Hacker News India Story

Let’s begin from the beginning. Last Sunday, when a group of about 15 Hacker News (HN) members from Bangalore got together for a coffee, one of the inevitable discussions was the lack of visibility for very India specific discussions in HN apart from the other inevitable discussion of the art of gaining Karmas. Later coffees were gulped, cards were exchanged and ambitious plans were made to meet more often and discuss more topics relevant to India  in the HN Google group. Did I feel something was amiss. Of-course I did.

The very next day, I downloaded an old HN codebase, bought the domain hackernews.in and set up a Hacker News for India (HNI). It had such an awesome reception that it was like everybody was waiting for something like that all their lives. Yeah, okay I am drumming it up a bit in saying so. The reception was awesome nevertheless. We have over 300 users and 700 submissions (posts + comments) in less than 72 hours of setting up HNI.  Also, lets compare some posts on HN and HNI

Ask HNI: Silent places to work in Delhi? – http://hackernews.in/item?id=112 (An India specific logistics question with 12 replies)

Ask HN: CoWorking space in Delhi/India? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163808 (4 points, 2 replies)

Discussion on a blog post by Swaroop on startup hiring issues in India – http://hackernews.in/item?id=69 (An India specific blog post)

Ask HN: Startups hiring in India? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631940 (1 point, 0 replies)

Ask HNI: Subscription and recurring billing management systems for India? http://hackernews.in/item?id=355 (12 replies)

Ask HN: Accepting Online Payments in India? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755854 (3 points, 1 reply)

I think you see the trend. India specific questions mostly go un-noticed and unanswered on HN. There are many more unanswered ones on HN that you can see at http://searchyc.com/india

Well, there were concerns raised about the usage of the brand/ name Hacker News. A valid concern. When I was looking to book a domain I felt it was most natural to call it HN India because it is going to be used by HN users from India. Much like the Barcamp and Barcamp Bangalore.  Even while concerns were being discussed, the forum was gleefully used by all members.

Every nice story has an ugly turn. There comes a tweet!

Amateurish, Illegal, Rip-off. If the person was actually concerned shouldn’t he have participated in the discussion on HNI itself or the mailing list and offered his side of the argument? If I was allowed to grade amateurishness his behaviour was definitely more amateurish than starting HNI (if at all that can be called amateurish!) Or may be he was dying for some attention.

In all this confusion, I knew one thing for sure. If this is a problem for PG I would change the name. I was not going to change the name assuming PG has a problem. So I mailed PG.

Here’s my mail

Hi Paul,

I have been a reader of HN for about 3 years and we recently had a HN meetup in Bangalore. One of the things we discussed was how some issues are very India specific and HN is not the best place to discuss them (as not everyone is interested). So I went ahead and created http://hackernews.in and it has had some good traction in the last couple of days.

There have been some concerns over the name “Hacker News”. I picked up the name because we were essentially catering to the same community and we are clearly not running this for profit. However if YC has a problem with this, I can change the name. However, I think that having local HN sites may be very useful to startups (as you can see from the discussions on HN India).

I am happy to put a disclaimer in the footer saying that this site is not affiliated to YC. However since the code is in lisp, its taking me a little longer ( I have no lisp background).  Please let me know your thoughts and I will comply.

Finally, thanks a lot for HN and YC. Its been very useful.

Thanks,

and here is the response I got from him

Hrm, I don’t know.  We’re not usually very fussy about such things,

but it’s possible this is something we might want to do ourselves

someday.  Not immediately but maybe in several years.  You’re

welcome to use the code of course but would  you mind calling it

something else?  You’ll probably find any other name will do just

as well anyway.  –pg

Since he did not want me to continue using the name, I went ahead and bought hackerstreet.in and redirected the site to it. In a followup email, I also asked PG for the latest codebase but he needs a few weeks to clean it up before he can release it.

Only time will tell the whether HSI will succeed or not but I believe that there is a great need for something like this in India and would always be proud that we started this.

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