Other Interesting Forums on the Internet

[José Ferreira]

I like the idea behind CosmoCoffee, although I have been mostly a lurker and not an active poster, this forum has helped me quite a few times by browsing through other people questions and the follow-up response provided by the most experienced users.
I feel like it is quite complicated, at least to me, to find this kind of forums online to ask questions. You either resort to services like StackExchange or Reddit, or you just paste your query in Google and hope for the best. Obviously, these days, you also have ChatGPT.
But they don't bring something which I felt existed a few years ago, when I was using the internet for just videogames: a community of people centered around one or more subjects.

In this thread, which is rather off-topic, I would like to share with you the forums that I find useful, and hope that you share yours as well:
- PhysicsForum: A more organized version of the Physics StackExchange, with some off-topic threads going on and "Insights Blog", i.e. posts made by experienced users about something which they would like to share with the world. Features RSS subscriptions!
- HackerNews: A simple news board dedicated mostly to technology but where you can often see posts in Mathematics and Physics. Quite useful to see new and interesting projects, but also some major breakthroughs in some fields of Science and Engineering. Also has RSS!

As a small side-note, this post was motivated by the fact that I'm interested in making a few programming related projects, but I am unsure what approach to take to ensure the project in maintainable and relatively portable. Given that I can't simply burst into the computer engineering department and ask for advice, I started wondering how do people find places of different expertise online.