
Show HN: Berlin Hacker News - bresc
http://berlinhackernews.com
======
blowski
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.

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.

~~~
bresc
Does anyone know WHY hackful.eu didn't work?

~~~
8bitpal
Hey, 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!

~~~
blowski
Thanks for the feedback.

------
selectnull
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...

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
Well, 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.

------
eik3_de

      DON'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
Fixed

~~~
krapp
If it's fixed, care to describe what the bug was if it was interesting?

~~~
eik3_de
When 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
It'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.

------
sebkomianos
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.

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?

------
kimar
We 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.

------
bresc
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.

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
Could 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
Interesting 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.

------
squigs25
This 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
I 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.

------
omegote
_Because HN is very US focused_

That's an understatement.

~~~
onion2k
I'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
Even 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.

~~~
onion2k
I 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/pop...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=popcorn#!/story/sort_by_date/0/popcorn)

------
tucosan
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.

------
lelf
> _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/)

~~~
ntaso
Also: [http://hackerbruecke.io/](http://hackerbruecke.io/)

Never gained any traction and it wasn't even Berlin-centered.

------
jimmytidey
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:
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37e363c2-3cc9-11e4-871d-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37e363c2-3cc9-11e4-871d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3DU0K2nhZ)

------
julianpye
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.

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
Is there a site for the business grad type community in London that you'd care
to suggest?

------
drtse4
Just a small correction because it feels weird :), on the registration page:

    
    
          <input id="user_password" name="user[password]" type="*password*" />

~~~
tilt
Same goes for edit profile :)

------
resca79
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.

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
You 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 :-)

~~~
jacquesm
The fact that TV overdubs movies (with like 5 voice actors for _all_ the
movies collectively) belies the fact that most Germans speak English and
understand it just fine.

I have lots of contact with Germany, go there frequently and speak passable
German but when I have people with me that don't this is never a problem and
not because I'm translating.

The Germans that don't speak English are usually either quite old or are from
rural areas. City and < 60: you can basically assume they speak English, and
if you try German first they'll switch to English if you can't find your words
unprompted.

This goes for most of Europe by the way.

~~~
Moru
I too spend a lot of time in Germany and with german contacts over the net.
Most of the techie contacts I have through work understands english fine and
also write and speak good english. The people I meet socially and in stores
are a completely different topic. They have no reason to learn english because
they have no contact what so ever with the language.

Ten years ago you would be hard pressed to find youth that would speak english
but because of internet I guess that has changed. I don't have so much contact
with people below 25 any more.

I assume this is also very different depending on area and your social level
in society :-)

------
doczoidberg
german or european Hacker News would have been better.

------
poseid
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 (
[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) )

------
erikb
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.

~~~
CmonDev
Upvoting means "interesting/controversial topic" rather than a "good idea".

~~~
krapp
To 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.

------
kornakiewicz
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.

~~~
drsintoma
I'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
Thanks, If anyone heard about startup looking for java/golang junior guy - I
would love to talk.

------
Yaggo
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.

------
jacquesm
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.

------
pantalaimon
You could have used one of those shiny new .berlin domains

------
dizzy
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.

One thing though, is there an RSS feed?

------
Peroni
You may want to work on moderation:
[http://i.imgur.com/yuTR1yO.png](http://i.imgur.com/yuTR1yO.png)

------
lowglow
Why doesn't HN just become a reddit clone?

~~~
spindritf
I think that a large part of maintaining HN quality is focusing all the
readers and their moderating power on a single front page.

------
kamakazizuru
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:
[http://imgur.com/bQFKTzB](http://imgur.com/bQFKTzB)

Password in cleartext.. really? Everyone around me at St. Oberholz can see my
passworrd now.

~~~
bresc
What's the point without https?

------
atmosx
I really don't see the point. Tried a couple of HN spin offs and I always end
up here, long live HN.

------
EToS
how about a european version? perhaps tagged by country to filter?

~~~
disputin
[http://hackeurope.eu/](http://hackeurope.eu/) \- looks like it's on holiday.

------
sauere
How about do GermanHackernews instead of BerlinHackernews?

~~~
drinchev
I 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.

------
nodesocket
Does upvoting work? Does not seem so.

------
eskimobloood
Who is behind this?

------
ozh
I fail at seeing what here is worthy of being first link on HN front page...

~~~
swombat
I don't think it's worthy of front page at all, personally...

~~~
oe
If only there was a mechanism with which people could indicate what they would
like to see on the front page.

------
blablabla123
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?

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
> 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.

