I see a lot of people making the argument that a Spanish-speaking HN is bad because information about startups/business/technology/etc written in Spanish is limited and therefore a Spanish-language HN limits exposure to information.
These arguments miss the point that Spanish-speaking people might want to discuss startups/business/technology/etc in Spanish with other Spanish-speaking people (whether or not the original content was written in Spanish), network with other Spanish-speaking people, collaborate and co-found companies with other Spanish-speaking people, and so on.
If you're going to start a company, or discuss technology, or whatever, there are benefits (as well as drawbacks) to doing that within a community of like-minded people. If you were born and raised in the US, would you go off to start a startup with two other guys from Tokyo whose culture and mindset might be vastly different from yours? Or would you do it with your local friends? Similarly, an entrepreneur from Spain might be a lot more comfortable starting a startup with some fellow Spaniards than Americans.
On the flipside, there are benefits to expanding your horizons and you might learn a thing or two from people outside your culture and social sphere who have different perspectives.
Because of that, I think the two versions can coexist nicely, rather than one being a substitute for the other.
Seriously, what's with all of these comments trying to promote/necessitate that to make some sense of your place in the technology community, you'd better speak english?
Why can't this resource be appreciated for what it is: a resource for the Spanish speaking community that might be interested in technology, but are unable to pick up the language for whatever personal reasons they may have?
Reality is a cold, harsh mistress. I'm not a native English speaker. If I were to restrict my knowledge of programming, startups, business etc. to what is available in my native language, I would severely handicap myself compared to those who can read English.
If I were to restrict my software business to only people who use my native language, I would only have 40 millions of potential customers instead of several hundred millions.
At best, it's a Quixotic effort.
At worst, it'll actually do harm to people it supposedly tries to serve by allowing them to stay in the comfort zone because that comfort zone is really, really small compared to richness of knowledge available in English, especially in topics like software engineering or startups. It's the law of unintended consequences.
Sure, learning to read English at a speed equal to reading my native language was a long and arduous process, but I only had to do it once. I reap benefits of that investment every day. When I think about it, it was the best investment of my life.
I'm going to assume that Spanish is not one of your languages, so why does it matter to you one way or another that this site exists? These arguments sound like bikeshedding, not real objections.
Does having a Polish or Portuguese section of Wikipedia harm people too?
I, for one, will use this to practice Spanish by reading topics with which I am familiar, and conversing with native speakers about them.
But beyond the irony of saying that establishing a Spanish-language tech community is a Quixotic effort, there are a lot more Spanish speakers than Polish. It's half the world. It's a really big community.
And I'm not just saying that because I'm happy to have someplace to practice my Spanish, either.
HN is extremely US centric and, believe it or not, some great content is just not available in English. Those two are good enough reasons for a non-English HN, even if everyone or nearly everyone visiting the non-English HN can also read and write English.
Just like I said it a few days ago when we had a conversation like this in NoticiasHacker:
Language barriers should not be the directing the behavior on the web. The idea of "cloning" and having translated platforms is something I think is needed as long as it's sole objective isn't to be a window to specific language original content because it can be scarce even though it empowers the community.
Sadly the combination empowering the community and looking for language specific content usually is what makes translated platforms be popular but at the same time kills them.
I think the key for successful non-english communities is to let go the empowerment model and work in a community without language or geographical limitations, where the focus is set to distribute and discuss information regardless of original language and open to discuss in whatever language needed.
Many people in Latin America or Spain can write great code, but they are not that fluent in English. There was nothing similar before. And among 400 million people that speak Spanish, there are many, many good hackers.
I don't think that applies in this case, I'm from Costa Rica but learned english very young (ironically, in Scotland) and I've seen how limiting it can be for non english speakers, most tutorials, documentation, books and just resources in general are either not available in spanish or not as rich; it doesn't help that most programmer jobs are for US based companies. A friend sometimes shares gnu/linux news from some a latin-american or spanish site and I kinda feel sad when it's something I read a week ago in HN.
Well, to be honest - MeFi and BoingBoing also get the good stuff a few days after HNN. And most programming jobs aren't in Indiana, either, so English alone isn't enough.
I grant you your point, of course: It's fair enough to say that lack of English is a disadvantage - but I don't think the answer is to say there shouldn't be a more vibrant Spanish-language community than there has been.
There are also good hackers in Europe, and they all speak various languages, but they all learned English at some point in their life. And I guess this is an advantage, because they can collaborate/interact with other tech people, especially from US/Canada.
I'm not against a spanish HN or any other website in a mother tongue, but wouldn't be better for everyone if Latin American Hackers would become fluent in English? Maybe then US companies could open up offices in Latin America, hire the best programmers, pay maybe less than what we pay now, etc.
I am not arguing the utility of having a Spanish HN nor I want to criticize the utility of knowing English. But for some Spanish /Latin American Hackers time is also a constrain and they might not have time to be fluent at a foreign language. Read it, understand it... sure, but fluently writing/talking requires time.
I have been lucky to be born in a region with 2 official languages and more lucky to have a 3rd language in my family and being able to learn English and French in school. But... this is not normal in the rest of Europe.
In any case, I am not sure if I have understood correctly your last sentence. Did you mean "pay maybe more"? I am not sure of what you are implying...
Less than what companies have to pay US programmers could still be far above average for a programming job in those countries, depending on cost of living and labor market differences. Basically, he's saying it's a win for everyone involved.
I suppose that would be more convenient for English speakers, sure. Are you honestly advocating that non-English speakers learn fluent English so they can be paid less than native English speakers?
No, he argues that they learn English so that they get paid more than they are being paid now.
Technically we're talking about the same amount of money (more than they are paid now, less than a programmer in Silicon Valley) but framing does matter.
I think the point of having Noticias Hacker is that maybe it's not the highest possible aspiration to learn somebody else's language so they can colonize you.
[Note: I can't think of a less argumentative way to express that without being a lot less succinct. It's not meant as a flame, really.]
Addendum on rereading, because I think it matters: For a Pole to learn English to open up career opportunities has a whole lot less historical baggage connected with it than for a Latin American to do so, and this is over and above the fact that there are ten times as many speakers of Spanish as speakers of Polish.
> wouldn't be better for everyone if Latin American Hackers would become fluent in English?
It would also be better for everyone if humanity as a whole switched to renewable energy sources next year. Unfortunately there's the small matter of feasibility. Learning a language is not trivial for everyone.
>"It would also be better for everyone if humanity as a whole switched to renewable energy sources next year."
I doubt that. The cost would be devastating. With current renewable energy technologies, we'd only generate a fraction of the power we use even after we pave the wilderness with windmills.
Why do so many people believe that because someone posts/reads/contributes in one language, cannot do so in other language? It baffles me that someone could believe information can be compartmentalized like that..
Spanish is the 3rd language in the world, people! Most of you would not hesitate to learn chinese if you had the chance to do some business or go live in China, and that's the 2nd language! Stop the hypocrisy!
I think I can observe four kind of opinions in here:
- Those who agree with this site.
- Those who disagree "because information about technology is mostly in english".
- Those who disagree "because it will split the community".
- Those who are english fans.
Those who push for everyone to speak english because information about technology is mostly in english.. may I point at the simmilarity of your position with a circular logical pattern? "Information about technology is in english, because no information is produced in other languages. You shouldn't produce information in other languages, because information about technology is mostly in english." Need I say more? Hope not, I regard everyone in this site as fairly intelligent to see the absurdity of such a statement.
To those who say that this kind of site will split the community, think about it this way: more people, who have no time to learn english, cannot because of economic/time reasons, or maybe just want to know about things and contribute in an easy way, will be able to do so. Of course, if we're talking about a "technological elite" (which I imagine you consider yourself part of, since you recognize the need for a unified language), will still have english as a requirement. But the last time I checked, HN was not about that elite, but about a broad spectrum of subjects (and I dare you to argument about the need of speaking in english to talk about Lybia and the Internet blackout there, with several political and sociological implications, not just the technological ones)
And for those english fans, greetings. I'm one, and I'm from Argentina. But I acknowledge the existance of human beings outside the United States or England. Please, open your mind to other ways of thinking. Remember: there are some cognitive processes in some language, which are not possible in other languages. That alone should prompt you to congratulate the existance of as many clones of HN in as many languages as possible.
If I write {comments in code, documentation, tutorials, posts on a technical website} in English, programmers in Latvia and India who have learned English as the standard language in which computer science and software development are done can read it.
If I write it in German or Chinese or Spanish, they can't.
Speaking for myself, I'd rather have well-considered {comments, documentation, tutorials, posts} in German or Spanish than poorly written ones in English. Worst case, someone else in the community can translate them - if the developer writing this information is more fluent in a non-English language, I'd rather have him or her expressing ideas well than wrestling with a second language and failing to document things because it ends up being too much work.
And if some people in your country want to read your code, but is unable to read english, they can't either.
So.. what you're saying is that you prioritize programmers in Latvia and India, over your fellow citizens and the community of programmers in your country?
And I'm not only talking about proffessional developers, but also CS students. As I wrote, I'm not denying that to be proficient in CS, you need to know english nowadays. I'm saying that information should be available in other languages as well.
So a few months ago, I started a similar site in Hebrew[1].
My rationale was similiar to the OP's: most Israeli techies have no problem reading English, but when it comes to posting comments or writing blogs, lots would prefer Hebrew.
Still, there are differences between the two sites: a site in Spanish has lots more potential HNers, but on the other hand, a site in Heberw has the benefit of supplying Israeli-specific news.
While my site hasn't yet taken off, I'm certainly encouraged by similar efforts that do succeed. So kudos to the OP, and good luck!
I usually don't like straight up clones (e.g. Digg and Meneame) but I'll cheer anything that motivate us write quality content.
Personally I think that the language doesn't really matters and sharing stuff in english is the nearest thing to send a global message, but it's annoying that so many people speak the language and our blog community is so poor.
I just know I'm tired of Engadget and Boing Boing copycats.
So far, the links are far better than the ones here, at least there is no techcrunch, thenextweb, onstartups, all jacquesmattheij.com posts (sorry guys), all daringfireball.net posts, new Mega-Angels pissed or Steve Jobs got a new haircut.
Just pure programming and a little of startups. Good stuff.
I'm not saying this to be offensive in any way, but anybody who has visited Spain knows that it's a country relatively closed in its language.
Some will call it pride, others will call a generalized difficulty or lack of desire to learn different languages. Opinions will be divided in that, however, the fact is that every single thing in Spain is translated/dubbed. For instance, there is/was also barrapunto, which is the Spanish version of slashdot (being that the word barrapunto is the literal translation of slashdot).
A site in English will have more users and therefore more information, however, a site in Spanish will reach far more Spaniards and therefore end up being more useful for most Spaniards.
Just my two cents.
Note: I'm not from an english-speaking country either.
I have some thoughts.
Its good to see there are a tool for Spanish-spoken hackers because you can meet some cool people near you place and build a community, which i believe the REASON HN exists. When i've discovered HN, i thought this was really awesome and came to be addicted to all this cool stuff. The biggest problem about this, is that much of the spanish-spoken HN users doesnt know each other. I can count with at much 10 hackers that i know in person and know they visit HN.
Communities are organized as cell. When you born you belong to the first cell called family. When you show some interests like Basketball or Videogames, you know people, get accepted and now belong now another cell. I can see Noticias Hacker would be some cell that will be grouping all the best hacks and news about LatinAmerican stuff, and eventually help to know about key players in the ecosystem.
Amazing when you need to catch up some attention from SV Angels and Press coverage.
And as Android Developer, i don't believe you need to forget English(if you want to develop stuff you need to learn English and build it. in English), but both languages aren't both exclusive mutually. And in some way, know two languages makes you more smart.
Love it. I have a blog about code and other web development stuff but did not have a place to submit links to because I write in Spanish. The wait is over.
I love hacker news and my startup is spanish only. I am US based and fluent in english and spanish. After only a few minutes from posting a question in noticiashacker.com I received an answer that only a community like that would know. (I asked this question in Quora 3 weeks ago and it is still unanswered, by the way)
This site is invaluable to get the perspective of latin american hackers and users, specially if you are not in a spanish speaking country.
This could help so many startups that are mainly english based to expand and offer services to spanish speaking customers.
Well, maybe it's just me, but I really like the font size here. Sorry.
Also, a centered content table would be better IMHO, not to the left of the screen.
I've been spoiled by the HN site.. :P It's just so... clean.. and tidy..
EDIT: It's IE. Firefox shows the content centered in the screen.
Most of the material for technology news, articles, research, etc.. in spanish, suck.
Kudos to whomever created this, to help level up those resources.
And I'm a huge fan of pushing everyone to learn english.. but I wish we had our own content in spanish as well. It would really boost the industry in South America.
I say the site is a good thing because just like HN it strives to aggregate high quality tech posts that you might otherwise miss -- it just does this for Spanish language posts, which is currently outside the scope of HN.
As a bonus for those of us who learned or are learning Spanish, it's also a great way to practice the language. :)
(make-dream-happen '(This is cool but if all the hackers of the world would pool up to create a corpus of technical text in as many languages as possible and use that as a base for an awesome hacker translator the world would be a better place.))
now how do you define the make-dream-happen macro?
I think this is a terrible idea. First of all I am fluent in English and arabic and learning spanish, so I am not against languages.
But by having 2 communities we all lose. The spanish hackers will lose on all the great english content and the english hackers will lose on all the great spanish content.
This is how things are right now. If you want to be a programmer and compete in a global market, you need to know English.
It's not good or bad but if 20 years from now, the de facto language becomes French or German, I will learn it. For now, we are lucky that we have a ONE language development community all over the world.
How about thinking that, because some people choose to write and think in spanish, more people will be able to read those thoughts, rants, and tips, and maybe.. just maybe.. come to think: "Mmm.. I want to know more about this. I may as well try a little harder and read that english paper I found.. Who knows, maybe I can write a blog post about it and expand knowledge in my community, since there's none available in my language!"
Community means plurality as well, more so related to language when we're talking about a global one. And it's not like we're talking about learning Navajo. Spanish is the 3rd most used language in the entire world!
That's ridiculous, if only because there are lots and lots of non-English programming communities already. French, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese obviously. Knowing English is a good tool, but the actual fact of the matter is that there already are monolingual Spanish-speaking programmers out of the 400 million native speakers of Spanish, and clearly you can't say that they shouldn't have a community.
A good analogy to use is c# and VB in .net. I was a VB developer and when C# was born, I didn't want to learn it because I can do everything in VB. It's the same framework so the language didn't matter. Overtime almost 99% of code examples and open source projects were written in C# and I ended up moving to c# and haven't written VB code (and don't want to) in several years.
My point is, you want to blog/collaborate in spanish/frensh or whatever language? Go for it. But you have just considerably shrunk your audience and network and greatly diminished your chances of giving or getting help.
PS: Wikipedia is different than code and is not a good analogy. If I want to learn about Cancer/Golden Retriever/Panama Canal/etc.. then yes, I want to read it in my native language.
On that one.. I'm all for multiple languages, but man, the Spanish version is so behind the English one.. I wish the Spanish version had more resources/members..
Wow, just Wow. Thanks HN for all the input! Thank you very much!
The debate contained in this post is extremely interesting and there is a lot to learn about the different point of views about language barriers, culture and communities!
I guess I decided to work on this when I learned that a lot of my fellow latin american hackers read HN every day but rarely participate or post new links. Felling that having a place to share new projects and interesting notes in my own language would be cool I decided to start this a couple of weeks ago.
The code is open source and hosted here: https://github.com/DFectuoso/Noticias-HAcker mostly in english! I think that will add a lot to the conversation: I am not saying don't learn english, just trying to generate a community where people feel confident because they are talking in their own language.
Hopefully this will motivate more and more people to share and talk about awesome stuff!
Enhorabuena. It's a very good idea, precisely for the reasons you state. Only one comment, though. It's not only for Latin American hackers, there are also Iberian speakers of Spanish who may benefit!
En verdad buena idea, no lo había pensado de esa forma pero es cierto, considero que tengo un buen nivel de ingles, y visito hacker news muy seguido pero a la hora de participar no es lo mismo hacerlo en ingles que en tu propio lenguaje, esperemos que crezca tu proyecto por lo pronto me suscribiré!
Saludos!
This is really motivating for anyone who wants to interact with local community in native language. Glad you shared the code, keep improving it and build some quality crowd there. Good luck.
I'm curious to know why you're starting the code from scratch. I miss having a place to check on my own links, for instance, which I take for granted at HNN.
But kudos for getting it this far! I'll be reading it daily!
Edit for clarity: check my own comments. I swear, it's like I'm not paying attention at all sometimes.
Well, the latest version of HN I could find was a couple of years old and even tho I know a little bit of lisp, I didn't feel I could maintain/adapt the arc code that runs this beautiful website.
I decided to start from scratch and do it in python for the app engine, it was hard to get it to run smoothly(and I will still optimize some more to try to batch the RCPs for memcache and db).
Those features that you mentions will come in the next couple of weeks, right now I am going to concentrate on having some moderation tools and then i'll finish the profile and password recovery.
I figured that was about it. Well, consider my vote put in for a check-my-own-comments link. Maybe my Spanish will have gotten intelligible by that time! (It's about damn time there was a Spanish tech community I could sink my teeth into. I read Spanish at about 90% fluency, but my writing skills are abysmal.)
Love it or hate it, English is the language of technology.
I appreciate the need to cater for different audiences but I think it would be more beneficial for all concerned to encourage people interested in technology to learn to communicate about it in English.
No? then you suggest to wait at least 6 months after an intensive time-consuming-I-can't-do-anything-else English fast course to get up to speed to a competent English hacker level, so I can read/participate in something like HN?
Does this looks realistic to you? considering that the number of good Spanish hackers to-be and that-are is not small.
I don't want to suggest that anybody who speaks a language other than English is disadvantaged in any way. Quite the opposite.
But it is a fact that English is the language of technology (and science). If you want to participate then you really need to be familiar with the lingo. This is why I said "love it or hate it".
If you want to be a good hacker then you must learn English because there's a huge amount of advice on the web in English to help you. If you can't read it then you're missing out.
Starting a community in another language works in the short term, but it really isn't productive in the long term (either for the members of that community or the wider community). This was the key point I was making.
To address your specific point: what is six months? I've spent over 20 years learning to program in various languages. Why not spend six months learning English so that you can participate with the global programming community?
Ah, good hackers will eventually learn English, at their own pace though. Why spend 6 months in a really intensive English training course stopping everything else when you can have an influx of material on your own language now?
Plus, believe me when I say, not every Mexican teenager guy/gal with skills have the resources to pay a training course like the one you suggest (I didn't, learnt it on my own, took many years, still not perfect though).
I'm arguing for people hanging out in English forums rather than hanging out in forums designed to cater to their own language.
But I do take your point that good hackers will eventually learn English. I'm suggesting that this is by necessity - it's not a language you can ignore if you work in the technology sector.
These arguments miss the point that Spanish-speaking people might want to discuss startups/business/technology/etc in Spanish with other Spanish-speaking people (whether or not the original content was written in Spanish), network with other Spanish-speaking people, collaborate and co-found companies with other Spanish-speaking people, and so on.
If you're going to start a company, or discuss technology, or whatever, there are benefits (as well as drawbacks) to doing that within a community of like-minded people. If you were born and raised in the US, would you go off to start a startup with two other guys from Tokyo whose culture and mindset might be vastly different from yours? Or would you do it with your local friends? Similarly, an entrepreneur from Spain might be a lot more comfortable starting a startup with some fellow Spaniards than Americans.
On the flipside, there are benefits to expanding your horizons and you might learn a thing or two from people outside your culture and social sphere who have different perspectives.
Because of that, I think the two versions can coexist nicely, rather than one being a substitute for the other.