I'm from London, and I was at the Hacker News meetup when hackful.eu was launched. It was a promising idea, but most of the interesting or useful articles on HN aren't relevant only by where you live. It's rare that an article is interesting in London, but irrelevant in California. Given the nature of the community on HN, geography is rarely an issue.<p>As a result, any geographical-based version of HN ends up either duplicating 90% of the articles on the main HN, which fragments the conversation, or it doesn't post the most interesting or useful articles so becomes irrelevant. Even a language-based subcommunity is largely pointless, since most of us speak English - it makes more sense to read knowledgable comments in broken English than amateur comments in perfect German.<p>In the end, HN is not Reddit. I don't see that it needs, wants, or would benefit from subcommunities.
Living and working from Europe, I understand the sentiment about HN being US centric; but it's not HN's "fault". The majority of US businesses are very US oriented and often it's very annoying. Can't buy a product (Google Chromebook still can't be bought worldwide; only selected countries), can't use services (Netflix anyone? yes, i know it's not that simple...), most of the time good luck in getting an invoice with tax number on it...<p>I wish you all the luck but we really don't need HN clone for Europe and certainly not one focuesed on Berlin.<p>edit: fix typo
<p><pre><code> DON'T USE IT
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This site has a serious security flaw: every registered user can change the email and password of every account.<p>Edit: I've sent the site op an email
Disclaimer: I am not part of the hackful.eu founding team but I have had a coffee with them and I tried to help them spread in Berlin by organising a hackathon the same day they run one in London.<p>My thoughts about what happened - and what will eventually and inevitably happen to any similar community - is that unless you offer very specific content about the area you want to "represent" there is no point in being location-specific in the first place. And the tricky part is that this content is rarely in the form of a news piece or a sideproject submission: it's mainly opinions about things happening in that specific location (eg: I live in Berlin and I am interested in what is being discussed about startup taxes). So in the end you have to actually offer the things that one can't find in Hacker News anyway (eg: information about events, jobs, etc). And then, why build a hackernews clone?
We released <a href="http://techberlin.com" rel="nofollow">http://techberlin.com</a> a few months ago. While we don't plan to turn it into a HN clone, we'd love to make it a hub for Berlin's tech community.<p>Would be great to hear Berliners' opinion on what'd they'd like to see there next.
I am not trying to split up the community. HN is global and this is good. BHN is local and also focused on showing local startups. That being said it can't obviously have every hour 200 new submissions. It is more about sharing your experience in Berlin and getting to know the Berlin startup scene. I honestly think that submissions will stay on the front page for ~1 week and this is also how it was calculated.<p>I was not counting for BHN to be on the front page so I am trying now to fix all the small things that pop up.<p>Edit: As I mention in te FAQ this is an experiment and if people continue to contribute I will try to push it into a direction that makes it valuable for everyone interested in Berlin.
This is cool, and it definitely raises some interesting ideas about geography and our online hacker news community.<p>But I do think hackernews should consider making some articles locality specific. For example, a user logged in from Berlin could be shown an article of geographical interest. You can take this a step further and hsow articles to a user based on their interests. For example, a developer might be more interested in coding articles and a product managaer or vc might be more interested in new products.<p>It helps when people get personalized content, because a greater diversity of articles might get read by the community, and then truly interesting ones will become front page.
I think this is an awesome idea.
Since the startup scene is growing steadily with loads of meetups, hackathons, a great influx of international tech people coming to Berlin and the startup infrastructure advancing, having a Berlin focused hn clone could really be a neat means to get info on what is happening around the city.
> <i>if a HN focused on Europe would work.</i><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130218061649/http://hackful.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20130218061649/http://hackful.eu...</a>
Language aside, I'd say there is a cultural difference that isn't represented on HN very well, neatly captured by the different connotations of the word "socialist" inside and outside the US. But debates around liberalism and the free market also play out extremely differently in other parts of the world. Today's (paywalled) FT article addresses some of this: <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37e363c2-3cc9-11e4-871d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3DU0K2nhZ" rel="nofollow">http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37e363c2-3cc9-11e4-871d-00144feabd...</a>
YC/HN is global. You read the comments and you gain insight from people in Bangladesh, in Australia, in Japan, anywhere where idealistic techies are. The only country that realizes the potential is the US and the only region where you can live the lifestyle is the West-Coast and this is why it sometimes may feel like a bias.<p>Anyway, I fail to see the reason behind this. Especially since the startup scene in Berlin (and London) is mostly driven by business graduates and less by techies. If you want to find similar people, you can use meetup or similar.
Just a small correction because it feels weird :), on the registration page:<p><pre><code> <input id="user_password" name="user[password]" type="*password*" /></code></pre>
While I can appreciate the work to do the web site, the news of hackers made in Berlin sounds like very restrictive and poor of contents.<p>I came from italy, where with other guys, we have built hackingintalia.com(fork of lamernews) for italians hacker.
In Italy the culture of hackers often have not a global point of view, maybe for language issue and other reasons.<p>But for Germans as many Anglo Saxon, the English is not a real Problem, so it looks like "yet another news hub" with no something of much valuable than HackerNews
it would be great to have people share more on the (open-source) software driving forums and news-sites. For example, I learned quite a lot about Ruby and Redis from looking at the source of Lamernews ( <a href="https://github.com/antirez/lamernews" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/antirez/lamernews</a> ) and I also learned using Promises and Redit with Node while experimenting with ( <a href="https://github.com/mulderp/echojs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mulderp/echojs</a> )
I think it's a little funny that at one side nearly all comments say it won't work, and at the same time loads of people upvote and start to use it, which to me looks like the opposite.
Good news, I'm looking for a job in Berlin (Java, some Golang and JS, recently Elixir) and that seems like a good resource, but the tab "Jobs" will be welcome.
Funny how suddenly all good web design principles are thrown away and new HN clones build, just because the original was built by Paul Graham who isn't much a UX guy.
At times there have been thoughts rolling around at the back of my mind about doing another variation on the HN theme. But geography was never one of the driving forces.
Hey I like this. I used to live in Berlin and think about moving back there, would be great to keep up with what is going on there.<p>One thing though, is there an RSS feed?
also I'm really not sure I want to use a service that hasn't quite figured out how to use basic HTML forms yet: <a href="http://imgur.com/bQFKTzB" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/bQFKTzB</a><p>Password in cleartext.. really? Everyone around me at St. Oberholz can see my passworrd now.
Being from Berlin myself, I hope this is not going to split up the community. Of course the original HN seems kind of US centric but do we seriously want a separate HN for each city?<p>Moreover one should keep in mind that there are just way more hackers in the US, so there's no need to worry that there isn't always a post about Berlin on the front page... ;) It's rather a reason to cheer when there is one more success story from Berlin...