Hi edw519, Mainly that Hacker News isn't a forum. The format makes discussions here ephemeral. Hacker news is a niche site for posts of general-interest to that niche.

A forum is topical, so narrow interest posts are channeled into topic areas. In a forum you might have a topic "Co-Founders Wanted" but only people interested in being/finding co-founders at a given time would read and post in that topic. If Hacker news was mainly narrow-interest postings (ever seen this bug?, co-founder wanted) the signal to noise ratio would degrade.

A Hacker News Forum would be great because 1-this community is great and 2-I could browse topics I'm interested in at the point in time they're of interest to me.

Much more eloquently said than me, but thats what I was getting at. If some kind of forum mechanism was added to Hacker News I'd use it straight away

This is a great site - don't get me wrong. For news its wonderful and its great to see what other people are doing. However, for general advice type questions (more suitable for a forum) the site isn't designed for that and I was wondering where people tend to go other than this site to interact with likeminded people

OK, I think that this site is both. I have posted my problems here and gotten excellent responses. I have learned quite a bit on others' postings. Also, I like to think I've contributed, too. Give it a try - you may be pleasantly surprised by the response.

(Most of my concerns are NOT technical. I can go to Webmonkey or Barnes & Noble for that. I'm more interested in how others like myself handle similar situations, technical or business. So far, I haven't found anyplace better, but if anyone does, I'm all ears.)