Your question is far too vague. For example, how do you personally define "web-focused" or "technical" or "professional"? All of those definitions matter a whole lot. Also, you left out an important aspect, namely if you're looking for a discussion forum or an aggregator?
Since I'm blindly guessing at what you mean, the following suggestions might not be what you want, but they're the best I can do.
A similar question to yours, with lots of subreddit answers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254884
There have been other "Alternatives to HN" type posts over the years, and a quick search will find them
If you're in the mood for skimming to find interesting titles, you can even skim the big HN rss feed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss
Lastly, on HN you can see the submissions from a given HN user, so if you find someone who regularly submits stories that interest you, you can check their submission history. For example:
To clarify:
- I am looking for a discussion forum, not an aggregator.
- By "web-focused" I meant posts about website development technology used on client and/or server side. Some of this technology is still interesting, like databases, but there is a lot more, e.g. desktop sw technologies, algorithms etc.
- By "technical" I meant in-depth technology reviews and discussions. More posts by people that are not about "how to use x" but "how x works inside".
- By "professional" I meant posts not about computer science basics (stuff a person knows when going through formal education and/or long years of practical experience).
Thank you for your suggestions. I looked through the websites you posted. Do you know what the purpose of http://www.datatau.com/ is? They do not really tell on their website (or do they?).
Though Lambda The Ultimate (LtU) is officially a blog, it does have comments and it might be interesting for you. From their FAQ:
>"Mostly this site deals with issues directly related to programming languages, and programming language research. However, we allow ourselves moderate forays to bordering issues like programmability and language in general."
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
Your desire to avoid "web-based" stuff suffers from the fact that such large swaths of tech today are "web-related" in some way.
Your desire to avoid "compsci basics" suffers from the "News-To-Me" problem.
Your desire to find "how X works inside" type content seems quite similar to "how X works _in_ _practice_".
Given the above, I'd suggest reading current research papers. The trouble with research papers on HN is, papers take more time and effort to read, so they rarely get significant attention or useful discussion.
Using Algolia HN Search can uncover some research. Stuff like "[pdf]" files, common sites, organization names, journal names, and even conference names can be useful:
[pdf]
arxiv.org
plos.org
usenix.org
JMLR
OSDI
CVPR
ICML
https://hn.algolia.com/?experimental&sort=byDate&prefix&page...
https://hn.algolia.com/?experimental&sort=byDate&prefix&page...
One of the better efforts I've seen so far on the research paper front is "Papers We Love":
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love
The trouble with "Papers We Love" is you need to live in one of places where the physical meetings happen, and you need to be able to get to said meetings. If you're home bound, then you're pretty much stuffed.
Good Luck