Show HN: European Tech News in 6 Languages
21 comments
·November 14, 2025Merinov
rr2841
Things that I liked:
* The article selection (which is probably the most important part)
Things that I did not liked:
* AI Images. While they are well made and not as cringe as others, I prefer to get stock images even if they are repeated.
* Lack of RSS (or at least I couldn't find it). This is a deal breaker for me
Nice busy!
beardyw
The pointless illustrations was what stood out most for me.
Merinov
Interesting perspective. Can you elaborate? Like: You'd prefer no images at all (text-only)? Or the AI-generated style doesn't work for you? Or something else?
I added them because plain text feels bare, but I'm curious what would work better. Real screenshots? Article-pulled images? Or just skip visuals entirely?
Honest feedback helps, thanks!
robin_reala
Not directly connected to this platform, but if I see an AI-generated image against a story I automatically assume the writer has taken as much care with their text as with their image and close the tab.
beardyw
I just checked out Feedly, and it seems to use an illustration from the article when it can, a topic related generic illustration as an alternative (vague picture of an aeroplane say), or nothing.
You could use it as a model.
shlip
Nice idea, but it does not work without JS. It's baffling to me that more and more sites use this (dark?) pattern of requiring JS just to display links.
EDIT: Well I was too quick, it partially works, you can click the grey "source" link on white bg for each article. Why not make the whole div a link instead ?
The sorting menus on top of the page are not working without JS though.
Merinov
Thanks for testing! The whole card IS clickable actually, it has two click targets: Click anywhere on the card and it goes to the summary article page on europedigital.cloud (with translations, context, etc.) Click the "source" link and it goes directly to the original article
This way users can choose: read our summary/translations, or jump straight to the source. Tried to make it intuitive without cluttering the UI.
You're right about the sorting/filtering requiring JS though - it's client-side state. Could move that to URL params for better progressive enhancement.
Appreciate the detailed feedback, this kind of testing helps! :)
embedding-shape
> Thanks for testing! The whole card IS clickable actually, it has two click targets: Click anywhere on the card and it goes to the summary article page on europedigital.cloud (with translations, context, etc.) Click the "source" link and it goes directly to the original article
The problem is that you're handling that with JavaScript, instead of adding a <a> with a href, and also missing href for the <img> element.
When you do this, you break the expectations of a typical web user. For example, I cannot ctrl+click or middle-mouse+click on anything of what you've done, because you personally didn't think about how people browse websites. That's not a problem, and not really your fault, lots of courses and tutorials get this wrong, teaching people to use divs then use JS for actually handling the navigation.
If instead you use a.href and img.href, you get all of these expected behavior for free, without doing anything! And as a extra bonus, people who are blind or otherwise need assistance tooling for browsing the web, will now also be able to use your website with their tooling! :)
larrywinch
let's go!!!
Merinov
Thanks! Yeah, trying to bring more attention to European tech innovation. Lots happening here that doesn't get enough coverage. Any suggestions for news sources or features you'd find useful?
4ggr0
very cool idea, but the AI-generated images really irk me. firstly because they're AI-generated images, secondly because they're just flat-out wrong for the example i clicked on.
Take this[0],
DATENSCUNTZ-EINSTELLUNES should be DATENSCHUTZ-EINSTELLUNGEN
ALLE AKZIETTREN should be ALLE AKZEPTIEREN
you get the point, basically almost all the text is wrong...i think AI-generated images are annoying and vapid enough, but if they don't even show actual text then what's the point? the english ones seem to be fine, can't judge the spanish ones. images feel like a lazy business-powerpoint.
anyways, cool site in general :)
[0]https://europedigital.cloud/_next/image?url=%2Fapi%2Fnews-im...
Merinov
True and good catch on the German text. Fair point, AI image generation struggles with non-English text rendering. This is a known issue I've been wrestling with.
Options I'm considering: 1. Text-free abstract patterns for non-English articles 2. Language-specific image validation before publishing 3. Manual review queue for non-English images
The pattern-based approach was meant to avoid generic "holographic businessman" images, but clearly the execution needs work for multilingual content.
Thanks for the detailed feedback: this is input I need. Herzlichen dank!
vindex10
RSS or/and newsletter would be nice (but manually curated, not ai summary)
max-privatevoid
Why does this have ads and tracking?
add-sub-mul-div
It's yet more LLM shovelware from yet another account with only self-promotion activity. Why wouldn't it?
andyjohnson0
I'm getting Secure Connection Failed error in Firefox. HN hug of death?
I suggest posting this in Show HN [1] if your server can handle it.
Merinov
Thanks for flagging! Checking now - site loads fine for me but might be regional/SSL issue. Can you try again? Also checking server capacity.
For others having issues, direct link: https://europedigital.cloud/en/news
Appreciate the heads up! :)
gethly
Good. I welcome it. I am quite tired of 'merica.
larrywinch
european artificial intelligence ftw!!!
I built a multilingual news aggregator for European tech in 6 languages (EN, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL), filterable by audience (consumers, businesses, government) to help users discover relevant European alternatives.
A few interesting technical challenges:
PATTERN-BASED IMAGE GENERATION Generic AI images all look the same ("holographic businessman with laptop"). I solved this with a JSON database of 60+ concrete visual patterns—context-aware selection prevents repetition. Funding news → coins/contracts, security → locks/shields. Much more visual diversity. Still needs tweaking though.
GRADUAL SITEMAP GROWTH FOR NEW SITES Daily news pipeline generates lots of content. Challenge: Google indexes new sites slowly—exposing all 2K+ URLs at once resulted in 1-3% indexing rate. Solution: Dynamic rolling window in sitemap—only expose top 50 most recent articles (300 URLs), gradually increasing to 100 → 150 → 200 over 6 months as site builds authority. Result: Indexing rate improved to 10%.
AUTOMATED TRANSLATION PIPELINE RSS aggregation → AI summaries and translation with context-aware prompts → human review queue. Still tweaking quality per language pair.
STACK: Next.js 15 with Turbopack, PostgreSQL, deployed via Sliplane@Hetzner which works pretty ok.
STATUS: 1+ month post launch, 80 pages indexed, 100+ European apps featured (Mollie, Wire, Ecosia, LanguageTool, etc.)
FEEDBACK WELCOME ON: • European news sources I'm missing? • Better approaches to multilingual SEO? • Translation quality red flags? • How to optimize for LLM discovery (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)?