[gregdoesit]

An interesting question here, on Hacker News.

Why did Paul Graham build Hacker News rather than encourage the use of Digg? It already had submissions of similar types that Hacker News started with. I assume it was because things were missing off Digg that Hacker News built, and the two sites ended up serving different audiences in the end.

Why build something new rather than encourage using existing services?

Because many of us have this entrepreneurial sprit to build, and do it the way we think is a good approach, filling in for gaps on the market. Time and people then decides if it was worth it.

The most obvious answer: TechPays caters for countries not present on eg levels.fyi - see how there are no data points for eg Estonia, Hungary, Belgium etc.

Then, this site is built with an anonymous-first mindset and offers additional context on data points - like whether or not equity is liquid - which I’ve not seen before, and has localization like being able to search for The Randstad in the Netherlands.

While there is data on levels.fyi, I expect this site to get significantly more data for European countries as it’s the main focus of it. Eg it already the has the most data for the Netherlands across any data source online - more than 2,000 entries -, and I have not promoted the site, this came from running in stealth. Same with eg Hungary which just launched but it’s hard to fine any data on this country - and impossible to submit data on most similar sites for it.

https://techpays.com/europe/netherlands

[__derek__]

Building a brand is a fine answer, but this is incorrect:

> The most obvious answer: TechPays caters for countries not present on eg levels.fyi - see how there are no data points for eg Estonia, Hungary, Belgium etc.

All three of those countries have submissions on levels.fyi.[1][2][3]

[1] Estonia: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&c...

[2]: Hungary: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&c...

[3]: Belgium: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&c...

[gregdoesit]

I had no idea. Always assumed it was limited to these countries listed here: https://www.levels.fyi/locations/

The point stands that I’m building an Europe-focused site, being a former hiring manager based here. Eg in Hungary, the compensation data is in HUF for most companies with local contracts. On TechPays, this information is in HUF. On levels, it seems to be in USD.

It’s a different site. I’m building it because I’d like to have something with more details on this market and because it’s a very fun side project and an excuse to keep coding.

[drakonka]

I am glad that you are building this. Often websites are built for a US market and then try to shoehorn EU usage into it. Sometimes that works, but aside from things like currency issues you also often end up with a user base/community that is just primarily interested in the US, with very little activity around other locations. I think it would be great to have this kind of thing specifically tailored to an EU community.

[__derek__]

Localized currencies is very useful! It seems like such an obvious thing, and yet.

[dan-robertson]

Wasn’t hacker news originally ‘startup news’ and mostly around to promote discussion around startups that might help out the companies yc was investing in and help yc get more companies to invest in? And wasn’t partly it was to prove pg’s new lisp dialect?

Today it’s not so clear to me that/why it’s valuable to yc but I’m glad they find the site and its moderation.