
Hacker News London Meetup, October 2016 – Review - Peroni
https://thoeni.io/post/hacker-news-london-october-2016/
======
avian
> The talks remind me somewhat of TEDx events, but primarily focused on
> technology.

All tech meet-ups in my corner of the world seem to have devolved into these
TED style talks.

These days everyone wants to be a visionary discussing big ideas. Everyone
talks how awesome it is to work for their startup that is changing the world
or be a freelancer that earns tons of cash by writing Ruby while surfing on
Tahiti. Share various personal stories of enlightenment.

This style was exciting when TED got popular a few years ago, but now I find
it increasingly annoying. I really miss old meetups where people would just
present their open source projects and discuss technical topics. If I go to a
Python meetup, I want to perhaps hear about some new cool library you made,
not how you learned to play the trumpet.

(I don't mean this as a criticism of this Hacker News meetup - I haven't been
to it and perhaps this style fits there. Just a general observation.)

~~~
Peroni
>I really miss old meetups where people would just present their open source
projects and discuss technical topics.

That's pretty much what HN London is. We like to keep the talks as diverse as
possible. Everything from local developers building 3D worlds in CSS3D[1] to
the creator of Haskell talking about shaping the future of how children learn
computing[2].

[1] - [https://vimeo.com/75454802](https://vimeo.com/75454802)

[2] - [https://vimeo.com/137420684](https://vimeo.com/137420684)

------
izolate
HNLondon is probably the best tech meetup in Europe. It's hard to convey what
makes it so special, and why other meetups can't seem to replicate its magic.
I highly recommend going if you can.

~~~
Peroni
Wow. Thank you.

The meetup has been running for about 5-6 years now and it's taken a huge
amount of time and effort to get it to where it is today. We're incredibly
fortunate that there's an amazing amount of interesting people willing to
speak at and attend the event.

~~~
Jaruzel
How does one find out when the next one is?

~~~
Peroni
Here you go:
[http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon/](http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon/)

Next one is likely to be at the end of November.

------
dmitri1981
If anyone is interested in coming along to future events, sign up at
[http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon](http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon) . Hope to
have the next one on in late November.

------
philipDS
I have been at meetups all around the world (Belgium, Madrid, SF, Barcelona,
London)... and HN London is easily one of the highest quality ones I've been
to. If you're in/around London and wanna meet some interesting people (e.g.
I've seen pc there once), make sure you go there.

------
jackgavigan
Dmitri (dmitri1981) and Steve (Peroni) deserve a huge amount of credit for HN
London. It's one of the largest tech-focused meetup groups outside the US, and
it's hugely refreshing to have an event that doesn't charge through the nose,
and seeks to help the local startup eco-system instead of seeking to profit
from it.

------
cbeach
Been attending HNLondon for several years now. IMO its success is down to
Steve and Dmitri's efforts to source speakers that cover diverse topics, are
not salesy, and are often completely and unexpectedly inspirational.

They avoid the overly polished and sometimes sanctimonious TED style. HNLondon
feels like an authentic event put together by true technologists for
technologists.

Free craft beer and pizza also sweetens the deal :-)

------
grub5000
Anyone able to explain the Poundstretcher thing? Why are they scattering
around the Seychelles on Google Maps?

~~~
mintone
Yes! This is something I discovered whilst building part of the fieldmargin
stack - basically historically speaking you order the terms as latitude,
longitude. For lots of applications (inc. geoJSON) you follow the mathematical
order however: x, y, z which equivalent to longitude, latitude. Our iOS dev
made the mistake of incorrectly ordering them one day and we discovered our
data along with the poundstretchers in the Indian Ocean which we thought was
pretty funny. We assume they made the same mistake.

------
jacquesm
That's at least one example of technology used for the betterment of humanity.
Wished I had been there!

------
ENadyr
Great to see this meetup is back again, would be great if someone from YC
(and/or YC alum) can do a talk about the emergence of hardware startups, maybe
Luke Iseman ?

------
fauria
Yesterday I created Hacker News Madrid Meetup
([https://www.meetup.com/hnmadrid](https://www.meetup.com/hnmadrid)) and now
its being reviewed.

Any advise on how to run it?

~~~
Peroni
Finding decent speakers is harder than finding decent sponsors. Expect to
spend most of your time chasing down speakers.

Start small. HN London started in someones apartment in London with 10-15
people turning up and grew from there to an average of 400 people attending.

Try to avoid talks that end up being a product pitch.

------
staticelf
I wonder if people is as critical IRL as they can seem here on HN sometimes. I
guess not :)

------
fatline
wow, didn't know about this. I'm definitely going to attend next time!

------
vmorgulis
Anybody interested to run a HN Meetup in Paris?

~~~
dmitri1981
Sacha Greif and the dotConferences guys (Sylvain Zimmer and Ferdinand Boas)
used to run them. Maybe get in touch with them and see if they can help you
get started. Also, feel free to give me a shout if you want any input /
suggestions

~~~
sylvinus
Hey!

We did start it a long time ago, but then someone aggressively took over the
meetup page, so we're not in control anymore:
[http://www.meetup.com/parishackers/](http://www.meetup.com/parishackers/)

We've since started "Paris Tech Talks" in the same spirit, which is now the
largest generalist tech meetup in Paris: [https://www.meetup.com/Paris-Tech-
Talks/](https://www.meetup.com/Paris-Tech-Talks/)

What we've seen over time though is that the Paris tech scene already has a
enormous number of high quality meetups, and people are increasingly tired of
them. We are seeing the same general decline in interest that happened with
hackathons a couple years ago.

I'd say that "Hacker News" is not really a strong enough unique proposition to
build a new meetup on. Meetups linked to specific languages or technologies
tend to do much better over time.

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss more!

