

Noticias Hacker, like HN but in spanish - armandososa
http://www.noticiashacker.com/

======
snikolov
I see a lot of people making the argument that a Spanish-speaking HN is bad
because _information_ about startups/business/technology/etc written in
Spanish is limited and therefore a Spanish-language HN limits exposure to
information.

These arguments miss the point that Spanish-speaking people might want to
_discuss_ startups/business/technology/etc in Spanish with other Spanish-
speaking people (whether or not the original content was written in Spanish),
network with other Spanish-speaking people, collaborate and co-found companies
with other Spanish-speaking people, and so on.

If you're going to start a company, or discuss technology, or whatever, there
are benefits (as well as drawbacks) to doing that within a community of like-
minded people. If you were born and raised in the US, would you go off to
start a startup with two other guys from Tokyo whose culture and mindset might
be vastly different from yours? Or would you do it with your local friends?
Similarly, an entrepreneur from Spain might be a lot more comfortable starting
a startup with some fellow Spaniards than Americans.

On the flipside, there are benefits to expanding your horizons and you might
learn a thing or two from people outside your culture and social sphere who
have different perspectives.

Because of that, I think the two versions can coexist nicely, rather than one
being a substitute for the other.

~~~
patd
On top of that, I think that a startup built for the Spanish speaking
communities would get better exposure in a Spanish-language HN.

------
iamdave
Seriously, what's with all of these comments trying to promote/necessitate
that to make some sense of your place in the technology community, you'd
better speak english?

Why can't this resource be appreciated for what it is: a resource for the
Spanish speaking community that might be interested in technology, but are
unable to pick up the language for whatever personal reasons they may have?

~~~
kkowalczyk
Reality is a cold, harsh mistress. I'm not a native English speaker. If I were
to restrict my knowledge of programming, startups, business etc. to what is
available in my native language, I would severely handicap myself compared to
those who can read English.

If I were to restrict my software business to only people who use my native
language, I would only have 40 millions of potential customers instead of
several hundred millions.

At best, it's a Quixotic effort.

At worst, it'll actually do harm to people it supposedly tries to serve by
allowing them to stay in the comfort zone because that comfort zone is really,
really small compared to richness of knowledge available in English,
especially in topics like software engineering or startups. It's the law of
unintended consequences.

Sure, learning to read English at a speed equal to reading my native language
was a long and arduous process, but I only had to do it once. I reap benefits
of that investment every day. When I think about it, it was the best
investment of my life.

~~~
aristus
I'm going to assume that Spanish is not one of your languages, so why does it
matter to you one way or another that this site exists? These arguments sound
like bikeshedding, not real objections.

Does having a Polish or Portuguese section of Wikipedia harm people too?

I, for one, will use this to _practice Spanish_ by reading topics with which I
am familiar, and conversing with native speakers about them.

------
ruycer
Many people in Latin America or Spain can write great code, but they are not
that fluent in English. There was nothing similar before. And among 400
million people that speak Spanish, there are many, many good hackers.

~~~
plainOldText
There are also good hackers in Europe, and they all speak various languages,
but they all learned English at some point in their life. And I guess this is
an advantage, because they can collaborate/interact with other tech people,
especially from US/Canada.

I'm not against a spanish HN or any other website in a mother tongue, but
wouldn't be better for everyone if Latin American Hackers would become fluent
in English? Maybe then US companies could open up offices in Latin America,
hire the best programmers, pay maybe less than what we pay now, etc.

~~~
tassl
I am not arguing the utility of having a Spanish HN nor I want to criticize
the utility of knowing English. But for some Spanish /Latin American Hackers
time is also a constrain and they might not have time to be fluent at a
foreign language. Read it, understand it... sure, but fluently writing/talking
requires time.

I have been lucky to be born in a region with 2 official languages and more
lucky to have a 3rd language in my family and being able to learn English and
French in school. But... this is not normal in the rest of Europe.

In any case, I am not sure if I have understood correctly your last sentence.
Did you mean "pay maybe more"? I am not sure of what you are implying...

~~~
ericd
Less than what companies have to pay US programmers could still be far above
average for a programming job in those countries, depending on cost of living
and labor market differences. Basically, he's saying it's a win for everyone
involved.

~~~
mrleinad
At the risk of my karma, can I state what everyone who reads this in the
states is thinking about?

"They took err jerb!!!"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIzivCJ9pzU>

------
mrleinad
Why do so many people believe that because someone posts/reads/contributes in
one language, cannot do so in other language? It baffles me that someone could
believe information can be compartmentalized like that..

Spanish is the 3rd language in the world, people! Most of you would not
hesitate to learn chinese if you had the chance to do some business or go live
in China, and that's the 2nd language! Stop the hypocrisy!

~~~
mrleinad
I think I can observe four kind of opinions in here:

\- Those who agree with this site.

\- Those who disagree "because information about technology is mostly in
english".

\- Those who disagree "because it will split the community".

\- Those who are english fans.

Those who push for everyone to speak english because information about
technology is mostly in english.. may I point at the simmilarity of your
position with a circular logical pattern? "Information about technology is in
english, because no information is produced in other languages. You shouldn't
produce information in other languages, because information about technology
is mostly in english." Need I say more? Hope not, I regard everyone in this
site as fairly intelligent to see the absurdity of such a statement.

To those who say that this kind of site will split the community, think about
it this way: more people, who have no time to learn english, cannot because of
economic/time reasons, or maybe just want to know about things and contribute
in an easy way, will be able to do so. Of course, if we're talking about a
"technological elite" (which I imagine you consider yourself part of, since
you recognize the need for a unified language), will still have english as a
requirement. But the last time I checked, HN was not about that elite, but
about a broad spectrum of subjects (and I dare you to argument about the need
of speaking in english to talk about Lybia and the Internet blackout there,
with several political and sociological implications, not just the
technological ones)

And for those english fans, greetings. I'm one, and I'm from Argentina. But I
acknowledge the existance of human beings outside the United States or
England. Please, open your mind to other ways of thinking. Remember: there are
some cognitive processes in some language, which are not possible in other
languages. That alone should prompt you to congratulate the existance of as
many clones of HN in as many languages as possible.

~~~
KaeseEs
If I write {comments in code, documentation, tutorials, posts on a technical
website} in English, programmers in Latvia and India who have learned English
as the standard language in which computer science and software development
are done can read it.

If I write it in German or Chinese or Spanish, they can't.

~~~
mrleinad
And if some people in your country want to read your code, but is unable to
read english, they can't either.

So.. what you're saying is that you prioritize programmers in Latvia and
India, over your fellow citizens and the community of programmers in your
country?

And I'm not only talking about proffessional developers, but also CS students.
As I wrote, I'm not denying that to be proficient in CS, you need to know
english nowadays. I'm saying that information should be available in other
languages as well.

~~~
Vivtek
You need to be able to _read_ English. I'd really hesitate to say it's
necessary to have good output to be proficient in CS.

~~~
mrleinad
Please, re-read the comment you replied to, and check whether I said something
about that.

------
Vivtek
This just might be my favorite part of this back-and-forth:

Hacker News, como NH pero en inglés (news.ycombinator.com) 4 puntos, entregado
por manelik hace 41 minutos | 2 comentarios

(In case you don't speak Spanish, this is: Hacker News, like NH but in
English.)

------
sep
So a few months ago, I started a similar site in Hebrew[1].

My rationale was similiar to the OP's: most Israeli techies have no problem
reading English, but when it comes to posting comments or writing blogs, lots
would prefer Hebrew. Still, there are differences between the two sites: a
site in Spanish has lots more potential HNers, but on the other hand, a site
in Heberw has the benefit of supplying Israeli-specific news.

While my site hasn't yet taken off, I'm certainly encouraged by similar
efforts that do succeed. So kudos to the OP, and good luck!

[1] <http://bitorama.com>

------
pablasso
I usually don't like straight up clones (e.g. Digg and Meneame) but I'll cheer
anything that motivate us write quality content.

Personally I think that the language doesn't really matters and sharing stuff
in english is the nearest thing to send a global message, but it's annoying
that so many people speak the language and our blog community is so poor.

I just know I'm tired of Engadget and Boing Boing copycats.

------
igorgue
So far, the links are far better than the ones here, at least there is no
techcrunch, thenextweb, onstartups, all jacquesmattheij.com posts (sorry
guys), all daringfireball.net posts, new Mega-Angels pissed or Steve Jobs got
a new haircut.

Just pure programming and a little of startups. Good stuff.

------
aymeric
Most links are english articles though...

~~~
oewolf
Yup, we put no restrictions to what content can be linked to.

We just ask that the comments and opinions are made in Spanish.

------
erebrus
I'm not saying this to be offensive in any way, but anybody who has visited
Spain knows that it's a country relatively closed in its language.

Some will call it pride, others will call a generalized difficulty or lack of
desire to learn different languages. Opinions will be divided in that,
however, the fact is that every single thing in Spain is translated/dubbed.
For instance, there is/was also barrapunto, which is the Spanish version of
slashdot (being that the word barrapunto is the literal translation of
slashdot).

A site in English will have more users and therefore more information,
however, a site in Spanish will reach far more Spaniards and therefore end up
being more useful for most Spaniards. Just my two cents.

Note: I'm not from an english-speaking country either.

------
nRike
Cheers for NoticiasHacker Dfectuoso!

I have some thoughts. Its good to see there are a tool for Spanish-spoken
hackers because you can meet some cool people near you place and build a
community, which i believe the REASON HN exists. When i've discovered HN, i
thought this was really awesome and came to be addicted to all this cool
stuff. The biggest problem about this, is that much of the spanish-spoken HN
users doesnt know each other. I can count with at much 10 hackers that i know
in person and know they visit HN.

Communities are organized as cell. When you born you belong to the first cell
called family. When you show some interests like Basketball or Videogames, you
know people, get accepted and now belong now another cell. I can see Noticias
Hacker would be some cell that will be grouping all the best hacks and news
about LatinAmerican stuff, and eventually help to know about key players in
the ecosystem. Amazing when you need to catch up some attention from SV Angels
and Press coverage.

And as Android Developer, i don't believe you need to forget English(if you
want to develop stuff you need to learn English and build it. in English), but
both languages aren't both exclusive mutually. And in some way, know two
languages makes you more smart.

------
flexterra
Love it. I have a blog about code and other web development stuff but did not
have a place to submit links to because I write in Spanish. The wait is over.

------
betojf
I love hacker news and my startup is spanish only. I am US based and fluent in
english and spanish. After only a few minutes from posting a question in
noticiashacker.com I received an answer that only a community like that would
know. (I asked this question in Quora 3 weeks ago and it is still unanswered,
by the way)

This site is invaluable to get the perspective of latin american hackers and
users, specially if you are not in a spanish speaking country.

This could help so many startups that are mainly english based to expand and
offer services to spanish speaking customers.

After reading [http://www.amazon.com/Latino-Link-Building-Communities-
ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Latino-Link-Building-Communities-
ebook/dp/B004AYCVMC/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299863111&sr=8-1-fkmr0)
there is a wave of users that speak spanish and they are going to need
services.

You don't have to help clients if you don't like money, success, etc...

Embrace communication people. (Yes, I plan on learning other languages)

------
mrleinad
Most of the material for technology news, articles, research, etc.. in
spanish, suck.

Kudos to whomever created this, to help level up those resources.

And I'm a huge fan of pushing everyone to learn english.. but I wish we had
our own content in spanish as well. It would really boost the industry in
South America.

------
benbeltran
the font size is kinda freaking me out. I'll check it out though, collaborate
with fellow spanish-speakers.

~~~
mrleinad
Firefox remembers the zoom for a site. Try it out.

~~~
patrickaljord
So does chrome.

------
theoj
I say the site is a good thing because just like HN it strives to aggregate
high quality tech posts that you might otherwise miss -- it just does this for
Spanish language posts, which is currently outside the scope of HN.

As a bonus for those of us who learned or are learning Spanish, it's also a
great way to practice the language. :)

------
nkassis
(make-dream-happen '(This is cool but if all the hackers of the world would
pool up to create a corpus of technical text in as many languages as possible
and use that as a base for an awesome hacker translator the world would be a
better place.))

now how do you define the make-dream-happen macro?

------
eibrahim
I think this is a terrible idea. First of all I am fluent in English and
arabic and learning spanish, so I am not against languages.

But by having 2 communities we all lose. The spanish hackers will lose on all
the great english content and the english hackers will lose on all the great
spanish content.

This is how things are right now. If you want to be a programmer and compete
in a global market, you need to know English.

It's not good or bad but if 20 years from now, the de facto language becomes
French or German, I will learn it. For now, we are lucky that we have a ONE
language development community all over the world.

~~~
Vivtek
That's ridiculous, if only because there are lots and lots of non-English
programming communities already. French, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese
obviously. Knowing English is a good tool, but the actual fact of the matter
is that there already _are_ monolingual Spanish-speaking programmers out of
the 400 _million_ native speakers of Spanish, and clearly you can't say that
they shouldn't have a community.

~~~
eibrahim
A good analogy to use is c# and VB in .net. I was a VB developer and when C#
was born, I didn't want to learn it because I can do everything in VB. It's
the same framework so the language didn't matter. Overtime almost 99% of code
examples and open source projects were written in C# and I ended up moving to
c# and haven't written VB code (and don't want to) in several years.

My point is, you want to blog/collaborate in spanish/frensh or whatever
language? Go for it. But you have just considerably shrunk your audience and
network and greatly diminished your chances of giving or getting help.

PS: Wikipedia is different than code and is not a good analogy. If I want to
learn about Cancer/Golden Retriever/Panama Canal/etc.. then yes, I want to
read it in my native language.

------
Tiomaidh
I feel really foolish for asking this, but...where the heck is the RSS feed?

------
whalesalad
Also, for blind people? Everything is jumbo sized.

------
karlzt
if the world would speak only one language, it would be a better place.

------
niico
Genial!

------
DFectuoso
I am the guy who created this and let me say:

Wow, just Wow. Thanks HN for all the input! Thank you very much!

The debate contained in this post is extremely interesting and there is a lot
to learn about the different point of views about language barriers, culture
and communities!

I guess I decided to work on this when I learned that a lot of my fellow latin
american hackers read HN every day but rarely participate or post new links.
Felling that having a place to share new projects and interesting notes in my
own language would be cool I decided to start this a couple of weeks ago.

The code is open source and hosted here:
<https://github.com/DFectuoso/Noticias-HAcker> mostly in english! I think that
will add a lot to the conversation: I am not saying don't learn english, just
trying to generate a community where people feel confident because they are
talking in their own language.

Hopefully this will motivate more and more people to share and talk about
awesome stuff!

~~~
candeira
Enhorabuena. It's a very good idea, precisely for the reasons you state. Only
one comment, though. It's not only for Latin American hackers, there are also
Iberian speakers of Spanish who may benefit!

~~~
DFectuoso
You are totally correct, latin american and Iberian Hackers and people from
any other place who happen to speak spanish!

------
omar_sansi
Noticias Hacker sucks

~~~
DFectuoso
Would love to hear why, and try to make is suck less.

~~~
Vivtek
I'm curious to know why you're starting the code from scratch. I miss having a
place to check on my own links, for instance, which I take for granted at HNN.

But kudos for getting it this far! I'll be reading it daily!

 _Edit for clarity_ : check my own _comments_. I swear, it's like I'm not
paying attention at all sometimes.

~~~
DFectuoso
Well, the latest version of HN I could find was a couple of years old and even
tho I know a little bit of lisp, I didn't feel I could maintain/adapt the arc
code that runs this beautiful website. I decided to start from scratch and do
it in python for the app engine, it was hard to get it to run smoothly(and I
will still optimize some more to try to batch the RCPs for memcache and db).
Those features that you mentions will come in the next couple of weeks, right
now I am going to concentrate on having some moderation tools and then i'll
finish the profile and password recovery.

The source is open source and mostly in english :D @
<https://github.com/DFectuoso/Noticias-HAcker>

~~~
Vivtek
I figured that was about it. Well, consider my vote put in for a check-my-own-
comments link. Maybe my Spanish will have gotten intelligible by that time!
(It's about damn time there was a Spanish tech community I could sink my teeth
into. I read Spanish at about 90% fluency, but my writing skills are abysmal.)

------
arctangent
Love it or hate it, English is the language of technology.

I appreciate the need to cater for different audiences but I think it would be
more beneficial for all concerned to encourage people interested in technology
to learn to communicate about it in English.

~~~
arctangent
I'd be fascinated to know why this got downvoted. I don't think what I said is
in the least bit controversial.

~~~
oewolf
No? then you suggest to wait at least 6 months after an intensive time-
consuming-I-can't-do-anything-else English fast course to get up to speed to a
competent English hacker level, so I can read/participate in something like
HN?

Does this looks realistic to you? considering that the number of good Spanish
hackers to-be and that-are is not small.

~~~
arctangent
I don't want to suggest that anybody who speaks a language other than English
is disadvantaged in any way. Quite the opposite.

But it is a fact that English is the language of technology (and science). If
you want to participate then you really need to be familiar with the lingo.
This is why I said "love it or hate it".

If you want to be a good hacker then you must learn English because there's a
huge amount of advice on the web in English to help you. If you can't read it
then you're missing out.

Starting a community in another language works in the short term, but it
really isn't productive in the long term (either for the members of that
community or the wider community). This was the key point I was making.

To address your specific point: what is six months? I've spent over 20 years
learning to program in various languages. Why not spend six months learning
English so that you can participate with the global programming community?

~~~
oewolf
Ah, good hackers will eventually learn English, at their own pace though. Why
spend 6 months in a really intensive English training course stopping
everything else when you can have an influx of material on your own language
now?

Plus, believe me when I say, not every Mexican teenager guy/gal with skills
have the resources to pay a training course like the one you suggest (I
didn't, learnt it on my own, took many years, still not perfect though).

~~~
arctangent
I haven't suggested a training course :-)

I'm arguing for people hanging out in English forums rather than hanging out
in forums designed to cater to their own language.

But I do take your point that good hackers will eventually learn English. I'm
suggesting that this is by necessity - it's not a language you can ignore if
you work in the technology sector.

