Hackful - A Hacker News for Europe | Hacker News Reader

Hackful - A Hacker News for Europe

hackful.com

340 pointsrayhano165 comments

I doubt it'll work. HN doesn't work just because it's there, it works because it has a certain traction among a certain community. Building up such traction is very difficult, and I doubt doing so by adding a link to it from a non-Europe-focused site is going to help much.

Lamernews looked real cool the first 2 weeks as well, and then it mostly died out. How will Hackful be different?

I mean, I'd love it to be different, I'd love a site about hacker culture more focused on European issues, people and businesses. But I can't see why it'll work.

You are right... but that is why Hackful should be fine: it was born out of an email list called Open Coffee London where there is an amazing community of entrepreneurs helping each other everyday. We saw how open HackerNews is and thought that we should give our European community more chance to flourish.

Our NEXT steps are to make this more shareable: RSS, possibly daily email digests (opt-in only)

THEN we are plugging in a calendar of local events and need-to-know events

AND FINALLY capping it off with a local Angel List

Ah, right!

Why not make an about page that explains this? For all i could know, you had simply put a homehacked version of HN for the kicks of it.

About page is now live... :)

I really like the idea. And i hope that this gains traction. Also, it would be great if hackful tries to focus on Europe* and not just London. E.g., Berlin is a great hotspot as well atm.

Are you guys planning to open source the code so other communities can use it? Or a hosted (even if paid) service?

The about page mentions that they are going to put the code on github. http://hackful.com/about

I didn't see a link to the about page on their front page, but it exists none-the-less.

Found it in one of the threads here - https://github.com/8bitpal/hackful

HackerStreet India has been doing ok for the last one year since launch - http://hackerstreet.in/

The objective was never to become the next Hacker News or replace it but just to have India centric discussions there. I would say Hackful has an equally good (or better) chance

I don't know. The thing is, a German person does not have a lot in common with an Irish person. They have a different culture, different media, a different language, different pop idols. If you are at some place in the Netherlands, it's more expensive to go to some other place in Belgium than to go to another place in the Netherlands, even if those are equally far away. I guess what I am trying to say is, Europe is still not a single country, but just an almost random collection of countries that happen to be geographically close to each other. And even though, that should not matter in this globalized world, it does. So, I don't know if there is a point, to have a Europe centric discussion platform, as opposed to having one for each country.

I'm in the Netherlands right now, and it is not more expensive for me to go to Belgium. In fact, I don't even need my passport - just my ID(which I'm legally required to have anywhere in the Netherlands also).

your comment reminded me of a quote from austrian diplomat Von Metternich[1] about Italy during that country's unification period: "Italy is a geographic expression" (as it was, being half a dozen independent states with different money, government systems, economic situations, costumes).

And that made me think, maybe the simile should go further: in 1800's italy different people did have newspapers (such as the one that made the above quote popular) read in more than one state to discuss about their situation and, arguably, this did play a role in the subsequemt unification[2]. We could use something like that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemens_von_Metternich

[2] ok, an army would be more helpful

from Italy it is often cheaper to go to London, Paris or Prague than from Venice to Milan :) low cost flights beat trains all the time.

> I doubt doing so by adding a link to it from a > non-Europe-focused site is going to help much.

Do you really think HN has no European visitors?

Let me start off by saying that this is a great idea, and maybe we do need more HN-like sites as HN currently has a usefulness monopoly as far as my news browsing habits are concerned.

On a more constructive note: please implement an RSS feed.

Yes, RSS feed please. Pretty please. pleeeez!

Downvote for supporting a feature request? srsly?

Downvote for a me-too post, probably.

Interresting, since a similar 'me-too' comment yielded five upvotes just three days ago.

Yeah, maybe I'll have to add more insight as to why i'm me-too-ing the parent post. With a link. http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/rss_is_dying_and_you_should_...

Downvote for being a dickhead. Not that this stops pg, of course. He loves incompetent morons like yourself. Apply to YC today!

Pardon me for taking the bait, but what are you so mad at pg for? Clearly you've taken some kind of interaction with YC and/or pg personally.

Please don't feed the troll. I don't know this person. Never interacted.

Your wish has been granted by the genius that is Elias (@8bitpal)

http://hackful.com/posts/90

I can't do without an RSS feed either. Hacker News has the top spot on my iGoogle page and if I can't put Hackful next to it, I'll probably forget about it real soon.

It is being worked on ASAP :)

RSS is now live

http://hackful.com/posts/90

Can I ask a simple question: Why?

I live in Europe, but AFAIK none of the places where I've lived/am regular even have an HN meetup. I have no idea we would want a splintered HN.

Maybe it will do things in new ways that are better than HN. Maybe it will eventually become more International like HN is? Choice and variety are a good thing. You've got to differentiate yourself somehow when you're starting out.

The number one reason for me would be because lots of the things covered on HN tend to be US focused to the point that people forget anywhere else exists. I'm tired of articles praising some service provider or payment processor only to find they are US-only and may support the EU in 'the future'. I'm tired of rants about carrier practices that only affect the US as if it is universal. I'd like to see a site where there is an actual consciousness that not everyone is living in the United States of America.

I'd like to see a site where there is an actual consciousness that not everyone is living in the United States of America.

Well, if our lobbyists do their jobs properly, mere accidents of geography will not keep you out of the fold. :)

Moreover, sorry dude, the tech war is over and we won. We've got better funding, better language, better regulations, and better spirit--and sadly, not a lot else.

EDIT: (and yes, not seeing stories about services that can be used outside of the US is unfortunate--agreed. Submit more and upvote!)

> the tech war is over and we won

Excuse me? I've just evaluated all possible virtual hosting services, and by far the best is in Germany.

I know dozens of people who hate the US passionately because of high-horse comments like yours.

I would be curious to know which service that is, and what boxen they run, and what company made those boxen.

In hindsight I realize that probably just opened the door to a pissing match over whose contributions to software/computing/startup culture is greater, but I think that would be an interesting conversation to have here.

EDIT: To get the ball rolling, we've got

Matsumoto : Ruby : Japan

Ericsson: Erlang : Sweden

Torvalds : Linux : Finland

I don't think this will turn into a pissing contest. Hacker News comments are usually pretty insightful. Arguing over whether Europe as a continent or the U.S. as a country is better in some respects is just useless.

Especially useless when the "argument" boils down to a single famous individual (or even a handful) that happens to hail from a given country or continent.

You probably understand why it would be immature to compare continents. It's anyway getting harder to really get to the bottom of it as lots of engineer and scientists were taken to the US in the last century to work on those boxes.

But ultimately there are no sides to take, and that is why "US already won the tech war" comments piss people off, and rightfully so.

...and if there are no sides to take, it hardly matters whether or not the startup news on HN happens to be mostly in the geographic bounds of an upstart colony of the British Empire, now does it?

And if that is the case, if we are indeed this sisterhood/brotherhood without nation or creed other than the desire to do work, surely it makes more sense that we address underrepresentation in our community here instead of balkanizing across the net?

Better:

Electricity | Gilbert/Galvani/Volta | Europe

Telephone | whoever you believe this week | Europe + USA

Computers | VonNeumann / Turing working in USA | Europe + USA

Internet | DARPA | USA

Web | CERN | Europe

Game, set... and match.

(it's all a joke, of course. Just be a sport, will you?)

( of course, my good sir or madam! :)

clearly the best things--modern internet for example--are the result of collaboration without regard to nation of origin )

Well, to be fair, let us also count things the US did wrong:

C++ | Bell Labs | USA

XML | IBM | USA

UML | IBM | USA

SOAP | Microsoft | USA

IE6 | Microsoft | USA

GPL | Stallman | USA

Visual Basic | Microsoft | USA

gcc | Stallman | USA

CORBA | Object Management Group | USA

Moreover, sorry dude, the tech war is over and we won

In monetary terms that is probably true, if by "tech" you mean IT. But the losers of your "war" have invented things like the Web, Linux, Python, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, English and the ARM CPU, not to speak of most math and logic foundations of today's tech industry.

The only item on your list that I wholeheartedly agree with is "better funding". Everything else is, um, ...patriotism?

And the US has several of its own.

Hardware: MIPS, x86, SPARC, Motorola 68* (and the attendant Apple product lines [1,2,Mac, etc.]), DTMF phones (and thus modems), the transistor (though some very preliminary work was done in Canada and Germany, Bell Labs and TI brought them to manufacture), Ethernet, packet-switched networks, touch and light-pen interfaces, etc.

Software: 3D graphics, functional programming (LISP et al), node.js, JavaScript, C, C++, Java, jquery, Unix, Plan 9, Windows (lol), BSD everything (sockets, operating system, license), modern information theory (thanks Shannon!), BitTorrent, etc.

Culture: GNU, EFF, FSF, copyleft, etc.

True, and all those lists could of course be a lot longer. My point is that what really sets the US apart is access to funding. The rest you can find in many places, and it's a lot more about individuals than nations and their wars.

Upvoted, as you do have a valid point. I also tend to agree about the influence of individuals, though one could argue that the US spending on defense is, in great part, the driving factor for the technology that got us here.

I personally think it's a bit more than funding though--for lack of a better way of putting it, the feeling of opportunity and independence is what provides a fertile ground for starting a business. We commonly have room for people arguing and making idiots of themselves, for going against the grain, for dropping out and trying to achieve great things.

There's still a sort of individualism in parts of the US that I believe makes doing business and work here great.

(honest question) Is there such great tolerance of nonconformity elsewhere? I've heard distressing things about parts of Europe and Asia in this regard (Japan, for example, apparently does not support the sort of ecosystem we do due to societal expectations of young folks). I dislike painting in broad strokes, but the topic seems to lend itself to that.

A correction to your list. C++ was created by Bjarne Stoustrup who is Danish.

He was inspired by Simula - the world's first object oriented programming language (created by two Norwegians). It introduced objects, classes, subclasses, virtual methods, coroutines,discrete event simulation and featured garbage collection.

This attitude of how everything that is great has come from USA is one of the reasons why some feel the need to add other news sources to their RSS reader.

This is the kind of comment for which I personally dislike the US centered mentality here on HN.

To address briefly your points:

war is over and we won

War? I find a bit funny this mentality you have in the US to turn everything into a war (war on drugs, etc). In tech there is no war, we are all working to make the world better. One does not need to "lose" for the other one to "succeed".

Moreover, the tech landscape is growing a lot here in Europe and is attracting people from the US too, people that don't like how things are going there, which means it's not so great as you would like to picture it.

Without forgetting that USA and Europe are not the whole world, Asia is growing and at some point South America and Africa will too. "War", or whatever you want to call it, is not over and I don't think it will ever be.

We've got better funding

Funding is growing in Europe as well. Some US investors are coming to invest here. I've seen a friend of mine discussing with a US VC for his startup in Poland. Investors move their money wherever they see talent. A lot of talent moved to the US from Europe or Asia. As things get better, less talent will move there, leveling things.

better language

By better I think you mean more homogenous, which is true [1], but knowledge of English in Europe is growing and there are a lot of countries that are non-native English speakers but have percentages of English speaking people between 80% and 90% [2]

better regulations and better spirit

These are highly subjective. I, for one, strongly disagree on both of them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States#Language

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_in_Europe

EDIT: formatting

I'm not inclined to disagree with you that the situation in the US is far from ideal in a lot of regards, but my personal experience (started a company [tanked] at 19, just closed accounts with my state and did tax paperwork, no repercussions, about to try again) tells me that regulations here are only somewhat of a burden, and the really bad ones are seen across the world soon enough to prevent us being disadvantaged. US copyright and patent law, SOPA, etc. could be disasterous for us--but via things like ACTA and the like, you can bet your ass we'll drag you down with us. :)

As for the funding and language--proclaiming that you too use US venture capital and the English language really is more a testament to American soft power than anything else.

proclaiming that you too use US venture capital and the English language really is more a testament to American soft power than anything else.

No, it's not.

Regarding VC, it means that there is more money there now, that's true. But the fact that VCs are coming to Europe can be seen also as you losing that power you claim to have.

Same for language. I cannot deny that English spread mainly because it's the language of tech and the internet and that comes more from the USA (but remember that English as a language comes from England, Europe).

But language is just a tool to communicate. European countries are adopting it, but that does not mean they are adopting it to talk to you, or at least not only. English is becoming more and more a language to communicate across Europe. I am form Italy and have been living in the Netherlands for almost two years, without having to learn Dutch.

It also makes it much easier for people that want to leave the US, since they know they can come here and be able to speak to everybody.

My point was not to deny that there might be an imbalance toward the US for some things, but nothing is over and I won't be like this forever. China has been the most powerful empire on earth for millennia. It lost its power, but it might regain it in the future.

dude, Bollycock on all your points

I've been to HackerNews meetups around the world and the London meetup is one of the biggest and best in my opinion. With more than 400 attendees a month, they sell out usually too.

One reason that is good enough for me: HN is a bit of an echo chamber. It's maintained by a specific VC with specific opinions, which already was a source of some controversy. While I don't see a problem with the existence of opinionated media, I do think it's healthy if we have alternatives. And being "european" is specifically beneficial, because it brings with itself a somewhat different perspective.

I'd probably use both (unless the other one dies, of course — just because it's useful doesn't mean it will work).

Hackful will never replace Hacker News - it is for local entrepreneurs to have far more relevant discussion.

Why would a European service need peer review from a predominantly US audience?

Uhm, because ambitious European services don't restrict themselves to the (often smaller and more conservative) local audience?

As an EU hacker myself, I'm not exactly crazy about this regional split - it feels unnecessary and artificial somehow. On the other hand, if we're going to have an alternative HN site, it will probably have to differentiate itself in some way.

First sharing with each other

Then a very relevant calendar

And finally a local Angel List

Would those be useful, or superfluous?

If the first point just happens on HN, that wouldn't preclude the second and third point, right?

So -- possibly superfluous, yes.

(EU person myself)

The key is accessibility - what relevant communication do you get out of Hacker News? If HN DOES fulfil your needs, then great. If, like many of us, local matters then Hackful is extremely exciting IF we can get the community owning/using it.

For the hacking side, I don't see any reason for a split either. But for the business side, it would be very good to also have a EU community to help create a better environment here. Let's not forget that we (from the EU) can move wherever we wish in the EU to set up shop (or work), so it would be helpful to know about the opportunities, the problems etc.

This is important - doing business wherever you are in the world will always be subject to local customs in my view. This is despite increasing globalization; there will always be different languages, currencies, market structures, legislation etc.

One of the reasons we intend Lion to be more focused on the UK and the general business community.

Btw, apart from the issues of regional relevance (e.g discussing developments in Europe, avoiding US-only services, etc) there are some cultural differences too, which a European HN-like site might alleviate a little.

As a European I find a lot of american's grasp of economy and politics extremely naive (and if I read about Ayn Rand again, I will smash my monitor). Also, the sometimes extreme political correctness (which comes natural for some people) leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Now, those are peripheral issues, true, but they occur a lot of times in HN discussions.

Same here. In order to make a geo based community there better be good reasons for that. All the abandoned Social Networks in Europe that had a localized positioning are still witnesses of this development.

Indeed, it solves the wrong problem. We are not lacking in tech news access over here, we are lacking in knowing who is around, what is around, who is hiring, who is firing, who funds, who succeeds, who fails, who is searching for cofounders etc.

Bingo! Hackful is one day old and only the first step - next step is a calendar and third a local Angel List.

Who is hiring is a difficult one as there are MANY others trying to solve that problem - better to leave it to them rather than a community effort stepping on their toes...

A Hacker News for Europe would be great. A lot of the stories on HN are very USA-centric. Currently it looks like Hackful focuses on the UK, especially London. Lets hope it expands to cover all of Europe.

That's the hope - come on European Hackers, get posting, commenting and upvoting

Even though I am a fan of Hacker News I have the same feel that it is mostly USA centric. Sometimes after reading some articles I wonder how things are in Europe, similar or not, etc. Hopefully it can become not a replacement but a complement for the european hackers.

I have to say that I'm a bit conflicted about this.

On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with "splitting" HN, especially by geography. The main reason being that news that would interest only hackers in a specific region/country wouldn't see the light of HN's front page, as global readers just wouldn't care as much. As a matter of fact, I even run an "HN splinter" myself, for Israelis (https://bitorama.com), and I'm pretty hopeful about it.

That said, the EU is a pretty big and diverse place. Would a guy from Romania or Finland be more likely to find stories that interest him in an EU-wide site rather than in HN? I'm not convinced. Maybe a more regional approach is required.

Then again, I could be proven wrong. So best of luck to the guys running the site!

> Would a guy from Romania or Finland be more likely > to find stories that interest him in an EU-wide > site rather than in HN?

That was my thinking too. There are lots of small countries with relatively small hacker communities that don't generate that much news on a regular basis.

That said, I've always struggled finding EU-based services, so this might be their chance!

Bad idea. HN is an international effort. No need to contextualize it by continent.

After all, we exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...

But that doesn't immediately invalidate geography as a useful filter.

What do you mean contextualize it? As in having sub-hn groups?

Passwords... Again. I can't believe I still have to create an account. Even for a website like HN that I'm completely addicted to, I would've never signed up if it weren't for OpenID. You want me to use your service? Make it easy for me to authenticate, I don't need yet another password...

This isn't phrased very pleasantly, but it is a valid point. It would be very cool to have OpenID support like on HN.

I'm working on it. Coming soon. (I developed Hackful)

Twitter, Facebook, or even GitHub authentication is certainly de rigeur, but I must admit I thought OpenID had fallen off the radar and I haven't seen any interesting new projects supporting it lately. Even 37signals gave up on it mostly due to lack of use: http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2011/01/well-be-re...

Nothing against OpenID, per se, but it doesn't feel like it has taken off. Or maybe the big sites that are using it are just getting on with it AOK :-)

I only recently made the effort to switch to a tool like 1Password and it's great for creating on-the-fly secure passwords that I don't need to bother remembering.

I believe there's quite a few products that do a similar job.

My only concern is that I don't think people in Europe feel very "European". There is no identity in being European like there is in being German, Swedish, or whatever. Bundling us together because we live on the same continent seems a bit artificial to me.

This, again, differs very much from area to area and from subculture to subculture. I, myself, feel very European. In the hacker culture context, even more so, given that it's my way of saying "Not USA". We have multiple languages (impacts app design and priorities), a very different set of employment laws (impacts hiring approaches), a more laid back working culture (impacts to what extent VCs can get you to work 70 hours a week), and so on. All of these things are relatively common among most, if not all, European countries, yet very different in the US. Canada is, as usual, somewhere halfway.

> a more laid back working culture (impacts to what extent VCs can get you to work 70 hours a week)

Good point. I havent thought of it that way.

Not identifying myself as european might be because I'm Swedish, and thus a bit off-center geographically.

I feel a stronger international identity in the Nordic countries, sharing a great deal of culture and political history. We don't even have any border controll to speak of between Norway and Sweden.

I feel very European. There is a huge amount of history and culture that binds us together. And I think a European hacker culture too to some extent. Writing this in a French bar in Brussels, although I am English.

I'm in Canada and I can completely understand the sentiments that led to the creation of this site. However, I fear that this may lead to HN_Asia, HN_South_America, HN_Oceania, etc., making it extremely difficult to stay on top of good interesting news, and leading to a lot of duplication.

I would very much like to see instead a single additional site (HN') which would have a larger focus than simply the European scene, and where obvious US-centric post/comments would mercilessly be deleted.

In the aftermath, I have been thinking if there is a way to hive off region specific posts into separate pages, but obviously still linking back to HN.

The other downside to HN is the obvious great mass/karma based in California/wider US that influences the front page of HN.

Work in progress :)

Feedback on specifics are being worked on furiously by Elias Haase in a coffee shop in East London - poor guy is struggling with coffee shop wifi to deploy - show some love: http://twitter.com/8bitpal

Ahh but that then opens the door to an HN aggregator.

Get to work! Media is endless disintermediation.

It's called tags. Imagine if any post on HN could be tagged by anyone. Then, you are free to only read HN/Europe (all posts tagged Europe). Or browse the regular home page.

It won't happen because HN has made a conscious choice of not going after all the "web 2.0" gimmicks, but sometimes you wish it wasn't completely the case.

Would be so much more useful with some restricted tagging :)

This looks like a service that tries to imitate Hacker News and assumes the same traffic and audience.

Focus on fewer posts on the front page; no more than 20% of the posts on it should have 0 comments, because it just serves to make the site look barren - which it probably is. You don't even have a community yet, so there is no hive mind nor zeitgeist on the site; bringing people together to discuss a few issues will make people get to get and know each other and help build the community.

Make it scalable.

We are trying - we have a core user base that have kept in communication with an email list called Open Coffee (powered by Meetup.com)

That is where the idea came up - we needed a more open method to ask questions of each other, share info and demos

Again, I've got to say you need to differentiate to survive. There have been several HN clones in the past year or so (remember lamernews.com?) but none of them differentiated enough.

Please don't make the same mistake. Like Steve Jobs said: "Be Different".

Why do I have to sign up with my email? I don't want to.

Working on Oauth...

The problem with Europe is the multitude of languages. You can't target Europe with English language, or it will end up UK/US centric. That's pretty much unsolvable problem. Of course we can talk about things happening in Europe, but that doesn't make sense.

You're being overly pessimistic on the percentage of Europeans speaking English (though not necessarily as their native language). This language has worked as a common means to communicate for a long time and definitely won't leave this web site end up being "UK/US centric".

Almost everyone speaks English of course, but most people prefer joining communities in their native languages. Many of my hacker friends don't participate on English forums although they speak English pretty well.

Interesting. I think there's definitely demand for services like this.

We have been working on a community for entrepreneurs and startups in the UK (in addition to our information website), lion.co.uk/community, we're still in the phase of optimizing things.

We've found that there's many entrepreneur and startup websites but gaining critical mass to make a useful community is another thing.

We should probably work together but then again, as others have mentioned, there's different requirements for different people. Founders of businesses other than technology and hackers for example might not have reason to collaborate.

That said, the more resources there are for business founders the better; especially in Europe right now.

We will definitely work together! :)

Sent you an email.

I posted a submission about this topic about a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2454412.

I'm missing an "about" section.

Please add some OpenID/OAuth option. I don't want to make yet another user account.

Sorry, you are right, complete oversight.

One suggestion: hackful.com has no linkage to the differentiating factor of the website. Why not change it to hackful.eu? This isn't a decisive factor, but it could help in the positioning...

Bookmarked, lets see if it goes well. One advice, give the page some border on the sides, its pretty bad at least for me to have to look to the edge of the monitor.

I'm British and I think this is a great idea. I'm interested to read about the startup scene in Europe and the UK.

I do think that we should be trying to move away from the 'hacker' label. People are never going to understand that 'hackers' can be good -- See that AP Press article. And really, our definition is the less popular one, and therefore less correct, and it is we who should change our wording.

Does it matter? The people who read Hacker News or Hackful Europe will understand the meaning.

Yeah, but these two websites aren't the only places that the term 'hacker' is used as we use it.

Wouldn't this be more successful if it would be split across countries? Stories about US-focused topics interest me as much (or as little) as stories about European countries where i don't live.

Also, for more people than you might imagine a site thats in English (and not in their local language) could be a barrier.

But you do live in Europe, and can visit other European countries relatively easily. If you are a member of the EU, you could even move to another EU country.

I think most Dutch people would prefer the site to be in English, as the Netherlands is only a small country, and England's an hour or less away by plane. Surely Dutch people would be interested in, for example, sources of venture capital in the UK?

Why? I as a an Austrian am very interested in stuff happening in Germany - being indirectly affected by it (job markets, economy), and the possibility of tele-working in Berlin is not so far-fetched, going there just once or twice by plane.

I'd be more interested by a HN Asia or something. I mean, political, technological issues in US and EU are different but not that much, after all. Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, India, etc... lots of stuff is happening there and nothing much comes to the surface.

right! I live in India, and though I do tend to get updates about local startups irregularly, I am still not aware of any good HN like site which keeps me up to date with all the latest activities in Indian startup world.

http://hackerstreet.in/

(Originally http://hackernews.in, but renamed as a result of this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913014)

I'll let you judge the usefulness yourself.

Hey thanks! I think I did go through that thread, but didn't follow up with HSI and eventually it faded out. Looks like it is still going strong.

At first I didn't liked the idea, but it could work as a way to filter out US centric posts and focus more on Europe.

I think it needs some guidelines: is English the preferred language? If this is limited to Europe, is it ok to have posts related to other parts of the world?

Post and find out. As with all UGC sites, it becomes what users make it. Waiting for "the rules" will probably leave you waiting for a long time.

Cool. I hope it doesn't turn into an OpenCoffee mirror/spam board for events/etc. Bookmarked :)

Bookmarked and registered in.

You need to focus on something other than nationality - I do not care if my news comes from the US or from Europe (and I think I am in the majority here), I only care if it is interesting. Maybe a Hacker News with subsections, like Reddit?

The one thing that should really be taken into consideration is username consistency across both sites, that will help. (And I can't have the same user name because the evil "-" is not allowed. Do something about it.)

I don't think this will necessarily gain traction without a huge push to build a community.

It would be cool if a system like subreddits was added to Hacker News where it makes sense (e.g. Europe).

You're correct regarding traction. We haven't done any marketing yet as our new features are pretty raw. Developing though is far easier than building the actual 'community'. In fact, we're looking for a marketer to help us do this very thing.

To be honest, I never go "Damn. I wish the Hacker News articles were more focused around me." Most of the articles here are universal, the rest still make a difference to me.

Then you will likely carry on benefiting from Hacker News, as we all do. Hackful is for those who want to share amongst their local peers. We aren't trying to be fancy; just an extension of the current Open Coffee mailing list.

The domain was registered 2 days ago, so great job in launching early. You really need a strategy to keep people coming, but all I can say is good luck, have an upvote.

We are planning london.hackful.com etc. Watch this space.

What I love about HN is that the users here are international - not just USA, or just EU. What's the benefit of having an EU only version?

Why doesn't it let me sign up without entering my email?

I think when I registered on HN, it didn't make email as mandatory!! Or is my memory deceiving me?

This is a great initiative. Will follow for sure

Why, why is email mandatory to sign up???

It doesn't even send a confirmation email, so it seems pretty redundant. Actually ... yes, it's required for password recovery. That seems to be its purpose. It seems like you can just put something fake in as long as you are confident you wont forget/lose your password.

750users in just over TWO days and approaching 200 posts with several times more comments!

Finally something in my timezone!

Just wanted to thank all the commenters and those who are signing up to Hackful!

A more appropriate solution, I would think, is regional filtering here on HN. Label submissions with the relevant region, if any, and add one more tab which filters results by region according to a black/white list in your profile.

Maybe hackful will show us that such a feature would be heavily used.

An RSS feed would be great !

Woo! Silicon Roundabout. :)

stick-shift recommended

Looks much like Antirez's lamernews.com. What's the stack behind it?

a look at the HTTP headers:

  tahu@laptop:~$ curl -I http://hackful.com/about
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  Connection: keep-alive
  Status: 200
  X-Powered-By: Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 3.0.11
  X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge,chrome=1
  ETag: "6972d16343b1a4d0f2a49c9a3174e977"
  Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate
  Set-Cookie: _hackful_session=BAh7B0kiD3Nlc3Npb25faWQGOgZFRkkiJWQ5NzYzMThlNDFkOWVhYTI1YzJiZGI0YzNjMjlkOWFhBjsAVEkiEF9jc3JmX3Rva2VuBjsARkkiMUVRU1gzZkhvcHRockpaWndWY2NRcGk3SElJczBmOEY3TW50YjJRZ0plSTg9BjsARg%3D%3D--572416e3b12cc85dda3675c22d117839535e636d; path=/; HttpOnly
  X-Runtime: 0.017811
  Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:26:04 GMT
  X-Rack-Cache: miss
  Server: nginx/1.0.10 + Phusion Passenger 3.0.11 (mod_rails/mod_rack)

Will the source be available on github for pull requests?

Yes, very soon.

Nice! :)

What is the stack behind it?

Where would we be able to get notified about this?

Yes, lets rule out the country that provides us with a userbase for most of our sites. Surely there's nothing relevant there?

Hands up if you have an English-language website in which the US is not the largest segment of users?

I have several - one for the UK, one for India (in English) and one for Australia. Each targets the local audience and gets negligible usage from the US.

It's a big world. Most English speakers don't live in the US. Not even most native English speakers live in the US.

It is nice to hear about Stripe, but useless to me as only available to US users.

I want to hear about GoCardless and not have to search through to see what is relevant to me and what I can access.

Plus, if I am based in Paris, I want people in Paris to quickly respond to a plea for help.

> Yes, lets rule out the country that provides us with a userbase for most of our sites.

With the greatest respect, that kind of silly assumption is exactly why a Euro-centric HN-style site is potentially interesting to those of us here in Europe. I can think of numerous ideas for businesses aimed at a particular kind of culture or niche interest where the US probably wouldn't be a particularly big market.

In any case, there are more people in Europe than the US, and a very high proportion of them speak English with impressive fluency even if it's not their native language. And while we have quite distinct national identities, we also have many things in common that are relevant to a business/tech audience and quite different from how things work in, say, North America or Asia.

So, if you already speak the language, why not use your larger demographic to promote more relevant articles here on HN?

We benefit from having another perspective represented here more than we do from having it shown in some other far-flung echochamber on the web.

Or is the idea of melting pot a bit much for you old country folks? :)

We do ;) There are many Europeans here on HN. For my taste, there could be more europe-centric news on HN, but again, how would US hackers support that? They are as bored of articles on Germany's public transport system as I am of articles on AT&T being unfair to their customers. By melting pot, do you mean the US or Europe? They technically both are..

I think getting the articles up there would at least give us a chance to see something we might not otherwise see--say, a German startup innovating in ticketing or something.

As for the melting pot, was a bit of a joke--the perception here is commonly that the US is a big diverse thingy whereas Europe, while diverse, is mostly diverse in terms of the amount of Europeans it has. :)

Incidentally, I'm an Irishman in Germany, and here's the usage for the main site I work on. We didn't look for an American market. Do people have very different experiences?

1. United States 29.69%

2. India 6.76%

3. (not set) 6.57%

4. United Kingdom 5.56%

5. Canada 4.05%

6. Germany 2.86%

7. France 2.36%

8. Australia 2.15%

9. Italy 1.86%

10. Japan 1.86%

nice, but can you fix editing comments please :)

Fixed :)

Without too much rhetoric: haters gonna hate.

this will be useful if it makes access to European VCs easier. Good luck guys, I'll read HE everyday.

Hacker News for Europe = Hacker News.

What is on-topic on this board?

Europe centric I think ?

what about splitting HN into different sections?

ok, so i've had this on my mind for some time now, and i'm going to highjack this thread in hopes of getting this out there.

Hackful has sort of shot itself in the foot by trying to use HN as a medium to expose itself. for a long time now HN has started to cross the line from a place for people to share ideas and experiences with running a startup to a place for people to link to tutorials and hot topics in the tech world, or high ranked questions from SO (i'm guilty myself). I really don't see why we do this, we have r/programming, et al for that. HN is a place to talk about statups.

look at Hackful. I ran through the first 3 pages and here are the topics. i broke them down by irrelevan, relevant, and something i call the grey area, where it could go either way. the count is very off. i could only pick 20 out of 45 posts as 100% startup relevant. or course my opinion is my opinion and i'm sure there are people who will argue that my lists are debatable, and they are, but that's not the point. the point is that it is not 100% on topic, and we need to figure out a way to fix this.

one way is for the community to have the correct mindset and get involved and fixing the issue: 1) don't post irrelevant topics. 2) if we see off topic posts - since there isn't really a way for us to stop that now - just ignore them and let them disappear. we come to HN to read about startups, if we want programming info, tutorials, etc then there are other places to go (reddit, so, etc).

another option is to go sort of the reddit-route and allow for subs. that's an option, but again we would be diverging from the original purpose of this site.

just shooting out some thoughts, and trying to make us think about where we're going with HN.

irrelevant list: (count = 11)

8 reasons for switching to Git(blog.fournova.com)

Git cheat sheet(blog.fournova.com)

How we are using Big Data to solve Social Travel(tripl.tumblr.com)

The switch from apache to nginx(news.ycombinator.com)

Top 10 IT skills in 2012(ciozone.com)

Nicnack for easy multicast testing(adventuresinfabric.posterous.com)

Only 6% of Wikipedia Readers Have Ever Edited Wikipedia Content !!(thetecnica.com)

Tech in "Hollywood Edition"(aaronklein.com)

Teach yourself Git in two minutes(jperla.com)

Show Hackful: Browser Based Strategy Game (Spoils Rotten)(spoilsrotten.com)

Show Hackful: My Digital Guidebook Startup (Artworm)(artworm.hillsbede.co.uk)

relevant list: (count = 20)

Show HF: Cubecolor, a fancy HTML5 colorscheme generator(plainas.github.com)

Dutch startup is building the most simple customer support software in the world(apo.io)

Startupbootcamp to shape up Berlin(venturevillage.eu)

Ask HE: What are the missing pieces of the European ecosystem?

15 startups from Berlin - there is more than Soundcloud, Wooga and Amen(netzwertig.com)

Who is missing from this list of young entrepreneurs to watch in 2012?(yourhiddenpotential.co.uk)

Twitter developer teatime in Berlin(techberlin.com)

Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Helsinki - We Have A Problem(arcticstartup.com)

Show HE: My first RoR-app... a platform for winning a dribbble invite.(showwwdown.com)

Berlin Startup Jobs. Marketplace For Inspiring Jobs(berlinstartupjobs.com)

Marketplace for Startup jobs in Berlin(berlinstartupjobs.com)

SEO Tool & Collectible Card Game. Boost Website Traffic - SERPs & Spyders(serpsandspyders.com)

Ask Hackful: Do UK angel groups work?(t.co)

Flagons Den Beginners' Poker(london.flagonsden.com)

EatSocial - 2nd Feb(eatsocial.net)

A local European Angel List

London needs a place for hackers to hang out

Citymapper - Find your way FAST(citymapper.co.uk)

Show Hackful: adscaped - Monetisation without compromise(adscaped.com)

Digital Shoreditch festival 2012(digitalshoreditch.com)

grey list: (count = 14)

Ask HE: Is the source open?

Hacker News

Tell HE: Hackful sounds (and looks) too much like Hateful

Hackful Team: API please?

Who registered @hackful? Can we have it please?(twitter.com)

Hackful Team: Can we have a daily roundup email please?

Is it ok to post articles in other european languages?

Tell HE: Please improve the contrast between comments and comment-attributes

Hackful Team: RSS feed please!

Founder of german ridesharing startup gives his car away (flinc.org)

Facebook S1 Filing (Official IPO Document)(sec.gov)

Whispero(whispero.com)

Longform - for lovers of essays(longform.org)

Openbrand(eu.techcrunch.com)

Edit: cleaned up the links

So you generally found it relevant? And bear in mind it's been up for just over 24 hours... :)

I'm not trying to question Hackful. I'm just trying to use them to show the trend of HN and how it's changing it.

Hackful has currently 424 users, that's not enough to redact the content meaningfully. Once there are (much) more users, and the primary dedication (startups/programming/socializing/job-platform) has been established, the topics will make sense. If it gets that far - I sure hope so, since many things must be approached differently here in Europe.

A quick but of advice: give the site some personality - visually, I mean. It will make a difference. People will respond to it better and respect it more.

If it looks like an HN clone, that's how people will treat it. Differentiate.

I actually quite like the look.

It's coming... only a day old so far :)

I'm pretty sure Hacker News can be viewed and contributed to by folks in Europe already.

great for Europe and everyone else! love the idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com