Hackful - A Hacker News for Europe

I doubt it'll work. HN doesn't work just because it's there, it works because it has a certain traction among a certain community. Building up such traction is very difficult, and I doubt doing so by adding a link to it from a non-Europe-focused site is going to help much.<p>Lamernews looked real cool the first 2 weeks as well, and then it mostly died out. How will Hackful be different?<p>I mean, I'd love it to be different, I'd love a site about hacker culture more focused on European issues, people and businesses. But I can't see why it'll work.

Let me start off by saying that this is a great idea, and maybe we do need more HN-like sites as HN currently has a usefulness monopoly as far as my news browsing habits are concerned.<p>On a more constructive note: please implement an RSS feed.

Can I ask a simple question: Why?<p>I live in Europe, but AFAIK none of the places where I've lived/am regular even have an HN meetup. I have no idea we would want a splintered HN.

A Hacker News for Europe would be great. A lot of the stories on HN are very USA-centric. Currently it looks like Hackful focuses on the UK, especially London. Lets hope it expands to cover all of Europe.

I have to say that I'm a bit conflicted about this.<p>On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with "splitting" HN, especially by geography. The main reason being that news that would interest only hackers in a specific region/country wouldn't see the light of HN's front page, as global readers just wouldn't care as much. As a matter of fact, I even run an "HN splinter" myself, for Israelis (<a href="https://bitorama.com" rel="nofollow">https://bitorama.com</a>), and I'm pretty hopeful about it.<p>That said, the EU is a pretty big and diverse place. Would a guy from Romania or Finland be more likely to find stories that interest him in an EU-wide site rather than in HN? I'm not convinced. Maybe a more regional approach is required.<p>Then again, I could be proven wrong. So best of luck to the guys running the site!

Bad idea. HN is an international effort. No need to contextualize it by continent.<p>After all, <i>we exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...</i>

Passwords... Again. I can't believe I still have to create an account. Even for a website like HN that I'm completely addicted to, I would've never signed up if it weren't for OpenID. You want me to use your service? Make it easy for me to authenticate, I don't need yet another password...

My only concern is that I don't think people in Europe feel very "European". There is no identity in being European like there is in being German, Swedish, or whatever. Bundling us together because we live on the same continent seems a bit artificial to me.

I'm in Canada and I can completely understand the sentiments that led to the creation of this site. However, I fear that this may lead to HN_Asia, HN_South_America, HN_Oceania, etc., making it extremely difficult to stay on top of good interesting news, and leading to a lot of duplication.<p>I would very much like to see instead a single additional site (HN') which would have a larger focus than simply the European scene, and where obvious US-centric post/comments would mercilessly be deleted.

This looks like a service that tries to imitate Hacker News and assumes the same traffic and audience.<p>Focus on fewer posts on the front page; no more than 20% of the posts on it should have 0 comments, because it just serves to make the site look barren - which it probably is. You don't even have a community yet, so there is no hive mind nor zeitgeist on the site; bringing people together to discuss a few issues will make people get to get and know each other and help build the community.<p>Make it scalable.

The problem with Europe is the multitude of languages. You can't target Europe with English language, or it will end up UK/US centric. That's pretty much unsolvable problem. Of course we can talk about things happening in Europe, but that doesn't make sense.

Interesting. I think there's definitely demand for services like this.<p>We have been working on a community for entrepreneurs and startups in the UK (in addition to our information website), lion.co.uk/community, we're still in the phase of optimizing things.<p>We've found that there's many entrepreneur and startup websites but gaining critical mass to make a useful community is another thing.<p>We should probably work together but then again, as others have mentioned, there's different requirements for different people. Founders of businesses other than technology and hackers for example might not have reason to collaborate.<p>That said, the more resources there are for business founders the better; especially in Europe right now.

I'm missing an "about" section.

Please add some OpenID/OAuth option. I don't want to make yet another user account.

One suggestion: hackful.com has no linkage to the differentiating factor of the website. Why not change it to hackful.eu? This isn't a decisive factor, but it could help in the positioning...

Bookmarked, lets see if it goes well. One advice, give the page some border on the sides, its pretty bad at least for me to have to look to the edge of the monitor.

I'm British and I think this is a great idea. I'm interested to read about the startup scene in Europe and the UK.<p>I do think that we should be trying to move away from the 'hacker' label. People are never going to understand that 'hackers' can be good -- See that AP Press article. And really, our definition is the less popular one, and therefore less correct, and it is we who should change our wording.

Wouldn't this be more successful if it would be split across countries? Stories about US-focused topics interest me as much (or as little) as stories about European countries where i don't live.<p>Also, for more people than you might imagine a site thats in English (and not in their local language) could be a barrier.

I'd be more interested by a HN Asia or something. I mean, political, technological issues in US and EU are different but not that much, after all. Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, India, etc... lots of stuff is happening there and nothing much comes to the surface.

At first I didn't liked the idea, but it could work as a way to filter out US centric posts and focus more on Europe.<p>I think it needs some guidelines: is English the preferred language? If this is limited to Europe, is it ok to have posts related to other parts of the world?

Cool. I hope it doesn't turn into an OpenCoffee mirror/spam board for events/etc. Bookmarked :)

You need to focus on something other than nationality - I do not care if my news comes from the US or from Europe (and I think I am in the majority here), I only care if it is <i>interesting</i>. Maybe a Hacker News with subsections, like Reddit?

The one thing that should really be taken into consideration is username consistency across both sites, that will help. (And I can't have the same user name because the evil "-" is not allowed. Do something about it.)

I don't think this will necessarily gain traction without a huge push to build a community.<p>It would be cool if a system like subreddits was added to Hacker News where it makes sense (e.g. Europe).

To be honest, I never go "Damn. I wish the Hacker News articles were more focused around me." Most of the articles here are universal, the rest still make a difference to me.

The domain was registered 2 days ago, so great job in launching early. You really need a strategy to keep people coming, but all I can say is good luck, have an upvote.

We are planning london.hackful.com etc. Watch this space.

What I love about HN is that the users here are international - not just USA, or just EU. What's the benefit of having an EU only version?

Why doesn't it let me sign up without entering my email?<p>I think when I registered on HN, it didn't make email as mandatory!! Or is my memory deceiving me?

This is a great initiative. Will follow for sure

Why, why is email mandatory to sign up???

750users in just over TWO days and approaching 200 posts with several times more comments!

Finally something in my timezone!

Just wanted to thank all the commenters and those who are signing up to Hackful!

A more appropriate solution, I would think, is regional filtering here on HN. Label submissions with the relevant region, if any, and add one more tab which filters results by region according to a black/white list in your profile.<p>Maybe hackful will show us that such a feature would be heavily used.

An RSS feed would be great !

Woo! Silicon Roundabout. :)

Looks much like Antirez's lamernews.com. What's the stack behind it?

Will the source be available on github for pull requests?

Yes, lets rule out the country that provides us with a userbase for most of our sites. Surely there's nothing relevant there?<p>Hands up if you have an English-language website in which the US is not the largest segment of users?

nice, but can you fix editing comments please :)

Without too much rhetoric: haters gonna hate.

this will be useful if it makes access to European VCs easier. Good luck guys, I'll read HE everyday.

Hacker News for Europe = Hacker News.

What is on-topic on this board?

what about splitting HN into different sections?

ok, so i've had this on my mind for some time now, and i'm going to highjack this thread in hopes of getting this out there.<p>Hackful has sort of shot itself in the foot by trying to use HN as a medium to expose itself. for a long time now HN has started to cross the line from a place for people to share ideas and experiences with running a startup to a place for people to link to tutorials and hot topics in the tech world, or high ranked questions from SO (i'm guilty myself). I really don't see why we do this, we have r/programming, et al for that. HN is a place to talk about statups.<p>look at Hackful. I ran through the first 3 pages and here are the topics. i broke them down by irrelevan, relevant, and something i call the grey area, where it could go either way. the count is very off. i could only pick 20 out of 45 posts as 100% startup relevant. or course my opinion is my opinion and i'm sure there are people who will argue that my lists are debatable, and they are, but that's not the point. the point is that it is not 100% on topic, and we need to figure out a way to fix this.<p>one way is for the community to have the correct mindset and get involved and fixing the issue: 1) don't post irrelevant topics. 2) if we see off topic posts - since there isn't really a way for us to stop that now - just ignore them and let them disappear. we come to HN to read about startups, if we want programming info, tutorials, etc then there are other places to go (reddit, so, etc).<p>another option is to go sort of the reddit-route and allow for subs. that's an option, but again we would be diverging from the original purpose of this site.<p>just shooting out some thoughts, and trying to make us think about where we're going with HN.<p>irrelevant list: (count = 11)<p>8 reasons for switching to Git(blog.fournova.com)<p>Git cheat sheet(blog.fournova.com)<p>How we are using Big Data to solve Social Travel(tripl.tumblr.com)<p>The switch from apache to nginx(news.ycombinator.com)<p>Top 10 IT skills in 2012(ciozone.com)<p>Nicnack for easy multicast testing(adventuresinfabric.posterous.com)<p>Only 6% of Wikipedia Readers Have Ever Edited Wikipedia Content !!(thetecnica.com)<p>Tech in "Hollywood Edition"(aaronklein.com)<p>Teach yourself Git in two minutes(jperla.com)<p>Show Hackful: Browser Based Strategy Game (Spoils Rotten)(spoilsrotten.com)<p>Show Hackful: My Digital Guidebook Startup (Artworm)(artworm.hillsbede.co.uk)<p>relevant list: (count = 20)<p>Show HF: Cubecolor, a fancy HTML5 colorscheme generator(plainas.github.com)<p>Dutch startup is building the most simple customer support software in the world(apo.io)<p>Startupbootcamp to shape up Berlin(venturevillage.eu)<p>Ask HE: What are the missing pieces of the European ecosystem?<p>15 startups from Berlin - there is more than Soundcloud, Wooga and Amen(netzwertig.com)<p>Who is missing from this list of young entrepreneurs to watch in 2012?(yourhiddenpotential.co.uk)<p>Twitter developer teatime in Berlin(techberlin.com)<p>Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Helsinki - We Have A Problem(arcticstartup.com)<p>Show HE: My first RoR-app... a platform for winning a dribbble invite.(showwwdown.com)<p>Berlin Startup Jobs. Marketplace For Inspiring Jobs(berlinstartupjobs.com)<p>Marketplace for Startup jobs in Berlin(berlinstartupjobs.com)<p>SEO Tool &#38; Collectible Card Game. Boost Website Traffic - SERPs &#38; Spyders(serpsandspyders.com)<p>Ask Hackful: Do UK angel groups work?(t.co)<p>Flagons Den Beginners' Poker(london.flagonsden.com)<p>EatSocial - 2nd Feb(eatsocial.net)<p>A local European Angel List<p>London needs a place for hackers to hang out<p>Citymapper - Find your way FAST(citymapper.co.uk)<p>Show Hackful: adscaped - Monetisation without compromise(adscaped.com)<p>Digital Shoreditch festival 2012(digitalshoreditch.com)<p>grey list: (count = 14)<p>Ask HE: Is the source open?<p>Hacker News<p>Tell HE: Hackful sounds (and looks) too much like Hateful<p>Hackful Team: API please?<p>Who registered @hackful? Can we have it please?(twitter.com)<p>Hackful Team: Can we have a daily roundup email please?<p>Is it ok to post articles in other european languages?<p>Tell HE: Please improve the contrast between comments and comment-attributes<p>Hackful Team: RSS feed please!<p>Founder of german ridesharing startup gives his car away (flinc.org)<p>Facebook S1 Filing (Official IPO Document)(sec.gov)<p>Whispero(whispero.com)<p>Longform - for lovers of essays(longform.org)<p>Openbrand(eu.techcrunch.com)<p>Edit: cleaned up the links

A quick but of advice: give the site some personality - visually, I mean. It will make a difference. People will respond to it better and respect it more.<p>If it looks like an HN clone, that's how people will treat it. Differentiate.

I'm pretty sure Hacker News can be viewed and contributed to by folks in Europe already.

great for Europe and everyone else! love the idea.