[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosph...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't
know about?
What unique or high-quality content only exists outside the
English-speaking web? Is there a Chinese equivalent to Hacker News?
A Hindi StackOverflow? I would love to broaden my horizons :)
Author : remolacha
Score : 449 points
Date : 2021-02-14 23:56 UTC (23 hours ago)
| donquichotte wrote:
| mikrocontroller.net, a German resource and forum for electronics,
| microcontrollers and low level programming.
| sasaf5 wrote:
| https://endic.naver.com
|
| Best resource for Korean language when approached from the
| Anglosphere.
| mcyc wrote:
| Yes, this is truly a great resource for Korean. There are some
| interesting bugs (like english text example search matches
| substrings rather than words; e.g. searching "tile" results in
| "The Ptile value is outside the range of valid values". There
| were worse cases a few months ago that seem to be resolved),
| but overall it is an invaluable tool for Korean learners.
| pmlnr wrote:
| https://prohardver.hu/forum/index.html
|
| Hungarian tech forum; think tech only reddit. The thinkpad thread
| used to host quite a decent knowledge in the x200 modding era.
|
| http://www.elektro.zolee.hu/rajz_lista.php
|
| Oldschool electronic circuit board drawings, also Hungarian.
| [deleted]
| fomine3 wrote:
| Scrapbox is well made note/collaboration SaaS made in Kyoto. It's
| frictionless experience but also opinionated (like they don't use
| Markdown).
|
| https://scrapbox.io/
| djaahk wrote:
| In French you have a few interesting options, notably:
|
| - LeBonCoin.fr ("the good corner", a Craigslist type site that's
| used for everything from second-hand selling to job hunting to
| meet up organising),
|
| - LesNumeriques.fr is a decent tech review media with in-depth
| tests and a VERY critical community providing good balance
|
| - Gazelle which has now become backmarket.fr (also exists across
| other countries like Spain and the U.K.) and offers vetted
| second-hand tech gear - great for bargains and avoiding buying
| new for ecological reasons,
|
| - LeMonde.fr/Les-Decodeurs is the fact checking arm of the French
| paper Le Monde and has some really interesting visualisations and
| articles
|
| - Presse-Citron.fr was one of the first tech blogs in France and
| continues to be a reference
|
| - priice.fr is a price comparison site I've heard good things
| about but haven't used myself yet
|
| - danstonchat.com is the French version of Bash.org for IRC fun
|
| - Legorafi.fr is a satirical paper with lots of hilarious fake
| news - often quite timely - akin to The Onion (it's a play on
| words on the famous French paper Le Figaro)
|
| - Gandi.net is a registrar and hosting site which I've been using
| forever - they're awesome
| di4na wrote:
| canardpc.com is probably the best video game magazine and
| review around.
|
| I would not advise presse-citron they have been pretty obvious
| about being more or less just a sold out editorial at this
| point.
| LordNight wrote:
| It's very niche but Philharmonie de Paris has some brilliant
| visualized analysis of some classical music scores.
|
| For example:
|
| https://pad.philharmoniedeparis.fr/CMDA/CMDA100008800/defaul...
|
| https://pad.philharmoniedeparis.fr/CMDA/CMDA100003900/defaul...
|
| https://pad.philharmoniedeparis.fr/CMDA/CMDA100004800/defaul...
|
| Sadly they don't present the full scores, only the beginning or
| some part. I wonder if there are other sites where you can find
| something similar.
|
| Somewhat related is http://www.critique-musicale.com/ - another
| great site.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I like Gandi too (I'm American, not French), very pleasant
| compared to other registrars I've used.
| gquiniou wrote:
| I would add Linuxfr.org and specifically the user journals :
| https://linuxfr.org/journaux : it is the website of the french
| libre software community.
|
| Lots of interesting content you don't find anywhere else.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| LeBonCoin became annoying since they put contact details behind
| a login wall. What made it successful back in the day is the
| simplicity - just post an ad and have interested people call
| you. Search for something and you can directly call sellers.
| staticelf wrote:
| LeBonCoin is actually a fork of the Swedish original site
| Blocket.se, visit it and you will see similarities. Both are
| today owned by the Norwegian umbrella organisation Schibsted
| afaik.
| aasasd wrote:
| If you're asking about services too: Yandex Market. It's like
| Google Product Search that is actually successful and widely used
| for searching for specific products, or Amazon that doesn't
| swindle you left and right.
|
| It's basically just a large catalog of products, filled by third-
| parties a-la Amazon now, only it didn't sell anything itself
| (until recently). Instead, it had detailed characteristics for a
| lot of products, with corresponding filters in the catalog; and
| good user reviews. Since Yandex is good at dealing with
| unstructured text, even poor data exports by vendors end up
| organized decently on the service. Since Yandex had millions of
| users on its other services, they all could leave reviews without
| much hassle. And since Yandex is primarily a search engine, it
| knows when a bogus review is spammed across the web.
|
| Alas, it's only available in Russian since it works with Russian
| shops. Every time I need to look for a product on the English
| web, I lament that there's no service that is quite that solid.
| Amazon has filters, but search results usually look like simply a
| bit better Aliexpress. In regard to Google Product Search I don't
| even know anything particular--I tried to use it a couple times,
| and my general impression is that it... exists. Not much else.
| daishi424 wrote:
| Looks like they've been running A/B tests recently - reviews
| are hidden on some products. Or maybe they hide reviews for
| anonymous user. I hope it won't go further than that.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Sweden has prisjakt.nu, and Japan has kakaku.com that serve the
| same purpose, they're both great! It's so nice to be able to
| drill down into any product in any product category (for kakaku
| this is not just tech products but contact lenses, credit
| cards, movers, electricity providers, car insurance, phone
| plans, etc) using the specs you want, and then sort by
| intelligently selected columns like $/TB for a harddisk.
|
| Amazon attempts to do some product categorization but it
| doesn't work at all - even when they have the category you want
| to filter on the results are usually wrong, and the sort
| options are bad and marred by their ads and recommendations.
| RasmusLarsen wrote:
| I don't know the exact list, but pricespy (prisjakt) is in a
| lot of countries. I have used .no/.se/.co.uk previously and
| they all seem to be at about the same level for their
| respective countries.
| universa1 wrote:
| Sounds a lot like geizhals.de - price comparison site with
| detailed info on products, best for tech products though
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| it's an awesome product search focused on depth not
| breadth. This site lets you filter headsets by connectors
| and dog food by taste.
| tatami wrote:
| Geizhals is amazing! I started using it for price
| comparison almost 15 years ago, but nowadays I use it
| mainly as a database to filter for products which fit my
| needs and are available.
| jug wrote:
| Prisjakt (Pricespy) is very deep in Swedish online shopping
| culture. I wonder if Amazon realizes what they are up to. It
| does make their website feel superfluous to me and more like
| what what I'd expect from a company of the year 2010.
|
| What I like most about Prisjakt is that they don't try to
| second guess what I want given a basic search phrase.
| Instead, Prisjakt gives me the categories to drill down into
| tables. Sortable and filterable tables with product name,
| price, rating, and category-specific columns (like storage
| size and $/GB for hard drives). The filters run DEEP. If
| you're looking for a HDR display, you can be happy with a
| "HDR" filter but also opt into DisplayHDR 1000 certified
| displays with 120+ Hz. For the entire Sweden because every
| decent Swedish retail chain and store is on this website, and
| they have everything between solid state drives and shoes in
| their database. If you look for watches you have filters and
| columns for e.g. automatic, solar powered watches, etc.
|
| Amazon is very, very different. They're also a front to
| various stores but try to make it appear like THEY are the
| store when they are really not. Prisjakt instead just has
| this razor sharp focus on making you in charge of the data
| and forming decisions based on that, and then when the
| decision is made, presents you a list of the stores with that
| product and their respective prices. You are in control and
| maybe you prefer a certain one because you're a long time
| user there and like them.
|
| So Amazon becomes a "fake store front" (like Sweden's CDON)
| and Prisjakt is more like just a database. One optimized for
| usability and presentation.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > It does make their website feel superfluous to me and
| more like what what I'd expect from a company of the year
| 2010.
|
| That is a wonderful feature, not a bug. I wish all websites
| would go back to 2010 era.
|
| The usability alone of Prisjakt is incredible. It's not in-
| your-face like the shit that's being invented in 2020s.
| aasasd wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds pretty much like a description of Yandex
| Market, plus YM also has good user reviews. I regularly
| learned from reviews what I _might_ want from a product,
| for both functionality and quality.
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| Something like https://idealo.de/ (and .at .es .fr .it .co.uk)?
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Idealo is a great price comparison website, but not really
| for finding the right product for you. More for finding where
| to buy the product you've already chosen.
| scns wrote:
| I usually use https://geizhals.de/ since it is more tech
| related. Useable for people living in EU/UK/AT/DE/PL.
| Black101 wrote:
| Yandex reverse image search is also much better then Google's
| version in my experience.
| adventured wrote:
| Google intentionally tamped down their reverse image search
| several years ago. They fundamentally changed how the product
| works, the results that it delivers, and did it on purpose.
| It's definitely inferior if you're actually looking to find
| copies of an image (Google is fully aware, they don't want
| you to be able to effectively search their image system that
| way).
| beefield wrote:
| > they don't want you to be able to effectively search
| their image system that way)
|
| Why?
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| This is an excellent question.
| pizza wrote:
| Interestingly enough, Yandex did so also, a while ago, as
| it was being used as a scarily good open-source undercover
| agent identification tool
| https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-
| tos/2019/12/26/guid...
|
| although I can't seem to find the followup post that
| actually discusses how the Yandex search quality decreased
| following the publication of the original article
| llampx wrote:
| Fascinating read, thank you. I can't help but wonder what
| is available to big companies and governments these days
| in terms of technology and algorithms that we laypeople
| don't have access to or even dream about.
| exikyut wrote:
| Ah, wow, finally found the exact article I was looking
| for. This thing:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22492671
|
| And then there was the genomics or DNA database or
| something that a couple of people were running out of
| their garage (well, a bit more than that) but then had to
| shut down after law enforcement discovered it, found it
| incredibly useful, and everything rapidly went sideways
| as "things aren't supposed to work that way"... but I'm
| having the hardest time finding the link for this one
| sadly ._.
|
| EDIT (just within the 1hr window :): I think the second
| one was GEDmatch. A quick search of
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gedmatch didn't relocate
| what I remember reading, but I think this was it.
| modeless wrote:
| Amazon product listings and reviews are such a cesspool these
| days. It's a travesty.
|
| It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from
| useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled
| in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good
| quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same
| two products with different fake brand names. The sorting
| options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they
| indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying
| reviews.
|
| It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.
| [deleted]
| derefr wrote:
| You'd think someone would have come along who just scrapes
| Amazon's listings, applies their own intelligent indexing
| heuristics, and spits out a new search/browse page that just
| links through to Amazon's regular product pages. Like
| CamelCamelCamel, but for dimensions other than price.
| modeless wrote:
| I thought about trying to build something like this, but
| figured that I'd probably just get sued. Also I think
| matching listings to accurate product metadata would be
| practically impossible even if you had a good source for
| the metadata, and it still wouldn't fix issues like
| inventory commingling in the warehouse or bait and switch
| listings that reduce product quality over time.
| fomine3 wrote:
| AFAIK in the kakaku.com case, between kakaku.com and
| shopping sites are partner. Sites (including Amazon.co.jp)
| gets customers, kakaku.com gets affiliate fee. Why this
| model won't work in the US?
| flarg wrote:
| Fakespot
| karlicoss wrote:
| Can confirm -- if I need to buy some electronic device, I'd do
| a search/filter on yandex.market first and compare side by
| side. Amazon with its fuzzy searches is garbage for such
| shopping.
| adem wrote:
| [Eksi
| Sozluk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ek%C5%9Fi_S%C3%B6zl%C3%BCk)
| kamyarg wrote:
| Came to mention Eksi also.
|
| Eksi Sozluk(Sour Times) is a community driven wikipedia without
| the moderation. Most tech-savvy Turkish people I know visit it
| atleast once per day.
| gspr wrote:
| Most of the techy anglosophere know CCC from the annual
| conferences. But they do much more: https://www.ccc.de/
| charlysl wrote:
| In Spain, forocoches.com (started out as a forum around cars, now
| tons of subforums; right-wing bias; invitation only) and
| meneame.net (user submitted news, tech & more; left-wing bias;
| draconian moderation).
|
| Both very useful to understand what people really think in Spain
| about all kinds of topics.
| Darmody wrote:
| Meneame is the Spanish /r/politics. You will hardly get
| anything of value out of there. Even the founder noped the f
| out.
| luxurytent wrote:
| https://www.webtoons.com/en/ is massively popular in Korea and
| surrounding, but niche in NA
| daocao wrote:
| Taobao!
|
| It's like eBay, but for wholesalers who are ~selling "ghost
| shift" parts~ offloading excess inventory to small-time
| consumers.
|
| There are brokers for international customers; they communicate
| with the sellers and consolidate orders into a single parcel for
| ~10-15% commission.
|
| But it's harder to browse these days; less is available without
| an account which you need to provide a mobile number for, and you
| have to jump through hoops to avoid getting only "international"
| listings.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| https://tweakers.net
|
| Dutch-language tech community. Has news, a well-moderated and
| active forum, product and price comparison (with many filtering
| options) and reviews (both by tech journalists and the
| community), second-hand sales, and a job board.
|
| It was started by one guy 20 (if not more) years ago, but these
| days it's part of one of the big Dutch-language media
| conglomerates (DPG Media).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I started visiting this site when I was 16/17 and starting off
| my IT classes. I still feel like I learned more browsing the
| site's daily news than my school. It's still my daily routine,
| nearly 20 years later, to visit it every day. I'm apparently in
| the top 100 wrt number of comments (mostly shitposts and
| arguing, kinda like what I do on HN)
|
| Never did get on with the forums much, mind you. But some
| threads are fun to follow.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I think the forums are one of the site's greatest assets,
| actually. But there does exist a certain culture there in
| which absolutely everything is debated into oblivion, even
| long past the point where such a discussion stops being
| useful for answering the question at hand.
| superdeeda wrote:
| Nice! Any other Dutch websites you can recommend?
| Darmody wrote:
| - EU Open Data Portal: https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/home
|
| - Research*EU Magazines: https://cordis.europa.eu/research-eu -
| EU Research magazine is the World leading open access publication
| for scientific research and dissemination. Each issue covers a
| different thematic area, presenting cutting edge science in an
| innovative and entertaining format.
| gspr wrote:
| https://yr.no provides an API for high quality open weather data,
| globally, supplied by the Norwegian meteorological service.
| Information is available in English too, but it is perhaps not
| well-known in the anglosophere.
| luplex wrote:
| It's what I use for mountaineering in the alps. It has all the
| mountains as searchable POIs, so it's much better than other
| consumer apps.
| gspr wrote:
| I guess I should add some information, since it's not trivial
| to find from the main page. The API documentation [1] is in
| English. Most (all?) the data is dual-licensed under CC-BY-4.0
| and the Norwegian open government data license [2]. Please do
| take care not to abuse a tax-payer funded service, and do obey
| the the terms of service [3] (these are restrictions on
| querying the API, not on the use of the data themselves, which
| seems reasonable).
|
| [1] https://developer.yr.no/
|
| [2] https://data.norge.no/nlod/en/2.0/
|
| [3] https://developer.yr.no/doc/TermsOfService/
| coopierez wrote:
| The app also has an extremely enjoyable visualisation of the
| weather predictions, which is a nice bonus!
| shyber wrote:
| this one is also great for sailing
| yarbas89 wrote:
| There's a very old Turkish website (late 90s AFAIK) called
| http://eksisozluk.com - it's like a mix between wiki, reddit and
| urbandictionary.
|
| It has an important place in Turkish youth subculture and I
| believe it originated as a 'forum' for the tech community in
| Turkey.
| 4cao wrote:
| 4PDA.ru is arguably a better version of XDA-Developers: a
| repository of all kinds of customizations for Android devices.
|
| Unlike XDA, it's well-categorized into threads, the first post is
| always a good summary of what's inside that particular thread
| with links to individual posts, and low-effort clutter is
| mercilessly moderated away.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| I particularly like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marefa. I
| wouldn't know about the quality of the content - I don't speak
| Arabic - but from what I can tell it's like Arabic Wikipedia, but
| you also get blogs, forums, ancient manuscripts, email with
| unlimited storage (?!?) and much more. The Arabic internet in
| general is always interesting to me, because even in 2021 it
| still seems very ad-hoc and far less commercialized than the
| parts of the internet I've seen in other languages.
| imedadel wrote:
| It started as a fork of the Arabic Wikipedia, though. And most
| content is outdated since they don't have that many
| contributors.
| ximus wrote:
| Quality docomentaries and looks on society on Arte.tv, the
| european culture channel
|
| AFAIK, north americans don't know about its existence. It's
| available in english.
|
| https://www.arte.tv/en/
| bierjunge wrote:
| A while ago ARTE started a side channel and asked users how to
| name it, which we all know is a bad idea in the internet. The
| result was "Irgendwas mit ARTE und Kultur" ("something with
| ARTE and culture") and they really took the name:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/IrgendwasmitARTEundKultur Kudos to
| ARTE.
|
| BTW. it's a cooperation between french and german public
| televisions, is there something similar elsewhere in the world?
| [deleted]
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| Their Twitter team(?) is also all-in on self-deprecation:
| https://twitter.com/ARTEde/status/928269091311296512
| remify wrote:
| As a French my definition of a documentary is what Arte
| produce.
|
| I recently discovered what a documentary is for an American and
| it's night and day. American documentaries are entertainment
| package with actions and conspiracies. There's really not a lot
| of discovery and knowledge.
| drstewart wrote:
| Can you explain how and why you think a documentary such as
| Ken Burns' Civil War series, a seminal example of American
| documentaries, is filled with action and conspiracies?
| currymj wrote:
| if you go to the "documentary" section on Netflix or
| another streaming service, there are dozens and dozens of
| really low-quality documentaries. Some are on conspiracy
| topics (UFOs, ancient aliens) or stupid and sensationalist.
| They all seem to treat the audience like they are not very
| smart.
|
| I think most were produced on small budgets to run during
| the daytime on cable channels like History or Discovery,
| and then sold to Netflix as well.
|
| These could definitely give someone a bad impression of
| what counts for documentary film in America, and in terms
| of raw numbers there are way more of them than anything
| else.
|
| However, the documentaries produced for American public
| television (like those of Ken Burns) tend to be very good.
| And there are also high-quality American documentaries that
| go on the festival circuit.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| There is this short weekly broadcast on french and german
| cultures compared, with a light tone, that we never miss:
| https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/RC-014034/karambolage/ Available
| in french and german languages.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Vimeo has amazing documentaries as well. Similar to Arte.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| NHK World is a similar website and app for phones and TV, but
| for Japan (and occasionally other Asian countries). An immense
| variety of culture, tourism, history, and food content. I
| believe BBC and RT also have cultural documentaries (you can
| ignore their news content).
| afkqs wrote:
| A great initiative in the media industry for sure. They have a
| programme call Tracks that explores the underground culture
| [1]. Very interesting
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/TracksARTEde
| tauntz wrote:
| > They have a programme call Tracks that explores the
| underground culture
|
| I.. I thought that it's gonna be a Youtube channel about
| people living.. underground. I should get some sleep.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| And currently a great series on "The civil war" - "La guerre
| de secession" - "Der Amerikanische Burgerkrieg", mostly for
| European watchers obviously. With plenty of photos and
| citations from the time and just enough commentary as
| necessary. Available in french and german.
| https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/040864-001-A/la-guerre-de-
| sece...
| Kunix wrote:
| Tracks is what made me discover the demoscene 20 years ago
| when I was in secondary school. Such a great show.
| nicbou wrote:
| Arte has some amazing German and French documentaries on
| YouTube. I believe they are not accessible everywhere, but if
| you have access, it's worth a look.
| scns wrote:
| You can watch the series which inspired Homeland there in
| french (Original) or german. No english subtitles though.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1676462/
|
| https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/048080-001-A/hatufim-in-der-ha...
| abledon wrote:
| Qiita https://qiita.com/
|
| its like a cool mixture of stack overflow + reddit + twitter ...
| all in japanese
| fomine3 wrote:
| dev.to looks like equivalent to Qiita. Now zenn.dev is getting
| popular in Japan instead of Qiita.
| input_sh wrote:
| Any cool monetization strategies on Qiita or Zenn? I know
| dev.to is betting on Coil, so I'm curious if Japanese
| developers have a method they're betting on.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Qiita has been acquired by game company Ateam 3 years ago.
| Possibly it works for the company's advertisement. They
| also selling collaboration SaaS called Qiita Team. I don't
| see any their cool monetization.
|
| Zenn has been trying to sell paid article for profit.
| That's not so cool for tech perspective but it's looks good
| for me if they succeeded. Zenn was operated by single
| person but it has been acquired by IT(AWS) service company
| Classmethod very recently. Maybe they also work for the
| company's advertisement.
| zinclozenge wrote:
| It sometimes shows up when you're searching tech topics. I
| actually found a series of blog posts that explained how to
| write Erlang/Elixir NIFs in Rust with Rustler.
| Seb-C wrote:
| Yes, it's everywhere when you search technical topics in Japan.
| fromaj wrote:
| I can understand a fair bit of japanese and posts on Qiita have
| often been life-savers. They have quite a few medium-like long
| posts where people describe how to do something specific
| through a tutorial or step-by-step explanation.
| StackOverflow/Reddit aren't really great for that
| guerrilla wrote:
| While we're doing this, I should point out that every European
| country has their own public television, radio and news site like
| NPR/PBS or the BBC. You can easily find them via Wikipedia but
| I'll list a couple:
|
| - Germany: ARD, ZDF, DW, Deutschlandfunk
|
| - France: France.TV, RadioFrance
|
| - Spain: RTVE
|
| - Portugal: RTP
|
| - Italy: RAI
|
| - Switzerland: RTS, SRF, RSI, RSR
|
| - Sweden: SR, SVT
|
| - Denmark: DR
|
| - Norway: NRK
|
| They all have websites that are pretty easy to find and although
| some content is region restricted, a lot is not.
| Arete314159 wrote:
| Alas, RTVE no longer lets you watch Ministerio Del Tiempo
| episodes for free (sort of like a Spanish Dr. Who time travel
| show).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hattori31 wrote:
| famitsu.com
|
| Japanese site for game news. Every new and upcoming game is in
| the list, very good to see whata coming
| walrus01 wrote:
| news of the weirdest electronic gadgets for sale in japan. google
| chrome and automatic translate do a reasonably good job on the
| page. it's related to the retail stores in the akihabara district
| of tokyo.
|
| https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/
|
| also its parent site PC watch
|
| https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/
| fomine3 wrote:
| Similar website: https://www.gdm.or.jp/
|
| They also posts new PC parts rumors relatively early.
| Answerawake wrote:
| Thank you for posting! What a nifty little site showing off
| things I didn't even know I wanted!
|
| Small selection of things that I found interesting:
|
| 1. Turn your old Dreamcast VMU into a modern game console:
| Would never have thought of it but in hindsight its the perfect
| device to mod given its form factor! https://akiba-
| pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/news/1306197....
|
| 2. Combine a Raspberry pi with a Famicom cartridge to provide
| the Famicom the ability to run DOOM. Given all the other
| Famicom related releases listed there, its amazing to see the
| Famicon still alive and kicking. Wonder how the N64 scene is
| like over there. https://akiba-
| pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/news/1297530....
|
| 3. IPS Screen mod for Wonderswan (granted we have seen lots of
| IPS mods so this one for Wonderswan makes sense given its
| Japan)
|
| The story about Akihabara stores being vacant seems sad though.
| Even they cannot escape COVID/the future of shopping being
| online it seems.
| known wrote:
| Examples of Chinese equivalents to Western internet services[
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#E...
| SenHeng wrote:
| 5ch.net
|
| _The_ Japanese anonymous forum that inspired 4chan. It actually
| started of as 2 channel but various business and legal disputes
| happened.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Tabelog lead to some amazing dinners in Japan.
| Ueland wrote:
| A Norwegian web-store is famous for its "design" and is being
| showcased in all kinds of design talks and presentations. (Of
| course in the "How not to do it" category)
|
| http://arngren.net/
| aGRa_kursk wrote:
| Runet (Russian-speaking part of Internet) has LOTS of it. We have
| HN equivalent (habr.com). We have RSDN (rsdn.org), which is
| somewhat like StackOverflow, but in Russian.
|
| Social networks largely unknown outside of Russia? We have'em
| (vk.com, ok.ru). Reddit equivalent? See pikabu.ru. IMDB? See
| kinopoisk.ru.
|
| There's a Russian browser (Yandex.Browser), Russian map service
| (Yandex.maps), tons of Russian e-mail, hosting and cloud
| services, Russian Spotify (Yandex.Music), Russian Netflix
| (several of them, actually), Russian Uber (Yandex.Taxi, which
| actually owns Russian Uber).
|
| You'll see lots of Yandex services here, it's sort of Russian
| Google (except it predates Google by a year or so). Yandex's
| primary business is search and advertising, but just like Google,
| they diversify a lot. And even in primary area, they sometimes
| manage to beat Google. Yandex's reverse image search (when you
| upload the image to search for similar ones) is FAR superior to
| Google's.
|
| And there's a lot of unique Russian content on global sites like
| Facebook, Livejournal (owned by a Russian company nowadays) or
| Wikipedia.
| BlueGh0st wrote:
| I can vouch for Yandex's reverse image search. It blows
| Google's out of the water. I think regular image search is
| typically better too, depending on what your needs are (Google
| seems to prefer stock imagery which can be frustrating).
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Maybe helpful when browsing extra-anglosphere sites:
| translate.yandex both has much more liberal length limits than
| GOOG translate and makes it easy to look up alternative
| translations for individual words.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Habr is great. I don't visit other Runet sites often, but read
| Habr regularly - it's part HN, part Slashdot, with great
| original content.
|
| The Russian Internet seems to be an overall great place to find
| information on old devices, old software, and the like.
| http://sht-rajvo.narod.ru/index.htm is a retro-looking site
| about retrocomputing, it has many articles from computer
| magazines circa 1990. Also worth noting that due to Russia's
| traditionally "relaxed view on copyright" it's not hard to
| stumble upon a site that has direct download links to e.g.
| versions of MS-DOS or Windows 3.1.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Yandex is responsible for developing and maintaining my
| favourite columnar database: ClickHouse. It's one of those
| pieces of software where everything I use it go "wow this is
| fast".
| LordNight wrote:
| Besides yandex there are also rambler.ru (less popular, but
| even older) and mail.ru
|
| dic.academic.ru allows you to search through several dozens
| encyclopedias. And bigenc.ru adds onother one (the largest and
| the most recent).
|
| fantlab.ru is the best site dedicated to sci fi/fantasy
| literature (it is IMO 10 times better than goodreads or
| librarything). There are also a lot of site dedicated to
| literature like proza.ru lib.ru litres.ru feb-web.ru
| www.obshelit.su etc.
|
| Besides habr, forum.ru-board.com ixbt.com cyberforum.ru
| overclockers.ru 3dnews.ru are very popular sites dedicated to
| hardware/software/coding.
|
| There are a lot of sited about video games like old-games.ru
| goha.ru stopgame.ru riotpixels.com as well as a streaming
| platforms like goodgame.ru
|
| rutube.ru exists for many years now but it's crap.
|
| There are several sites dedicated to popular science like
| elementy.ru arhe.msk.ru gramota.ru histrf.ru
|
| www.intoclassics.net and www.classicalmusicnews.ru are popular
| for those interested in classical music. www.darkside.ru and
| rock.ru for rock music.
|
| forum.awd.ru and otzyv.ru are popular travel sites.
|
| There several general purpose forums like forum.rcmir.com
| www.e1.ru/talk/forum/ In general, classic forums are still very
| much alive in runet (hell, even LJ is still alive) and there
| are a lot of niche forums you could visit.
|
| There are more than 100 news sites, but the quality is quite
| average (like everywhere else). meduza.io ria.ru rbc.ru tass.ru
| inosmi.ru for example. sports.ru and championat.ru for sport-
| related news.
|
| ozon.ru is now a russian version of amazon.
|
| And obviously there are a lot of pirate sites from rutracker to
| flibusta to libgen.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| i like anekdot.ru - they have a pretty solid community, and the
| jokes are really funny (sometimes).
| luplex wrote:
| https://wiki.selfhtml.org/ (German) is where I learnt the basics
| of web development in high school. I'm not sure how up to date it
| is, though.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| The French national library has quite an extensive digital
| collection. https://gallica.bnf.fr/
| lefrancais wrote:
| Wow, just discovered that! thanks it is awesome. I finally
| found illustrated version of Les trois mousquetaires and Jules
| Vernes in epub for free !
| logicchains wrote:
| Yandex! It's like Russian Google, but the results (or at least
| the English-language results) are more algorithmic, without human
| intervention in the rankings.
| yread wrote:
| https://mapy.cz/
|
| Google maps alternative with great tourist maps (also has a layer
| for cross-country skiing) and an app with offline maps
| simonmales wrote:
| As a non Czech I assumed it was a nice layer on top of OSM
| tiles, but the outdoor trails are truly high quality.
|
| Only have managed to fault it once whilst trying to decide how
| to descend a mountain in Slovenia.
| exyi wrote:
| Yes, outside Czechia and Slovakia they use data from Open
| Street Maps.
| sajagi wrote:
| Best worldwide outdoor map there is, with offline support. I
| use it very often to find trails not even locals know about
| (e.g. Japan). Don't forget to switch to Outdoor mode!
| mehrzad wrote:
| Not a website, and this may be obvious, but if you are doing
| research on Wikipedia on a topic from a non-English speaking
| country, sometimes that nation's language features a longer and
| more in depth article. I am currently learning German and have
| noticed this with regard to articles regarding universities in
| Germany.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| this is a great recommendation also for scientific topics:
|
| Often when I am really interested in something I read the
| article and four different languages, because most often each
| language offers different aspects and images.
|
| also it's a great way to learn languages.
| fy20 wrote:
| There's a home automation protocol that's been around for over 20
| years called KNX. It's backed by big names (ABB, Hager, Gira,
| Osram, Mean Well) however outside of Germany it's pretty much
| unknown. Compared to ZigBee or Z-Wave it's wired and the config
| is stored in the devices themselves, so there's no single point
| of failure. It has strict certification requirements so you can
| be guaranteed that products from different manufacturers will
| work together (this does mean its more expensive though). The
| quality of the hardware (esp. motion/presence sensors) is a lot
| better than what you can buy from Amazon or the 'smart home'
| section in your local Walmart.
|
| There's plenty of content (in German) on YouTube about it, and
| forums:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiCPbFz0Ld6mera2fNDRWzw
|
| https://knx-user-forum.de/
| thecleaner wrote:
| Germany really needs to start documenting their work in
| English. This is good stuff.
| jxf wrote:
| Or more people need to learn German? The community is already
| there, obviously -- if others want to join, that's how they
| do it.
| bloqs wrote:
| After many attempts to speak german with germans, it seems
| to be a consistent theme that they prefer english if you
| are incompetent.
| d26900 wrote:
| Not everyone has the time to learn yet another language.
| Besides, learning a language to understand content like
| this takes a lot of time. (I speak 4 languages already.)
| qntty wrote:
| Have you ever tried to communicate in
| beginner/intermediate-level German with a German speaker?
| They'd most likely insist on switching to English.
| enchiridion wrote:
| A lot of negative replies to this which don't make sense.
|
| We're talking about software which is used to make money.
| Translating it to English would help with that, because
| English is the default for software development (yes this is
| changing, but it's true at the moment).
|
| It's not like we're talking about a work of art, it's a tool
| the creators sell.
| thecleaner wrote:
| I mean I said this out of appreciation. I suppose its just
| much easier to not get involved with the German software
| ecosystem at all since the impression is that they dont
| need attention from people who don't speak German. I don't
| see any reason why more people would have a professional
| reason to do so.
| pestatije wrote:
| So, the OP asks about non-english sites, and the _first_
| reply is a "you should do that in English". WTF?
| thecleaner wrote:
| It says software out of Anglosphere not software not in
| English.
| kreeben wrote:
| Germany is fine with you not being able to ingest their
| documentation. If there is ever a need to do anything it
| would be the need for you to learn German and the need for
| anyone monolingual to learn a second language. The more
| balance in the world the better place it would be.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I agree with your point on principle, but to balance a bit:
| I'm trilingual but don't (yet) speak German. Yes there's no
| fair reason why English should be the standard language,
| but there's value in a standard language and that's the
| closest we have.
|
| Edit: I'm not American and English isn't my native language
| d26900 wrote:
| Authors addendum: This post was a mistake on my part.
| Please downvote this post. Thank you! I would rather have
| a retract option, but there is none here on HN.
|
| Original post:
|
| Apologies to you on behalf of people who made you feel
| uncomfortable.
|
| Full disclosure:
|
| I had (still have?) negative
| biases/sentiments/stereotypes towards Americans: being
| ignorant, self-absorbed, reckless, careless etc.
|
| And this almost made me have a knee-jerk reaction to the
| expressed desire to make the content in question
| available in English. As if I am tired of you Americans
| Americanizing everything you touch[2]. This sentiment is
| also expressed in Ramstein's song "Amerika"[3].
|
| But that's why it is called a "stereotype". I shouldn't
| stereotype a population of +300 m out of a small sample
| size (that includes YouTube/Twitter too). I lose a lot of
| potential good/bad experiences if I continue to do that.
| And even if, for the sake of the argument, 90% match my
| silly stereotype, I still should have an optimistic modus
| operandi. Pessimism/cynicism is a counterproductive
| trait. You should be an optimist[1].
|
| But putting all that aside, what makes you think that the
| inquirer is an American? He could be a French person
| knowing Japanese and Russian besides English.
|
| Anyhow, we shouldn't follow protectionist policies.
| Nothing good comes out of that. We should be
| thankful/appreciative to people who are willing to share
| content with others (open source, creative commons,
| etc.).
|
| References:
|
| [1] Algorithms to Live By
|
| [2]
| https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2021/01/04/report-
| plays...
|
| [3] https://youtu.be/Rr8ljRgcJNM
|
| Edit: for the people who take issue with my post here: I
| would appreciate a feedback on why my post is
| counterproductive/bad. Thank you!
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I am not sure you meant to answer to my comment, because
| I didn't mention feeling uncomfortable, and didn't take
| any guess about anyone's nationality. Also I'm not
| American, I edited my comment to clear that up.
| d26900 wrote:
| You're right, benhurmarcel. My input here has come to
| nothing, and it wasn't a good input to begin with. I wish
| there was a retract option.
| kreeben wrote:
| I empathize with you. But I reject that it should fall
| upon Germany to learn English for your convenience or
| that the task of translating their texts should fall upon
| them. I guess I reacted (perhaps poorly) to GP's
| statement that Germany "really should start documenting
| their tech in English" which to me sounded rather
| preposterous.
| sneak wrote:
| Germany already learned English. There is approximately
| no-one in Germany under 30-40 who doesn't speak a little
| English.
| tubularhells wrote:
| Learn German, Dummkopf!
| lobotryas wrote:
| We beat them in 1945 just so we didn't have to do that!
| dang wrote:
| Oh god, please don't do this here.
| terramex wrote:
| In Poland there is elektroda.pl - forum about electronics,
| electrics and programming. Is was founded in 1999 and has over 2
| 500 000 registered accounts.
|
| It is a bit like polish StackOverflow - every time you google a
| technical problem in polish you will find an elektroda.pl thread
| on very top. And just like on SO, it will usually be closed by
| moderator for some bizarre and arcane reason.
|
| It certainly has 'old-usenet' vibe, both the good parts (huge
| amount of knowledge) and the bad (pretty toxic behaviour of many
| power users and moderators).
| [deleted]
| d26900 wrote:
| I. C++ (related) forums from Germany and Japan that I've found
| (so far):
|
| - https://www.c-plusplus.net/
|
| - https://dixq.net/
|
| II. Quality YouTube channels from Germany:
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/c/MrWissen2go/videos
|
| Explains societal/political/historical topics (in a neutral
| manner) to laypeople.
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/c/maiLab/videos
|
| Explains science topics (chemistry, biology, studies) to
| laypeople.
|
| III. Quality YouTube channels from Japan:
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/c/atelierateruimath/videos
|
| Math professor teaching linear algebra, analysis etc.
|
| IV. Services from Germany
|
| - https://www.mindfactory.de/
|
| Computer hardware etc.
|
| - web.de
|
| For me the best European Dropbox alternative so far (Online-
| Speicher).
|
| V. Services from Japan
|
| - https://fc2.com/
|
| Website hosting etc.
|
| - https://www.nicovideo.jp/
|
| The Japanese YouTube basically.
|
| - https://www.rakuten.co.jp/
|
| The Japanese Amazon.
|
| VI. Concluding Remarks & Miscellaneous
|
| - Arte, Phoenix make good documentaries. (But these were already
| mentioned by others.)
|
| - https://www.schenker-tech.de/en/ - https://www.xmg.gg/en/
|
| Laptops made/assembled in Germany.
|
| - https://www.gigaset.com/hq_en/
|
| Some smartphones are made in Germany.
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/c/worldorder/videos
|
| By Genki Sudo (Xu Teng Yuan Qi ) former MMA fighter. He's now a
| politician.
|
| - Hiroshi Abe (A Bu Kuan )
|
| The Japanese Clint Eastwood.
|
| - Kim Ki-duk
|
| A Korean movie director that I happen to like.
|
| PS: If I find/remember more interesting stuff from Japan and
| Germany, I will update this post. :)
| Seb-C wrote:
| In French we used to have "le site du zero". It was a very
| popular collaborative site with a ton of free courses for
| beginners in (mostly) programming.
|
| Today it feels that it just became a somewhat bland and nothing-
| special corporate resource (OpenClassrooms), but it was once a
| vibrant community with it's own identity:
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20120309143317/http://www.siteduz...
|
| On a completely different topic, https://www.jeuxvideo.com/ have
| long been (and still is) one of the most popular forums among
| young people in France.
| cedex12 wrote:
| I feel like linuxfr.org also deserves a mention: had pretty
| thorough articles on lots of subject, as far as I could judge
| them (and knowledgeable members!).
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Le Site du Zero is how I got started with programming back in
| high school. That was a great site, it's a shame what happened
| to it.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| https://www.fun-mooc.fr/
|
| Online courses with a wide variety of topics. Took a number of
| them unrelated to CS, unfortunately many are archived. There is
| a very good introduction course to Chinese https://www.fun-
| mooc.fr/courses/course-v1:Inalco+52004+sessi... with a session
| this spring.
| Davidbrcz wrote:
| Check https://zestedesavoir.com
|
| Made by former staff of Sdz, high quality, can't recommend
| enough.
| omnibrain wrote:
| https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
|
| A world wide map of rail tracks run by (german) rail enthusiasts.
| tga wrote:
| https://bahn.guru
|
| Easy price calendar for (mostly) German trains.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Surprisingly it also has some planned tram lines in Poland.
| Quite neat.
| jonp888 wrote:
| It's 'just' OpenStreetMap rendered in a way that emphasizes
| railway lines and exposes some of the metadata. So whilst the
| site is german-run the data has no geographical bias.
| emgo wrote:
| Thinkerview:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQgWpmt02UtJkyO32HGUASQ
|
| It's a French podcast covering a wide array of topics such as
| geopolitics, journalism, big tech, industrial espionage, economic
| warfare, etc.
|
| I find it refreshing because the ideas and opinions discussed are
| very different compared to those you'd find in the usual
| anglophone media, and just that by itself is a ton of value.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| I would mention hitta.se from Sweden. Probably a privacy
| nightmare to some, and very creepy to others.
|
| On the page you can search peoples home address, phone number,
| date of birth, _other members living in the same house_ , real
| estate value, mortgage rate, all by searching their names. I
| successfully once identified a parent of a owner of a lost
| wallet, only containing a gym card with last name on it. Found
| her phone number on the site, called her and gave her the wallet.
| bashwizard wrote:
| So I'm in infosec and I know a lot of americans and some of
| them work with OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and some things
| that they spend hours on, a 10 year old kid can do in 5 minutes
| here in sweden.
|
| It's kind of hilarious.
| adamfarhadi wrote:
| Sweden is a privacy-minded individual's nightmare. There are a
| bunch of other sites like Hitta as well. For example on Ratsit
| you can pay a small amount of money and see anyone's salary and
| full personnummer, which is similar to a social security number
| in the US. If they live in an apartment you can see exactly
| where in the building they live. Just as an example, when I was
| visiting a friend for the first time I wasn't sure where in the
| building he lived so I put his name into Ratsit and it said
| "second floor, third door from the left". It also had his phone
| number and other information about him as well, including other
| individuals he lived with and the names of every person in his
| building.
| nemetroid wrote:
| > full personnummer, which is similar to a social security
| number in the US
|
| It's similar in the sense that it's a unique number assigned
| to each person, but the fact that it's publicly available
| means that it cannot be used as authentication.
| ptman wrote:
| And SSN shouldn't be used as authentication either. It's
| too easy to steal, too hard to change.
|
| We have a similar issue with Finnish Personal Identity
| Codes, which are legally public, but there are restrictions
| related to their processing. Which leads to the common
| misunderstanding that they're secret, so they're used for
| authentication. It's a mess.
|
| https://hetueiolesalasana.fi/en.html
| matz1 wrote:
| This should be the way. This eliminate the issue of information
| leak/having to hide information, since its public anyway. Of
| course it has it's own downside. So instead of focusing effort
| on hiding the information, we should instead fix the issue that
| arise from information being public.
| mongol wrote:
| Also Lexbase. See anyone that has been subject of a criminal
| trial, on a map.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexbase
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| Run a plate for any Swedish vehicle: https://biluppgifter.se/
|
| Another privacy nightmare with complete vehicle history --
| better than carvertical.com or vin-info.com
| d26900 wrote:
| Why is the EU so lenient with Sweden in that case?
| ackbar03 wrote:
| WOW. Is this a well known service/site in Sweden? In other
| countries this would have been blown up into a huge privacy
| issue. Assuming its not because its sort of underground, why do
| you think it hasn't in Sweden? Genuinely curious
| pelliphant wrote:
| yes, it is well known. I just see it as a digital versin of
| the phone book.
|
| And there are even more extreme versions, like ratsit.se
|
| where you can pay to get credit information on anyone.
|
| Personally I think that what ratsit does is probably too far,
| and maybe it shouldn't be legal.
|
| But in general I like our "public information" system, that
| lots of government information is available to every citizen,
| I find the benefits of being able to check what the
| government and those with power does (journalism would be way
| harder without this), outweights the negatives.
| nemetroid wrote:
| It should be noted that when you buy credit information
| from a site like Ratsit, the person being queried will
| receive a notice to this effect, including the identity of
| the person/business making the query.
| Winterflow3r wrote:
| You clearly have never been the target of abuse or a
| stalker. Nothing less fun than when someone on a dating app
| in Sweden messages you saying "I know exactly who you are"
| and you know they can find out where you live in less than
| five minutes. If it works for 90% of people in Sweden,
| that's good but they should really make it easier to get
| your information hidden. Phonebooks of old times only had
| your number not your full address, the type of car you
| drive, who is your sambo etc
| NalNezumi wrote:
| It's a well known site in Sweden. I remember using it at
| least 10-13 years back. A quick Swedish googling found me a
| dozens of sites offering similar services. One even offered
| credit rating assessment at 1.5 dollar after the search.
|
| I'm not well read on the issue but a lot of things are
| digitalized in Sweden. It's a cashless society, where
| everyone have a personal number that they can use for
| government service & signing up for phone contracts. The tax
| institute (like USA:s IRS) sends their deductions out
| digitally, and AFAIK they have a very open API a lot of
| digital services in Sweden use for online identification of a
| private person. So I assume those pages probably use the tax-
| institutes API for personal information, and then other APIs
| (such as real-estate portals) to tie information together.
| airhead969 wrote:
| So, the government knows every purchase they make, tracks
| everything they do, and can take it all away whenever it
| wants? No thanks. And what about homeless and old people,
| are they disenfranchised too? A cashless society controlled
| by a government or a corporation means a powerless society.
|
| Norway has had similar tax return approval by text
| messaging for almost 20 years.
| altacc wrote:
| I don't know what your percention of Norway is, but
| having moved around a bit and currently being based here,
| I see that Scandinavians have a different relationship
| with governments and corporations than in many other
| countries. For a start, it's not primarily seen as an
| adversarial relationship. It's more of the people, for
| the people. Not perfect, but Scandinavian societies rely
| on a high level of trust and it works, for now. There's
| been an increase in data protection recently, which I
| think is needed as it's a bit too transparent at times.
|
| The government doesn't know about every purchase you make
| but there is a lot of data sharing. However there is a
| lot more consumer protection and less power lies with
| unaccountable corporations than in many other capitalist
| countries, where corporations have almost free reign and
| have powerful influence over society, economy & politic.
| For example, credit scoring is relatively new here and is
| a lot less intense than other countries. In places like
| the UK/USA, credit scoring companies control your
| financial possibilities. Much less so in Scandinavia.
|
| There is a small number of people for whom a cashless
| society poses problems, but it's probably less, and a
| different subset, than you think. Those I know of through
| association tend to be those who suffer severe mental
| health issues. Old people have bank accounts, debit cards
| and mobile phones for digital transactions. As for
| homeless people, there are less of them in Scandinavia
| than in other countries. Almost all of them will still
| have a bank account and a mobile phone and be receiving
| state funds digitally. (Homelessness is not defined as
| living on the street, almost all the homeless are in
| temporary housing.)
| Moru wrote:
| Besides, you still can pay with real money in most
| places, you just have to choose the right line at the
| exit. Not all of them take cash. For us that has no
| problems, card is so much easier to use but there are a
| lot of people that can't handle the tech and they should
| be able to buy things too.
|
| All this is marketed as better for crime prevention, less
| bank/store robbery. Ofcourse this only pushes the cost on
| the individual in the end though. If you can't rob the
| store, you can still find valuables in private houses
| with much lower security. Or just stop any youth on the
| street. Chances are they have an expensive phone if
| nothing else.
| altacc wrote:
| Good point, I should have mentioned that cash is still
| accepted almost everywhere.
|
| I think the crime thing might not be a direct link, as a
| bank robber and an opportunistic street thief are
| probably different people. There is less opportunistic
| crime than elsewhere as a big driver of crime is people's
| situation which, in general, aren't bad enough to resort
| to crime. I'm still unnerved by the lax security
| everywhere, e.g. the tiny bolts and padlocks in common
| storage areas in apartment blocks, which are an
| increasing target for thieves as they are easy pickings.
|
| Another benefit is BankID, which makes fraud & identity
| theft is a lot more difficult as there is an easy and
| secure way of identifying yourself online. Even with
| somebody's ID number you can't impersonate them in most
| situations. This is something I've really appreciated
| working in the finance industry. The old way of calling
| up and accepting people's identity purely on trust never
| sat well with my non-Scandinavian mind.
| Moru wrote:
| On the other hand, BankID has really taken of as the main
| fraud avenue. It's so much easier to just look someone
| up, punch in their personal number, start a log in to the
| bank and then call them up saying someone is trying to
| steal their money, they need to stop it by verifying
| their identity with BankID. This instead logs the
| attacker in to the bank with full access. Now you just
| need to start a transfer to your bank account and tell
| them the ID failed, try again. Money is yours, now just
| make it jump between a few more temporary accounts and
| let your friend take out the cash at the ATM.
| [deleted]
| llampx wrote:
| What makes you think other governments don't have that
| kind of information or can easily access it from their
| friends in bigcorp Inc?
| adventured wrote:
| As crime perpetually gets worse in Sweden in the coming
| decades, it's practically a guarantee their culture will
| change when it comes to tolerating such privacy violations.
| They'll begin to lock down formerly open aspects of their
| culture.
| gspr wrote:
| Oh god, you're one of _those_ people.
| staticelf wrote:
| It is well known and no one in Sweden seems to give a shit
| which boggles my mind as a Swede. Anyway, it was nice but it
| has only worked well beucause of Swedens low crime rate
| historically.
|
| Now, with increasing criminality due to mass immigration
| there is only a question of time until these services becomes
| illegal I think.
|
| I have personally been subjected to a stalker, so it will be
| nice when these services disappear for me personally but I
| honestly think the utility of them are great. If you find a
| wallet for example, you can easily find this person and call
| them due to these services. But for now, the only way to be
| truly anonymous in Sweden is to get a protected identity
| which is pretty much impossible to get or to buy some land
| and switch your home address to that place. People can still
| get all the properties you own with your "Personnummer"
| (social security number) but it is harder, less known, takes
| more time etc.
| Moru wrote:
| It's not even the only one, there is a bunch of them that
| gives different levels of information. Partly because the
| equivalent of social security numbers are public information
| in Sweden.
|
| There are apps for Eniro and Hitta that could tell you if an
| incoming call is from a known callcenter for example. Not
| sure they still work after google tightened up security.
|
| I'm always amazed I can't find someones phone number outside
| Sweden when I need one. Here it's just a few clicks away.
| Sure you can ask to be removed from their register but most
| wants to be there.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| tax returns themselves are public in sweden and you can
| literally find out what anyone has paid in taxes by
| contacting the authorities.
|
| Sweden has a different attitude to this kind of information
| that is fundamentally more about transparency than privacy,
| so it's not perceived as an issue.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Is there any way to get taken off these sites?
| luplex wrote:
| I'm a big fan of werstreamt.es (German), which is a simple search
| engine for all streaming services.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| https://pantip.com/ Thai Reddit / Wikipedia / answers.com.
|
| It's a massive forum with an area for almost any topic.
| geza wrote:
| Sites and apps in Chinese:
|
| Baidu Wangpan (Bai Du Wang Pan ): file-sync service like Dropbox,
| but gives you 2TB (terrabytes!) of free storage
|
| Tengxun Ketang (Teng Xun Ke Tang ): similar to edX/coursera, they
| have a lot of free courses on programming, machine learning, and
| technical topics
|
| Wanmen Daxue (Mo Men Da Xue ): similar to edX/coursera, they have
| a lot of free foreign language classes and lectures on
| economics/social sciences
|
| HKGolden (Xiang Gang Gao Deng ): Hong Kong forum on tech and
| software, similar to reddit
|
| Huxiu (Hu Xiu ): tech news site
|
| Toutiao Xinwen (Tou Tiao Xin Wen ): news aggregator site, has
| categories and comments
|
| Zhihu (Zhi Hu ): QA platform, similar to Quora
|
| Zhihu Zhuanlan (Zhi Hu Zhuan Lan ): blogging platform, similar to
| Medium
|
| Ximalaya FM (Xi Ma La Ya FM): podcasts app
|
| Duokan (Duo Kan ): ebooks app similar to Kindle
|
| Douyin (Dou Yin ): Chinese version of Tiktok
|
| iQiyi (Ai Qi Yi ): video site with tons of movies and dramas
|
| JD (Jing Dong ): amazon-like marketplace with same-day delivery
|
| Taobao (Tao Bao ): ebay-like peer-to-peer marketplace
|
| Weibo (Xin Lang Wei Bo ): microblogging site like Twitter
|
| Zhifubao (Zhi Fu Bao ): peer-to-peer payments app that works by
| scanning QR codes, very widely accepted in China
|
| Wechat (Wei Xin ): messaging app that also has tons of micro-apps
| and payment functionality built in
| bloqs wrote:
| > Douyin (Dou Yin ): Chinese version of Tiktok
|
| Tiktok is literally chinese??
| notafraudster wrote:
| Tiktok, the app, is made by the same Chinese firm that makes
| Douyin, but it is maintained separately and not available in
| China. The content is entirely separate.
|
| It is not uncommon that Chinese firms have separate, parallel
| versions of their applications within / outside China.
|
| So it is accurate to say that Douyin is a Chinese (meaning,
| available in China; not meaning made by a Chinese company)
| version of Tiktok.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Nice try CCP
| samwestdev wrote:
| how does the p2p payment app work? No middle man?
| geza wrote:
| Ah I meant P2P in the "from user to user with no transaction
| fees charged, doesn't go through Visa/Mastercard/Unionpay"
| sense (similar to Venmo, except that in China businesses
| accept it everywhere), not in the "fully decentralized and
| doesn't need a server" sense. For Zhifubao the servers are
| run by Ant Financial (it's a spin-off company of Alibaba),
| for WeChat the servers are run by Tencent. You can
| deposit/withdraw money to your bank account.
|
| I'm assuming you're probably more interested in the new
| digital RMB wallet technology which supposedly works even if
| your phone doesn't have internet access, but I'm not familiar
| with how that is implemented (I'm guessing it uses blockchain
| and broadcasts the transactions later when you connect to the
| internet). There's some info about it at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi#Digital_Renminbi
| _-___________-_ wrote:
| Zhifubao is better known as Alipay outside of China.
| yorwba wrote:
| Let me add a few more:
|
| Bilibili Manhua (Bi Li Bi Li Man Hua ): webcomic site adjacent
| to the Bilibili video platform https://manga.bilibili.com/
|
| Qidian (Qi Dian ): webnovels https://qidian.com/
|
| Zhanse Nileyuan (Zhan Se Ni Le Yuan ): discussion forum
| attached to another webnovel site with female-skewing
| readership, maybe slightly similar to r/twoXchromosomes
| https://bbs.jjwxc.net/board.php?board=20&page=1
|
| SegmentFault: StackOverflow-like
| https://segmentfault.com/questions
|
| V2EX: the closest thing to HN, except more like a traditional
| forum https://v2ex.com/
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Nice list :)
|
| A few things to add about some of the items:
|
| - Baidu Wangpan's sharing model is more like the file locker
| sites of the early 00s: when you share a file or folder, the
| recipient gets a 'copy'. It's not like Dropbox where you
| collaborate and sync changes with each other.
|
| - Baidu wangpan can download torrents server-side.
|
| - Toutiao is by Bytedance, which readers here will know for
| their popular Tiktok product.
|
| - Readers here may know Tengxun by its international name
| Tencent
|
| - Zhifubao's English name is Alipay.
|
| - Taobao is more than a peer-to-peer marketplace. I'd guess
| that over 50% of e-commerce goods purchases in China (by
| volume, not value) are via Taobao/Tmall. There are many 'mom
| and pop' stores, but also many with 10s of employees.
|
| - Tingting FM is another good one for audio content. e.g. it
| has Peppa Pig episodes in Mandarin, and each episode has some
| commentary at the end explaining the key lessons from the
| story. (You can watch Peppa Pig in Mandarin on YouTube for
| free, but there's no commentary at the end.)
| _a1_ wrote:
| https://www.wykop.pl is probably the biggest Polish site that
| gathers best experts from most of the industries, to provide
| comments on the newest political, religious, science and
| engineering news from all around the world. The comments posted
| by users of wykop.pl are often cited in other sites.
|
| ...at least that's what everyone on this site would like to
| think. In reality, it's just a digg.com clone, before it started
| to suck ;)
|
| (even name is a reference to digg, 'wykop' means 'a dig site', or
| 'to dig')
| tester34 wrote:
| This page is terrible, heavily biased and almost all
| discussions that occur there are fundamentally flawed due to
| basics of basics of logical fallacies.
|
| It's one of those websites that makes you lose faith in people
| e.g when you read popular takes about Bill Gates and COVID
| related stuff, it's pretty sad.
|
| I bet that just reading titles from the front page for a 3
| months would affect your happines cuz majority of headlines
| there are sad stories, provocative titles about politics,
| religion, men and women relations with heavy biass towards one
| side, generally a lot of junk
|
| It's sad that this is one of the biggest ""discussion""
| happening sites in the Polish internet.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| > This page is terrible, heavily biased and almost all
| discussions that occur there are fundamentally flawed due to
| basics of basics of logical fallacies.
|
| Agree but only partially, you just have not to browse the
| front page and Wykopalisko (= queue on Digg) - this is where
| tinfoil hatters, right-wing nutjobs and paid trolls thrive.
|
| The _sine qua non_ of browsing wykop.pl and retaining sanity
| is
|
| - blacklist tags (like #polityka #przegryw #patostreamy)
|
| - browse only Mikroblog (no frontpage, no Wykopalisko).
|
| - use uBlock or a third-party mobile app
|
| I stand with the GP that wykop.pl is one of the best places
| to ask for advice on hobby and such. Why? It's less
| circlejerk-y than specialized forums and people absolutely
| _hate_ paid shills here. And there are almost no "Facebook
| mom" type of people. It's also good for local news / local
| questions, as hashtags of most cities have quite a lot of
| followers. Ah, and on Mikroblog the OP can delete comments on
| their posts, which comes in handy if someone is getting
| nasty.
|
| The only comparable stuff would be the loosely defined
| "sekcje JBWA" ("Jak bedzie w ...") groups on Facebook, but
| many of these groups have overzealous admins who ban people
| breaking rules, but with no subtlety (I mean, if someone is
| polite, posts higher-effort content and the infraction is
| minor, a mute would suffice)
| crazypython wrote:
| Yandex Images - https://yandex.com/images/ It's much, much better
| than Google Images. The only Western equivalent that comes close
| is DuckDuckGo Images.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| https://www.mercadolibre.com.mx/
|
| is ebay but cooler and from Latino America.
| unhammer wrote:
| Norway has finn.no, though perhaps more like craigslist (get
| rid of old couch, find cheap exercise bike, get job, sell
| house, etc.)
| m-chrzan wrote:
| What makes it cooler?
| riledhel wrote:
| MercadoPago is the payment gatewat and it's amazing. They
| take care of delivery/logistics like Amazon and it's fast and
| works in remote places too.
| notdang wrote:
| To be fair, they launched the nice things after Amazon
| opened in Mexico and got the whole market. Before that they
| could not be bothered.
| ashwanidausodia wrote:
| http://e-maxx.ru/algo I used to study competitive programming
| algorithms from there with Google translate
|
| Edit: It seems somebody translated it to English https://cp-
| algorithms.com/
| timka wrote:
| http://rutracker.org -- a torrent tracker
| mooreed wrote:
| Great question. +1 for my interest too.
| smsm42 wrote:
| https://habr.com/ (Russian) has some good articles, some
| translated, some original.
| lovelearning wrote:
| I found DW's YouTube channels to be good resources to learn about
| cultures, societies, current affairs and geopolitics from around
| the world. Auto-generated subtitles for their non-English
| channels are good enough to understand what is being conveyed.
|
| [1] : https://www.youtube.com/user/deutschewelle
|
| [2] : their other channels are listed at the bottom of [1].
| mongol wrote:
| Lots of content in English as well
|
| https://youtube.com/c/dwnews
| BlueGh0st wrote:
| For some reason, the Russian web seems to rehost old
| drivers/software and such indefinitely without all the malicious
| spam you normally find in Google.
|
| That led me to Kazus Electronic Portal[0] which seems to have
| just about every hardware-related piece of information you could
| need. Including an obscure serial driver from 2005 that I
| couldn't find elsewhere.
|
| [0] http://kazus.ru/
| underyx wrote:
| This is probably not what you're looking for, but I recently
| found this dump of Hungarian tech/gaming magazine scans dating
| back to the late 80's, and I've been looking for an excuse to
| share it further: https://retroujsag.com/
| BugWatch wrote:
| Try mentioning it on reddit.com/r/DataHoarder, someone might be
| interested.
| throwaway9d0291 wrote:
| Deepl [0] is available in English but doesn't seem well-known
| outside of the non-Anglophone Western European countries. It's
| essentially Google Translate but generally has better quality
| translations for the languages it supports.
|
| [0]: https://www.deepl.com
| mimagic wrote:
| I find deepl better than Google translate for some languages
| now. Just the fact that you can change some specific words in
| the translated text is a game changer for me
| shaydwyrm wrote:
| Deepl was an incredible tool when I was struggling though my
| first full length novel in Spanish. It gave much more lucid and
| nuanced translations than any other automated translation tool
| I tried.
| 101008 wrote:
| Looking for reverse copycat? Just kidding.
|
| Taringa used to be the Reddit in Spanish (well, at least for
| South America), with really interesting content. Microsiervos.com
| was probably the best tech/curiosities blog in Spanish, and a few
| days ago I visited and it is still active (from 2006 I think).
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| Serbian news aggregator/search engine:
|
| https://naslovi.net/
|
| Its name is "Headlines" in Serbian.
| Amin3456 wrote:
| How to Take Care of Betta Fish
|
| https://bit.ly/2Zqahul
| 12ian34 wrote:
| The most accurate rain/snow/wind forecaster I've ever used:
| https://www.buienradar.nl/
| jaflo wrote:
| If anyone has a site similar to Reddit or HN in German I would be
| interested. Anything with interesting discussion really.
| 4cao wrote:
| Someone will probably come up with a better answer but you can
| check out https://www.heise.de/forum/ for tech news.
| [deleted]
| omnibrain wrote:
| The heise forum sadly has been a cesspit of trolls for a long
| time. In the last 5 years it got even worse because some of
| the conspiracist and nazi trolls from the Telepolis forum
| came over to the tech forums an I think heise don't know how
| to properly deal with them.
| 4cao wrote:
| I know Heise (the publication) for its good coverage of
| specific issues, the most recent I recall being the data
| collection practices of coronavirus-related apps [1].
|
| I've always assumed it's something like a better version of
| The Register, [2] which I used to read a while ago, but
| don't really know that much about it, especially the
| comments section. Thanks for the heads-up.
|
| 1. https://www.heise.de/news/Corona-Apps-im-Datenschutz-
| Check-A...
|
| 2. https://www.theregister.co.uk/
| omnibrain wrote:
| Heise is definitely one of the best tech media/print
| houses.
|
| But their handling of their comment section is seriously
| lacking and it looks like it is stuck in early 90ies
| usenet discussions and worse.
| amaccuish wrote:
| What is the difference between golem and heise. I like
| both but are they equally popular?
| kradeelav wrote:
| Pixiv! (http://pixiv.net/) If you're familiar with deviantart or
| artstation, it's a similar Japanese digital art site with its own
| culture, store, contests, and more. While the site has a pretty
| great English navigation, I was on there back in the day when it
| was 100% Japanese only, and many of its current mores stem from
| those days.
| gjvnq wrote:
| This website is well known by the reddit transgender community.
| Naga wrote:
| I would love suggestions of French language sites! I have found
| them quiet hard to find, especially of a more than surface level
| discussion.
| jette_au_loin wrote:
| France has a few enormous message boards about various topics.
|
| forum.hardware.fr is a big one (it's not just about computer
| hardware, there's a decent section about news/world events,
| etc.)
| gspr wrote:
| > forum.hardware.fr is a big one (it's not just about
| computer hardware, there's a decent section about news/world
| events, etc.)
|
| What I assume is the equivalent, forum.hardware.no, used to
| be huge in Norway in the 00s too, but then the community more
| or less got swallowed by Reddit. Did the French one survive?
| waterpowder wrote:
| Oh yes, it's very active. Interestingly, the hardware news,
| tests and reviews closed a year or two ago, but the message
| board remained.
| Glawen wrote:
| Very active, I find it much better than reddit where I
| usually cannot find anything useful, the UI is awful on
| reddit.
|
| The real interesting thing is that there are a lot of
| threads for very specialized topics (e.g. bikes, mattress,
| pizza oven or torch lights). Before buying something I
| usually check if a thread exists and read it / ask
| questions. You however end up having to revise upwards your
| budget to buy the stuff they recommend.
| swanswan wrote:
| Try https://teddit.net/ for an alternate Reddit UI
| interface.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I think it's more or less saved by the bad English level of
| most users. They won't switch to an international
| alternative.
| unhammer wrote:
| diskusjon.no still seems fairly active. Though anytime I
| search for something non-tech-related in Norwegian ("us
| taxes norway", "car brake trombone", "kid face blue",
| "beach meteorite"), I typically get one of the forums
| Kvinneguiden.no ("the women's guide"), BarniMagen.no
| ("child in tummy") or MammaNett (... you get the drift). So
| there's a part of the Norwegian Internet that strangely
| hasn't been swallowed up by the FRAANG.
| alfl wrote:
| La Quadrature du Net [0] is a collective of privacy advocates,
| like the EFF for the EU. They run an active Mastodon node at
| mamot.fr.
|
| [0]: https://www.laquadrature.net/
| croisillon wrote:
| Rezo.net is a leftist portal, often displaying obscure blogs no
| one reads. I started reading it around 1999 and I'm glad it is
| still here.
|
| Around 2005 there was a very cute php generalist forum called
| kopikol.net but I still lament that they had to close around
| 2008
| OJFord wrote:
| Ha, I'm learning Hindi, I'd love a 'Hindi Stack Overflow', I
| imagine the technical bits would be English anyway so it'd be a
| great way to familiarise/practice. (Easier than news, say, I
| imagine, since I'd have more context and it wouldn't be as
| formal/pure Hindi.)
|
| I could try to contribute too: My cache is full of eels, how do I
| set the death timer for the evictings of my tenants?
| exikyut wrote:
| +1 for the second line, but I'm very curious about "eels". The
| rest generally makes sense.
| bmn__ wrote:
| It is part of a collection of well-known phrases that are
| also translated into many languages.
|
| * https://enwp.org/My_Hovercraft_Is_Full_Of_Eels
|
| * https://enwp.org/I_Can_Eat_Glass
|
| * https://enwp.org/Omniglot
| OJFord wrote:
| Yep as sibling comment says I was riffing on 'my hovercraft
| is full of eels' [0], meaning to say that that's probably
| what me trying to ask questions on a hypothetical 'Hindi
| StackOverflow' would sound like.
|
| [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g
| xkyscore wrote:
| It's a long-running joke that Youtube is a Hindi Stack
| Overflow, albeit non-text based, though you can view
| transcripts.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Yup, writing good technical content in Hindi is nigh-
| impossible.
| xxpor wrote:
| I've noticed that Twitter will translate Hindi written in
| Roman characters, which is certainly common on the
| internet, but I'd think given (AFAIK) there's no formal
| standard for it it'd be hard to get good data to feed into
| an AI. Or is it enough of a 1-1 transliteration that all
| you need to do is encode the Roman->Devanagari rules and
| that'll work nearly 100% of the time?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| There are several standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Devanagari_transliteration#Tra...
|
| Nobody bothers to use them.
|
| Same for Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu
| OJFord wrote:
| The standard is IAST - but colloquially people don't use
| it, preferring a more Anglophone phonetic approximation
| (since English literacy is high) so you get 'aloo'
| instead of 'alu' (potato) and 'jeera' instead of 'jira'
| (cumin), for example.
|
| It's quite annoying as a learner, since it can make it
| difficult to map back to devnagari (resp. devnagari) to
| look up a new word, for example. (It's almost entirely
| true to say that devnagari script is phonetic, so if you
| write kuch and I don't know the word, I know how to
| pronounce it without knowing what it means, and can ask
| someone or look it up, which is a great feature that
| English of course doesn't have at all, and while Hindi
| phonetic approximation in the alphabet might get closer,
| it's still non-standard and different typers will spell
| words differently.)
| captn3m0 wrote:
| The challenge isn't with the script - it's with lack of
| acceptable technical vocabulary in Hindi/English.
|
| Video works because Hinglish is how tech-talk in (many,
| not all) companies works.
|
| But you'd never see a technical doc in any of the these
| companies in Hindi, because you can't even translate
| simple terms like Server or package-management. Even if
| you find acceptable translations, they aren't immediately
| obvious, because nobody has heard them before.
|
| In a Python video, you might hear: "meraa code requests
| library se Google server ko HTTP request bhejtaa haiN"
| (My code uses the requests library to send HTTP requests
| to Google".
|
| It works on video, but it doesn't on text because nobody
| is used to reading this in Hindi in the first place.
| arp242 wrote:
| So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't
| used for loanwords like this in written text?
|
| When I was young I used to play some MSX games in
| Japanese, the language doesn't really matter for a lot of
| these 1980s games, and you would frequently see English
| words and terms written in Latin characters used all over
| the place.
|
| Why won't this work for Hindi? Are people not familiar
| with these characters? Or is there just no tradition of
| doing so?
| OJFord wrote:
| That does happen, a common word for 'school' is skuul
| ('skul') for example.
|
| It's just that another phenomenon is the alphabeticising
| of Hindi (as in actually Hindi words) like 'namaste aap
| kaise hain? Mera naam Ollie hoon' (IAST ap, nam, oli, and
| hun) is a contrived sentence but the sort of thing
| someone might text if they didn't have the keyboard for
| nmste aap kaise haiN? meraa naam olii huuN or whatever
| reason.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| > _So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren 't
| used for loanwords like this in written text?_
|
| It happens in casual text - WhatsApp forwards, SMS
| messages. But for official writing - you pick a language
| and stick to it, as much as possible. This made more than
| a few notices impossibly hard to read when I was in
| college, because the Hindi felt archaic, even if it
| wasn't.
|
| Other countries had a rich culture of research and
| scientific literature published in native languages.
| India never got that to a national scale, because India
| has hundreds of languages[0] so any efforts were local. A
| paper published in Tamil would be unreadable by folks a
| hundred miles away, so English became the technical
| lingua-franca of the nation (The colonial imposition
| didn't help either).
|
| When a developer searches stack-overflow for an answer,
| english works better because it serves all developers in
| India.
|
| [0]: India scores 0.914 on the Linguistic diversity
| Index, which ranges from 0 (everyone has the same mother
| tongue) to 1 (no two people have the same mother tongue)
| arp242 wrote:
| I think English is the _lingua franca_ of science and
| computing pretty much anywhere now? Just as Latin was in
| the past? Newton didn 't publish in English, but in
| Latin, as did most people of his day.
|
| In Dutch, I would just say "de server is kapot" ("the
| server is broken"). There is no attempt to translate
| words like "server" to Dutch. You see the same in
| Indonesian (standard Indonesian, Bahasa, there are many
| Indonesian languages) where these kind of words are just
| copied ad-verbatim from either English or (for older
| words) Dutch. For many technical terms in the IT world
| there are no "Dutch words": just the English ones. The
| exceptions seem to be the ones where there are Dutch
| words that are close enough to the English ones
| ("function" - "functie", "variables" - "variabelen").
| Both languages having similar Germanic roots with
| Latin/Greek influences helps I suppose.
|
| And in those cases all the languages use the same Latin
| script, so it's easier to include loanwords and technical
| terms.
|
| So it seems to me, unless I'm misunderstanding something,
| that it's at least partly an issue of script
| translations? Adopting the example someone else posted,
| why shouldn't "nmste aap kaise haiN? meraa server olii
| huuN" be considered acceptable Hindi?
| xxpor wrote:
| For the English words used in Dutch, do you use Dutch
| pronunciation, even if the word is spelled the same?
|
| We all know how Dutch people like to pronounce their Gs
| :)
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