> 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.)
>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].
I really miss old meetups where people would just present their open source projects and discuss technical topics.
To add a counterpoint, I, on the other hand, am burnt out on these kinds of meetups. For short 5-10min lightning talks, I think presenting projects or libraries is fantastic for discovery, but longer talks about specific projects bore the hell out of me 9 out of 10 times. I can learn faster in my own time and its difficult to match the topic (and level: beginner? expert?) with the audience.
Visionary talks are harder to miss with and therefore safer bets to not bore me.
While I understand your frustration, I think it is not necessarily a bad thing to support this.
I think we live in a pretty unique time where being a visionary is encouraged and more economically feasible than ever. This will result in many novel products, some of which will greatly impact the mankind. Granted, most of them will just be noise with little or no global benefit, but I'm willing to take that risk.
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.
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.
I only went once, it seemed to stop for a while after I managed to go. I'm looking forward to attending again if it will be regular once more.
I agree it was a particular good experience, even with technical issues (no lights for one), it had some really helpful topics and enlightening speakers.
It's always good to hear from real projects about real problems and solutions rather than blog posts which are too often focused on what's best given a perfect environment, not what is realistic.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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 ?
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
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/
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!
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.)