code 418: I'm a teapot https://bit.ly/2GjRYQ2

- Terry Davis used to post to HN with "God says... {a bunch of random words}." One of his last comments revealed the script he used to generate those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15609972

#!/bin/bash
#This prints random words from the Linux dictionary.

echo "$(shuf -n 32 /usr/share/dict/words --random-source=/dev/urandom | tr '\n' ' ')"

So I set it up at the bottom of /l/templeos: https://bit.ly/2TCDP3z

I listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY33uoBSw3w a lot. I wish I'd started the site sooner, so that Terry would've had a place to chat with people. Even youtube nuked his account.

6. We're developing an iOS app that you can pre-alpha test: https://bit.ly/2tev6cf

Some WIP screenshots: https://bit.ly/2SMFpmt

The app is pretty great for reading HN as well, so we're hoping to maybe offer both a site reader and an HN reader.

We have an Android plan too.

7. Much of the community hangs out in our Discord server: https://bit.ly/2URZcOx (There are some top-shelf programming memes in the #silliness channel. Feel free to append to it.)

8. Private submissions. If you submit to /l/private, no one can see the submission except you. I've been using the site as a personal bookmarking service, and I find myself using it more often than Pinboard nowadays. https://bit.ly/2WURqW0

(There's still the question of how to import 4,000 bookmarks from pinboard. not sure yet. https://bit.ly/2BulZsu)

--

Some similarities:

1. You can search comments and stories: https://bit.ly/2GypaCN

2. The community's growth curve aims to match HN's early growth curve. The tail is about equal now:

https://bit.ly/2RTrJBx

(pg on twitter: "The graph is the right shape".)

3. A vibrant community with quality conversation. You might like burntsushi's comment about his two-way string matching studies: https://bit.ly/2TE6VPT

4. You can show your projects and ask the community whatever you want. (The only threshold for a Show submission is that you have to have put significant work into whatever you're showing. That said, you don't need to have something for people to play with. It can be an idea you've been working on, an unfinished side project, or a full product launch.)

https://bit.ly/2WXjGHk

https://bit.ly/2BuHEkm