107 ms·
Show HN: Berlin Hacker News
- drtse4 12y agoJust a small correction because it feels weird :), on the registration page: <input id="user_password" name="user[password]" type="*password*" />
- tilt 12y agoSame goes for edit profile :)
- lelf 12y ago> if a HN focused on Europe would work. https://web.archive.org/web/20130218061649/http://hackful.eu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130218061649/http://hackful.eu...
- mkdir_home 12y agoSo they took this down, do you know if there is a replacement?
- ntaso 12y agoAlso: http://hackerbruecke.io/ http://hackerbruecke.io/ Never gained any traction and it wasn't even Berlin-centered.
- lowglow 12y agoWhy doesn't HN just become a reddit clone?
- spindritf 12y agoI think that a large part of maintaining HN quality is focusing all the readers and their moderating power on a single front page.
- nodesocket 12y agoDoes upvoting work? Does not seem so.
- omegote 12y ago_Because HN is very US focused_ That's an understatement.
- onion2k 12y agoI'd say it's an overstatement. Superficially things are posted about America, but usually that's more a problem with the site that's linked to being written for an American audience - the majority of articles that make it to the front page are about things that have global impact. Actual content within HN is pretty much entirely for a global audience - Show HN is usually about startups/projects with global reach. Ask HN is usually about things that affect an individual. Hiring threads are very often for remote jobs where people can work anywhere.
- kuschku 12y agoEven in the comments everything is US oriented. Example: "2 years are now a long support cycle for phones as most people get carrier upgrades every 2 years anyway" (from the Android Browser vuln thread. This is only valid in the US because most people in Europe, Africa, Asia, India, etc. buy their phones seperate from their contract, so there is no "automatic" upgrade. Another example was in the Popcorn-Time threads the "Who needs this if you have Netflix?" – Netflix doesn't even exist in most countries, and where it does exist, they only have like a dozen series, nowhere near the US version, so it provides no benefit. Hell, here where I live even DVD rental is still used, even Amazon provides DVD rental here. Most of the people in the comments assume that everyone is in the US and a Hacker-News without that would be great.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- onion2k 12y agoI don't see that at all, and I'm from the UK. The fact that you're using PopcornTime as an example is interesting - there hasn't been a Popcorntime discussion on HN for months. There's been plenty of threads[1], but mostly about the development of the apps. You have to go back 5 months for real discussion (more than 100 comments). I realise that this is just one example, but I'd be wary of suggesting there's an implicit bias to US-centric discussion using a thread from that long ago on a forum that gets hundreds of submissions and dozens of discussions daily. Essentially, I think it's important to question how much of the US focus is real and how much stems from our biases. I don't think there's very much, but maybe that's because I ignore it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=popcorn#!/story/sort_by_date/0/popcorn https://hn.algolia.com/?q=popcorn#!/story/sort_by_date/0/pop...
- kornakiewicz 12y agoGood 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.
- drsintoma 12y agoI'll be submitting my project to HN in a few weeks when I feel it's ready. But in the mean time, here you go: https://englishjobs.de https://englishjobs.de
- kornakiewicz 12y agoThanks, If anyone heard about startup looking for java/golang junior guy - I would love to talk.
- EToS 12y agohow about a european version? perhaps tagged by country to filter?
- disputin 12y agohttp://hackeurope.eu/ http://hackeurope.eu/ - looks like it's on holiday.
- ozh 12y agoI fail at seeing what here is worthy of being first link on HN front page...
- blowski 12y agoI'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. 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. In the end, HN is not Reddit. I don't see that it needs, wants, or would benefit from subcommunities.
- tormeh 12y agoEven a language one doesn't make sense for Berlin - I think the only common language for the uni/startup scene there would be English anyway.
- bresc 12y agoDoes anyone know WHY hackful.eu didn't work?
- blowski 12y agoIt's been asked a few times, (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5298716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5298716) but I haven't seen any response either from the Hackful founders, or anybody in general.
- 8bitpal 12y agoHey, I'm one of the guys who started and ran it. I think there are a couple of reasons. 1. We decided to build something custom. Which means we have to respond to feature requests, keep things secure and maintain the system. In hindsight a subreddit may have been a better idea. (like http://www.reddit.com/r/EuropeStartups/ http://www.reddit.com/r/EuropeStartups/ I'm not affiliated.) 2. It was a side project. I think in order to maintain an engaged community there has to be a core of very active users and submitters. We were not really. I tried for a while but the platform we had built did not really lend itself to interaction. Many people used it as a news feed for European startups and tech news rather than a place to interact. The site never gathered critical mass to have enough submitters and commenters to keep things moving. 3. It was our first community project and we were inexperienced. We made a few mistakes early on, spread ourselves too thinly and didn't come up with a good way for others to participate. 4. It fizzled out. The other guys went on to other things and while I kept running it on one of my boxes for a while nothing happened (which makes sense considering there were very few submissions and almost no participation) Overall I would say we didn't have enough experience and time to make it a great community. We also made early mistakes that made things more difficult down the line. Sorry it just went off the air at some point without notice, by that point visits were down to a handful of people per week. Maybe r/EuropeStartups will have more success!
- julianpye 12y agoYC/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. 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.
- conjectures 12y agoIs there a site for the business grad type community in London that you'd care to suggest?
- selectnull 12y agoLiving 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... I wish you all the luck but we really don't need HN clone for Europe and certainly not one focuesed on Berlin. edit: fix typo
- christop 12y agoWell, Netflix did launch in Germany at midnight today ;) But I agree; looking at the HN front page just now, I only see a couple of things that could be said to be US-specific (or any-country-specific), one of which is a job posting.
- Peroni 12y agoYou may want to work on moderation: http://i.imgur.com/yuTR1yO.png http://i.imgur.com/yuTR1yO.png
- doczoidberg 12y agogerman or european Hacker News would have been better.
- kamakazizuru 12y agoalso I'm really not sure I want to use a service that hasn't quite figured out how to use basic HTML forms yet: http://imgur.com/bQFKTzB http://imgur.com/bQFKTzB Password in cleartext.. really? Everyone around me at St. Oberholz can see my passworrd now.
- bresc 12y agoWhat's the point without https?
- blablabla123 12y agoBeing 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? 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...
- mqsiuser 12y ago> I hope this is not going to split up the community You are overrating (Berlin) bcz you are from Berlin. Don't worry about your concerns too much ;) > cheer when there is one more success story from Berlin... I will search HN for news from Berlin now (not aware of any recently): "Berlin Hacker News": Some "Ask HN", no products. A HN in German would have made slight sense. A HN for Berlin?! Sorry, bye, bye :). You are not PG.
- resca79 12y agoWhile 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. 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. 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
- Moru 12y agoYou would be surprised at how many germans refuse to read/write english. They get everything dubbed on TV since ages and almost all games comes out with a german version. But this berlin hacker news is only accepting english submissions so it's a moot point anyway. Just ignore me :-)
- dutchbrit 12y agoThis is no joke, we use to get German TV here in The Netherlands. I always found it amusing to watch the A-Team dubbed in German.
- Systemic33 12y agoYou should try to watch How I Met Your Mother in german, that is so weird, but quite hilarious.
- qznc 12y agoWell, our Bruce Willis voice makes up for a lot. :)
- resca79 12y agoYes but you are talking about TV, games and so on. I'm sure that hackers have much propension to read/write English, than common people.
- 12y ago
- atmosx 12y agoI really don't see the point. Tried a couple of HN spin offs and I always end up here, long live HN.
- bresc 12y agoI 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. 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. 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.
- tormeh 12y agoCould it be integrated with HN somehow? Some things are of global interest and could be shared between the two and some things are of local interest and could be only on BHN.
- bresc 12y agoInteresting idea but kinda hard to accomplish. How would one determine what is of global interest and therefore maybe shared? I think it works best if you check HN for global "news" and BHN for Berlin "news". I don't see a problem with that.
- tucosan 12y agoJust open up two separate tabs. One for hn and one for bhn. ;)
- sauere 12y agoHow about do GermanHackernews instead of BerlinHackernews?
- drinchev 12y agoI think Berlin is more as a term of a startup scene, rather than a geographical location in a country. If I'm mistaken it would not be interested in BHN at all.
- eskimobloood 12y agoWho is behind this?
- tucosan 12y agoI 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.
- jacquesm 12y agoAt 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.
- erikb 12y agoI 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.
- CmonDev 12y agoUpvoting means "interesting/controversial topic" rather than a "good idea".
- krapp 12y agoTo be fair, and despite the staff's intentions, upvoting and downvoting don't really mean anything, although people interpret the visual cue however they wish.
- erikb 12y agoIf something is controversial I upvote the opinion I can agree with most, or if my opinion is not represented I write it myself. I think everybody has their own idea of what upvotes mean.
- jimmytidey 12y agoLanguage 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: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37e363c2-3cc9-11e4-871d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3DU0K2nhZ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37e363c2-3cc9-11e4-871d-00144feabd...
- eik3_de 12y agoDON'T USE IT This site has a serious security flaw: every registered user can change the email and password of every account. Edit: I've sent the site op an email
- bresc 12y agoFixed
- eik3_de 12y agodo you know lobste.rs? Have you considered using it, it seems quite mature, can be white labeled and also is an rails app.
- sgdesign 12y agoThere's also http://telesc.pe http://telesc.pe :)
- krapp 12y agoIf it's fixed, care to describe what the bug was if it was interesting?
- eik3_de 12y agoWhen you visited a profile, there was a "edit" button so that you could just change email and password of every user. The kind of bug my grandma would find just by clicking around.
- mqsiuser 12y agoIt's a side project (and given the setup doomed to fail anyway). Super big (US) IT-companies struggel with how to being profitable, whilest IT is capital/work intensive (to avoid these embarassing bugs). There is a long-tail, but it's not for you.
- zerooneinfinity 12y ago
- squigs25 12y agoThis is cool, and it definitely raises some interesting ideas about geography and our online hacker news community. 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. 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.
- Kurtz79 12y agoI think one of the defining features of HN is its lack of advanced features. Considering who´s behind the site, if they thought HN needed more features there would be more than enough financial and technical resources to do so. It´s simple, minimalist , and it just works.
- poseid 12y agoit 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 ( https://github.com/antirez/lamernews https://github.com/antirez/lamernews ) and I also learned using Promises and Redit with Node while experimenting with ( https://github.com/mulderp/echojs https://github.com/mulderp/echojs )
- kimar 12y agoWe released http://techberlin.com http://techberlin.com 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. Would be great to hear Berliners' opinion on what'd they'd like to see there next.
- pantalaimon 12y agoYou could have used one of those shiny new .berlin domains
- Yaggo 12y agoFunny 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.
- sebkomianos 12y agoDisclaimer: 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. 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?
- dizzy 12y agoHey 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. One thing though, is there an RSS feed?