How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?. Trump kind helped accelerate this trend but is this generally good for the collective west?
> How do Americans feel about these regionalistic sentiment based posts here on hacker news?
Mutt here. It’s annoying how feckless the European pushback is. Half of these alternatives either run significant rails through America or are insignificantly small. Meanwhile, our ambassador to Greece is busy selling her sugar daddy’s natural gas to Albania and Bulgaria [1]. (Nobody is even pretending the folks buying her corruption will be prosecuted. Athens held up Russian sanctions to get one of their tycoons a carve-out.)
I wish the guy motivating this didn't exist, but I would love for Europe to develop genuinely competitive software products. I don't think it's good even for us Americans that so much software is developed by an American monoculture; we benefit greatly from the existence of Ikea and Toyota.
It's a shame you guys can't benefit from Chinese auto competition. Here in the Philippines there are great choices from BYD, Geely, Chery, GWM, MG, and probably more I'm forgetting. Even the big legacy brands here have had to lower prices to compete.
It is a shame, although I would emphasize that confused thinking on this is not a US-exclusive problem. The EU recently negotiated a trade deal to cut Chinese car sales by 50%.
Yeah and honestly I am not against protecting domestic industry as a concept, but it seems like the American auto industry is just really terrible at this point and not serving people well.
They seem to just want to be specialist suppliers of high end pickup trucks mainly. Most other forms of vehicle are already only well served by foreign companies, so the singling out of China here is definitely confused thinking.
Huh. I haven't seen that to be the case. But I suppose you can put whatever you like in arrow brackets and it might execute in some people's brains like it does in the browser.
Those watching can see that the oligarchs, the economic platform, and the propaganda delivery system are in position to groom the selected voter base for the long term.
The opposition to this open corruption and mayhem (gerrymandering, voter bribery) is only leading nationally by ... 8 points.
Sure got more visible the recent years but the "trend" isn't new.
When sensitive data was a topic even 15 years ago we built European only solutions because America and it's barely existing privacy laws were not to trust. (Built software for government, universities and other companies back then)
From my POV this has nothing to do with orange guy but it's an ongoing trend of benefiting from our customer and data protection laws.
Google, Apple, and Microsoft's profit first attitude has garnered the same resentment in Europe that they enjoy in the US. There's nothing surprising here. What will be surprising is if the push to move away works in Europe, where it hasn't worked in the US, so far.
I think you're attributing Big Tech's bad behavior to politicians where you should be attributing politicians' bad behavior to Big Tech's lobbying.
That doesn't make sense. If the "profit-first" attitude of the company problem, why is booking.com, with it's non-existent fraud-prevention and useless support, recommended as an alternative to Airbnb?
It's pretty dumb! I want the best software and the best hardware, no matter where it's made. Outside of extremely niche situations (e.g. military hardware) international trade is a positive good for all those involved. If you sleep on mattress from China, wear clothes from Vietnam, drink coffee from Ethiopia, eat food from Mexico, and use software from the United States, everyone involved in all of those countries wins: you win because you get the best product, and the companies win because they are financially rewarded for making the best product -- not for their postal address. C'mon people, this is basic economics.
We all wanted that! But than we feared that the USA will just cut our payment systems, government emails and basically every online service we have as it tries to take over Greenland.
I don't feel anything yet because these efforts rarely go anywhere. The average person makes decisions on a multitude of factors but price, availability and convenience are the most important.
However, if this ever got big enough to hurt America's economy in a measurable way, the press would be all over it and Americans would retaliate. Considering how our trade is structured, Europe would experience a lot more pain.
In other words, I think it's cool that you raise visibility to your products. I think you should do it. But you'll lose more than we will if this gets too serious at America's expense.
Optimally we should all develop specialities and maintain a local reserve in most key industries. But all out of war isn't in our interest.
> these efforts rarely go anywhere. The average person makes decisions on a multitude of factors but price, availability and convenience are the most important.
Some people still don't grasp the gravity of the damage.
Emotional boycotts don't work like that. Once the customers will find an acceptable replacement for some US brand they will not return to the brand, because in the first years "not consuming US" has become socially a premium and added value, and then it just runs by inertia. Canadians were selling their houses in Florida out of rage. Do you think that the same people will buy other house again in Florida in five years?. Will be drinking Kentucky bourbon? Forget about it.
> if this ever got big enough to hurt America's economy in a measurable way, the press would be all over it and Americans would retaliate.
And the press would be called piggy and Americans would retaliate voting Republicans in four years to raise the debt a couple trillions more. America does not need Europe to hurt their economy, is doing a stellar job by themselves.
Any attempt to punish your European customers can be satisfying for a while, (yeah lets remove their Youtube), but then you will just lose those customers. So now you earn zero money showing adds to this people and lose access to their free work keeping your web interesting and alive. And somebody competing against you will inherit that big chunk of the market that you so graciously gave to them.
And the Streissand effect created would be the size of the Moon. Keeping a low international profile is the best strategy right now. Any association of your brand with Trump is the kiss of death.
I'd love to see the Europeans roll their own HN equivalent and region block it (and themselves), but asking them to actually make something instead of complaining or virtue signalling their distaste for American goods is too tall an order.
The irony that they're all on an American website crying about American stuff because they have no alternative really never gets old, though.
I'm sure there's have been startups (even funded with public tax money) that do just that, and they probably fared just as "well" as those "European search engines" and similar startups.
I don't think a good idea to limit yourself to solutions only from your geographical area, but it's also a very ingrained " not from my tribe" human sentiment. It's hard to fight it.
Are you proposing forks of existing languages but in gitlab, and only european can approve PRs? Or a new language and OS? How does that work in practice when open source is public and users can have VPNs?
Any open source software should be considered "international" and there are a lot of European contributions to that universe.
The topic of "European" programming languages is highly interesting in the sense that there were a lot of highly developments done in Europe, but they are often less noticed than the counterparts popular in the US. The reason to look more into them would not be so much today's independence, but more to resurrect good concepts that kind of got ignored by history.
There is the ISLisp standard, of course the treasure chest of languages and works boy Nikolas Wirth and so much more. Europe has many great universities, their creations usually are free.
Of course, you could call Python an European language and Go heavily draws from the Wirth's language family.
Would you like to elaborate, if you disagree with my statement? Of course it was very shortened, because the point of my post was an entirely different one.
If you want a longer version: open source software under the normal licenses give you irrevocable rights to use it, as it is open source, you can also administrate it. You have full control over it. That was the core of my statement. Additionally, European authors are major contributors to many of this software. So in what exactly do you disagree with me?
Yet most contributions to biggest FOSS projects like Linux, LLVM etc come from US corpos and institutions. Non-US actors may leverage them, but control over those projects is in hand of US actors, even if letters describing the license doesn't state that, because power in real world doesn't reside in license files or even commit stats.
Yes, in theory Europe (let's ignore there is no such political entity as Europe, but people pretend there is) could hard-fork them and maintain it, but in practice it won't happen, because if it could, it would already.
There is the EU as a political entity covering large parts of Europe. But here Europe can easily mean the same as "not the US".
There are plenty of Linux forks. Which are maintained independently. In the moment it becomes relevant, any of them could be used in an instant. There is Debian, There is Suse. There is no lack of international Linux variants.
So what? One can always fork at any point in time and of course there are plenty Linux forks internationally.
Having the Linux Foundation is great, but it could be replaced at any time.
I like the UI simplicity of posteo. They still have quite some advanced features like encrypted address books and more, with good documentation on the implications. No regrets so far, using it since beginning of the year or so.
Proton not supporting third party apps and requiring minimum Android 10 to launch their app can keep their app for themselves, clearly they don't want more users.
Snickers for example shows first "Alprose" which I never heard, it's a small company that's not even common IN Switzerland. It lists Julius mainl which if it does chocolate its far from their actual business. And half of the other companies also seem regional niche stuff.
I can not comment on the vibe coded issue or not, but the name
Alprose is not really a surprising name at all.
Alps are "Die Alpen" in german, and rose is rose too. So, a rose
or a flower in a mountaineous area. It kind of fits to Switzerland.
Renaming operations are often strange: for instance, the name
Raider before it then became Twix. I always found the renaming
part peculiar; guess Twix is easier to market than Raider but
both names are strange to begin with.
I could also swear that Raider tasted better than Twix, but this
could be to my aging cells no longer being as performant as they
once were. Or they changed the recipe to the worse.
Having said that, I guess that website was AI slop generated, so no wonder it has low quality. I try to avoid AI in general, in particular the low quality slops; sadly youtube is being infected with it, I can no longer watch shorts - so many are just AI spam nowadays.
I didn't mean the name is strange, it's just a strange example to show up first as it's a very niche company you won't easily find to buy anywhere in Europe.
My parents also swear raider was the better product. Not sure if I ever tried one.
I wish the EU would promote English as a pan-European lingua franca. Sort of how it is used in India.
Having a common (second) language is a first step towards understanding each other's culture better. And that in turn facilitates a federal EU. It can't be done overnight, but it is a goal I wish we would pursue more actively.
No European wants to suggest promoting English over their own language. English is already an unofficial lingua franca anyway.
Each culture's language is an integral part of their culture, and their culture wouldn't be the same if they switched to speaking another another culture's language.
These days the latest trend is to vibe code Adobe and MS alternatives from scratch and they are pretty good, Europe has a golden chance of dropping US software vendors.
Apparently EU bureaucrats think that the MS office alternatives are shitty[0], well they can just tell an AI agent whats shitty and get it fixed.
"Element Pro" is not Open Source. Nor does it even come from the EU. From the outside it's incomprehensible anyone in EU bureaucracy would want something like this, given that there are good OS alternatives.
I guess both produce two-wheeled one-person mobility devices? There is some overlap in utility, but the audience doubting between a petro motorcycle and an electric scooter would be vanishingly thin, I think.
European alternatives - mostly shit produced in China with different badge when it comes to physical stuff. The rest is digital services with userbase smaller than the dev team. It is actually good demonstration how pathetic our production capacity has become. And the industries where we actually punch quite well - Henkel, VSM, Tyrolit are missing.
And lets not with Coca Cola alternatives. It is the funniest joke of the year so far.
Coca Cola is kind of a solved problem since LabCoatz made a good reverse engineered version. If the company decides to leave Europe any of their former bottlers can start making it under a different name, and it's not breaking any American laws because the formula was never patented.
it is kinda not of a solved problem. That is from a person that right now has probably 10 different flavoring cola combinations aging in bottles. You can get an awesome drinks. That are first cousins or fraternal twins. But not identical twins.
Btw - making your own drinks is really great value - it makes you appreciate the margins on soft drinks. 1lt is probably 10c or so with carbonation included.
That's actually where competition is easy enough that it produces something worthwhile. Afri Cola and Fritz Cola aren't bad at all (even if their market share is only a footnote to Coke and Pepsi).
That is not how it works with beverages. They are just not substitutes for your favorite carbonated style drink. Once you are hooked on a subset of them - favorite cola, tonic, bitter lemon - the others will always taste a bit off. I moved from Dr. Pepper to cherry cola is not sentence often heard. Or vice versa.
Why not? HN is not critical infrastructure. We do not depend on it even if we use it. We are also not anti-american, we just see that capitalism reached a fkd up state where it supports anti-democratic and specifically fascism patterns. Europeans that are very aware of this also avoid Spotify, even though it is EU. Using EU services is a good heuristic, though, simply because the issues are usually within the big players.
I wish lists like this were curated more carefully. Just because a company is European doesn't automatically make it better. For example, Gigaset is listed as one of the alternatives to the iPhone. They distributed malware to end users via their official update servers and then failed to inform them about it. Something like this should be an absolute no go for a smartphone manufacturer unless it's properly addressed.
Furthermore for Visual Studio Code it lists only IntelliJ IDEA as an alternative. There are also alternatives such as VSCodium, Neovim, or Emacs. In some cases, the alternative to an American company should not be a European company, but rather free software.
> There are also alternatives such as VSCodium, Neovim, or Emacs. In some cases, the alternative to an American company should not be a European company, but rather free software.
I agree in theory but VSCodium wouldn't be a thing without Microsoft continuing development of VS Code so you're dependent on American software nonetheless. If the goal is true sovereignty then VSCodium isn't it unless it becomes a truly independent fork aka when LibreOffice forked OpenOffice.
Agree. As an european I would go so far to say that a lot of european alternatives are not better at all. Some form of quality/trust indicator would be helpful though. No company that is distributing malware to its customers should be on any recommendation list.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] threadMutt here. It’s annoying how feckless the European pushback is. Half of these alternatives either run significant rails through America or are insignificantly small. Meanwhile, our ambassador to Greece is busy selling her sugar daddy’s natural gas to Albania and Bulgaria [1]. (Nobody is even pretending the folks buying her corruption will be prosecuted. Athens held up Russian sanctions to get one of their tycoons a carve-out.)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/at-davos-kimberly-guilfo...
They seem to just want to be specialist suppliers of high end pickup trucks mainly. Most other forms of vehicle are already only well served by foreign companies, so the singling out of China here is definitely confused thinking.
But I don't blame any country for disassociating with the US. Not just because Trump is our president, but more so that we elected him, twice.
<insert "European right-wing is actually further left than America's left wing" comment here>
Those watching can see that the oligarchs, the economic platform, and the propaganda delivery system are in position to groom the selected voter base for the long term.
The opposition to this open corruption and mayhem (gerrymandering, voter bribery) is only leading nationally by ... 8 points.
When sensitive data was a topic even 15 years ago we built European only solutions because America and it's barely existing privacy laws were not to trust. (Built software for government, universities and other companies back then)
From my POV this has nothing to do with orange guy but it's an ongoing trend of benefiting from our customer and data protection laws.
I think you're attributing Big Tech's bad behavior to politicians where you should be attributing politicians' bad behavior to Big Tech's lobbying.
However, if this ever got big enough to hurt America's economy in a measurable way, the press would be all over it and Americans would retaliate. Considering how our trade is structured, Europe would experience a lot more pain.
In other words, I think it's cool that you raise visibility to your products. I think you should do it. But you'll lose more than we will if this gets too serious at America's expense.
Optimally we should all develop specialities and maintain a local reserve in most key industries. But all out of war isn't in our interest.
Some people still don't grasp the gravity of the damage.
Emotional boycotts don't work like that. Once the customers will find an acceptable replacement for some US brand they will not return to the brand, because in the first years "not consuming US" has become socially a premium and added value, and then it just runs by inertia. Canadians were selling their houses in Florida out of rage. Do you think that the same people will buy other house again in Florida in five years?. Will be drinking Kentucky bourbon? Forget about it.
> if this ever got big enough to hurt America's economy in a measurable way, the press would be all over it and Americans would retaliate.
And the press would be called piggy and Americans would retaliate voting Republicans in four years to raise the debt a couple trillions more. America does not need Europe to hurt their economy, is doing a stellar job by themselves.
Any attempt to punish your European customers can be satisfying for a while, (yeah lets remove their Youtube), but then you will just lose those customers. So now you earn zero money showing adds to this people and lose access to their free work keeping your web interesting and alive. And somebody competing against you will inherit that big chunk of the market that you so graciously gave to them.
And the Streissand effect created would be the size of the Moon. Keeping a low international profile is the best strategy right now. Any association of your brand with Trump is the kiss of death.
The irony that they're all on an American website crying about American stuff because they have no alternative really never gets old, though.
It seems like a provincial mindset.
See how other economies are doing it.
Example,
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g...
https://go.dev/blog/hello-china
The topic of "European" programming languages is highly interesting in the sense that there were a lot of highly developments done in Europe, but they are often less noticed than the counterparts popular in the US. The reason to look more into them would not be so much today's independence, but more to resurrect good concepts that kind of got ignored by history.
There is the ISLisp standard, of course the treasure chest of languages and works boy Nikolas Wirth and so much more. Europe has many great universities, their creations usually are free.
Of course, you could call Python an European language and Go heavily draws from the Wirth's language family.
This so naive only a programmer could say this.
If you want a longer version: open source software under the normal licenses give you irrevocable rights to use it, as it is open source, you can also administrate it. You have full control over it. That was the core of my statement. Additionally, European authors are major contributors to many of this software. So in what exactly do you disagree with me?
Yes, in theory Europe (let's ignore there is no such political entity as Europe, but people pretend there is) could hard-fork them and maintain it, but in practice it won't happen, because if it could, it would already.
Tell that to Torvalds and the US government. Linux, Linux Foundation are in US.
Snickers for example shows first "Alprose" which I never heard, it's a small company that's not even common IN Switzerland. It lists Julius mainl which if it does chocolate its far from their actual business. And half of the other companies also seem regional niche stuff.
Dunno but gives a very vibe coded vibe
Alps are "Die Alpen" in german, and rose is rose too. So, a rose or a flower in a mountaineous area. It kind of fits to Switzerland.
Renaming operations are often strange: for instance, the name Raider before it then became Twix. I always found the renaming part peculiar; guess Twix is easier to market than Raider but both names are strange to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twix
I could also swear that Raider tasted better than Twix, but this could be to my aging cells no longer being as performant as they once were. Or they changed the recipe to the worse.
Having said that, I guess that website was AI slop generated, so no wonder it has low quality. I try to avoid AI in general, in particular the low quality slops; sadly youtube is being infected with it, I can no longer watch shorts - so many are just AI spam nowadays.
From your wikipedia link
> The name is a portmanteau of "twin sticks
My parents also swear raider was the better product. Not sure if I ever tried one.
Having a common (second) language is a first step towards understanding each other's culture better. And that in turn facilitates a federal EU. It can't be done overnight, but it is a goal I wish we would pursue more actively.
One or two years at school would be enough, which means that the entire problem could be fixed in a year.
But that's not how things work in real life. Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Each culture's language is an integral part of their culture, and their culture wouldn't be the same if they switched to speaking another another culture's language.
Apparently EU bureaucrats think that the MS office alternatives are shitty[0], well they can just tell an AI agent whats shitty and get it fixed.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/european-commission-staff-really-dislike...
Not scooters though.
And lets not with Coca Cola alternatives. It is the funniest joke of the year so far.
Btw - making your own drinks is really great value - it makes you appreciate the margins on soft drinks. 1lt is probably 10c or so with carbonation included.
but I agree with first paragraph
Why are you guys still here?
Furthermore for Visual Studio Code it lists only IntelliJ IDEA as an alternative. There are also alternatives such as VSCodium, Neovim, or Emacs. In some cases, the alternative to an American company should not be a European company, but rather free software.
I agree in theory but VSCodium wouldn't be a thing without Microsoft continuing development of VS Code so you're dependent on American software nonetheless. If the goal is true sovereignty then VSCodium isn't it unless it becomes a truly independent fork aka when LibreOffice forked OpenOffice.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/us-governmen...
It's generally beneficial to have more choice both from a free-market and a democratic-safeguards perspective.