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Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

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161–170 of 292 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#161

https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ A world wide map of rail tracks run by (german) rail enthusiasts.

Surprisingly it also has some planned tram lines in Poland. Quite neat.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#162

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…

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 was…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#163
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.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 bene…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#165
post #125

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 diffe…

Germany really needs to start documenting their work in English. This is good stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#166
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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,…

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?

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#168
post #107

https://mapy.cz/ Google maps alternative with great tourist maps (also has a layer for cross-country skiing) and an app with offline maps

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!

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#169
post #27

Qiita https://qiita.com/ its like a cool mixture of stack overflow + reddit + twitter ... all in japanese

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

Re: Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn't know about?

#170
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> 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?

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.

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