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> Also, from my own observations, in Europe "hipster" doesn't have a negative connotation, meaning simply "cool person"

Not really "cool person", more like "pretentious person".

I always understood it as "someone who is putting extra effort into finding obscure/novel things just to appear cool".

I would offer additional refinement.

A pretentious person is a person who thinks they're "better" than others (whatever that means) for irrelevant reasons, like their taste.

A poser is a person who in addition doesn't have the good tastes to be better than others, and so he fakes their tastes. He's putting in effort in order to attain pretentiousness.

I would define hipster as synonym of poser. It's worse than pretentious.

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