Yeah, despite how little I comment on here, I use HN all the time for basically the same thing. I think the good moderation, smaller, tighter-knit community, and relatively high-quality of posts compared to Reddit has made it my first go-to when I am curious about something.
I'll usually `query bla Talos II bla bla site:ycombinator.com`, and if that doesn't give me what I want, I'll try the Algolia search [1]. And only then will I give up and try `site:reddit.com`, unless there is a more specific site I know to try first [2].
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[1]: I'm sure most regulars here know it, but if you don't, it is super useful. I just wish it had more query operators to filter out stuff sometimes -- https://hn.algolia.com>
[2]: I'd be interested in what others here do. Off the top of my head, these are the ones I'll usually use, maybe it'll be helpful to someone else:
• For questions about server hardware / networking equipment / weird second-hand HPC stuff, ServeTheHome has a surprising number of quality articles and lots of forum discussion -- `site:servethehome.com` or `site:forums.servethehome.com`
Level1Tech's Forum (site:forum.level1techs.com) can be decent as well for such topics and stuff like ZFS-related questions, but it tends to have a more 'inexperienced'/consumer userbase relative to STH (though usually more into it than, say, the LTT audience).
• If you don't mind Google Translate, Russia's more-or-less HN equivalent, Habr [3] often has pretty high-quality, in-depth articles on a variety of tech/programming topics. It differs from HN a bit in that companies themselves tend to write them and they are displayed inline on Habr itself rather than more of a Reddit-like link-aggregation system like on HN.
The style tends to be similar to stuff like the CloudFlare blog posts -- `site:habr.com` (word of warning: great content, but the comments can be quite mean at times - e.g., the blog post on Cosmopolitan was just filled with awful transphobic stuff).
• For anything video encoding-related, `site:doom9.org` is a great resource when Googling specific questions. And for finding out which country has the best quality release of a movie, outside of something like a torrent tracker, screencaps from https://caps-a-holic.com> are great, and adding `site:forum.blu-ray.com` or `site:dvdcompare.net` to your queries can help a ton to find actual info about a disc.
Otherwise, certain Discord chats, like Beatrice-Raws, /r/av1's Discord, and the SeaDex Discord can have useful discussion.
• Anything Linux-related, the Gentoo Wiki is really good, and Arch too - adding `https://wiki.gentoo.org` to a query can help a lot, particularly for weird compiler flags and old/obscure hardware, or `site:wiki.archlinux.org`. For LTO and optimization bugs, the Gentoo LTO overlay project is also really useful, between the patches/notes and the issue tracker discussions [4]. AUR comments can also be helpful for issues with somewhat bleeding-edge builds.
• Arch's PKGBUILDs and Alpine's APKBUILDs are really easy to read, and I find actually getting to them/the sources for their patches is easier/quicker than most distros. If I'm running into trouble, I tend to check their stuff to avoid the useless Google searches.
• For anything drug/medication-related, the Psychonaut wiki [5] and Tripsit [6] tend to be better than stuff like Wikipedia in terms of "wtf did my doctor prescribe me, what will this do, and do I need to worry about taking it in combination with XYZ".
As a last resort, if neither has good info on some obscure thing I've been given, like when I was living in Russia, if you're willing to Google Translate, I've found Russian Wikipedia to be really vast on all sorts of medications and chemicals, and also much more objective and skeptical about certain topics (e.g., there are tons of borderline placebo Soviet-era meds they'll give you there, and if you look them up on English wikipedia, you can tell some Nootropics-bro wrote half of it, whereas the Russian page will quickly tell you "actually, there's been basically no proof this does anything").
• If I'm looking for a particular file that I can't seem to find normally on Google or torrent tracker, I've had success searching for Apache directory listings with some query abuse [7]. And if that fails, DHT indexers [8] like BTDig [9] can be helpful when you're in a situation where you know the filename, like a particular font that is no longer for sale, but seemingly can't find it on Google, Yandex, Archive.org, etc.
• For finding new music / movies / anime, queries like "Films like Parasite" or "Best Korean movies" on Google tend to be useless due to all the SEO-spam WatchMojo-tier blogs, all featuring the same five films that barely relate to what you're looking for.
The best way that I have found, personally, is to use the collages and comment sections on certain torrent trackers; as with HN, the communities tend to be tighter-knit and have higher quality discussion than you can find on Reddit.
For general music, even if you don't intend on ever actually pirating anything, Redacted's ("RED") "collages" (think: ultra high-quality, user-curated lists of similar music) is unmatched. And they have relationship diagrams for each artist to show what other users tend to download. RED is a private tracker, but they allow anyone to sign up if they submit an application through IRC [10]. For East Asian music (j-pop, j-rock, k-pop, etc), Jpopsuki can be useful as well - almost the same system, but more targeted niche (and unfortunately, less curated/moderated).
Otherwise, Last.fm's recommendations tend to be better than Spotify/YouTube for me, and the ability to see which other users have similar taste to you / have the same current favorite song can be really useful, since you can then click on their pages and inevitably find something you've never heard before that matches your taste.
Anime, unfortunately, does not have the same level of pirate curation as movies or music, so I tend to rely a lot on AniDB's tags [11] and MyAnimeList's user-curated recommendations [12]. For Korean and Chinese TV, MyDramaList is similar and pretty decent [13].
And for movies, another torrent tracker, PassThePopcorn ("PTP") has the same sort of collections/collages and system as RED, which can be great if you're looking for very specific types of films. And even better, you have to "pay" credits (non-purchasable points you receive for seeding) to even create a collection, which adds a surprisingly nice, artificial barrier to ensure that the only collections that exist are ones maintained by people who truly care about that particular sub-niche.
Like HN, the comments often have more value than the content itself. And unlike RED, where comments are for a particular torrent (e.g., Fake Record Label's 1997 Japanese-region CD of Fake Band's Self Title album), PTP comments are per torrent group (i.e., Fake Movie as a whole rather).
This can be really nice because the comments often turn into reviews and discussion about particular editions of a film.
As an example, I watched Wong Kar-wai's "Fallen Angels" much later than I should have (great movie, btw), but had I not read the comments, I'd probably have just downloaded the 4K Blu-ray, not realizing they re-colorgraded the film to have an entirely different style from the original, and changed the aspect ratio by cropping it from 16:9 to 2.39:1.
Personally, regardless of what the director claims is his true vision, I am really glad I read those comments because what sticks out to me the most in Fallen Angels is the beautiful color work and the ridiculous decision to use a super-wide angle lens (possibly 9.8mmi adapted to 6.8mm?) [14] for most of the film, which gave it this immersive feel. However, like almost everyone else, I have a 16:9 TV, and so when you crop it to a cinema aspect ratio, something feels very, very wrong -- you lose that immersion and claustrophobia the lens created in the first place [15].
• For anime watchers, you'll often notice that the official subtitles for certain, difficult-to-translate series, like Bakemonogatari end up feeling really robotic or simply don't make much sense in certain scenes.
However, while fansubs can be significantly better sometimes, there are always a dozen different groups, and often neither Google nor Reddit will have any information on whose subs are actually worth downloading.
For that, I tend to use SeaDex [16] or "A Certain Fansubber's Index" [17] -- these are spreadsheets with the current 'best' releases of most anime.
[3]: this is the English version, which has much fewer articles, but it might help to get a general idea - https://habr.com/en/all/> (also, note the company-specific and topic-specific filters)
[4]: https://github.com/gentoo-mirror/lto-overlay>
[5]: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Adderall>
[6]: https://combo.tripsit.me>
[7]: https://www.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/comments/933pzm/all...>
[8]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/BitTorrent_DHT>
[9]: https://btdig.com>
[10]: https://interviewfor.red/en/starting.html>
[11]: https://anidb.net/anime/7243#tab_main_4_1>
[12]: https://myanimelist.net/anime/7785/Yojouhan_Shinwa_Taikei/us...>
[13]: https://mydramalist.com/shows/top>
[14]: really cool video that tries to identify (probably successfully) the mysterious, seemingly non-existent lens the director claimed to have used - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2dq_7wu0Dw>
[15]: good comparisons of the WKW remasters - https://youtu.be/OrvGqEdomLo?t=435>
[16]: https://releases.moe>
[17]: https://index.fansubcar.tel>
(edit: sorry for the wall of text -- the U.S. Adderall shortage had left me unmedicated for the past two weeks, so I guess you can tell finally getting a refill has hit me like a truck!)