What happened to Zimbabwe
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
Also, especially in Zimbabwe, if you invest in sending children abroad to study, they will probably never come back. One of their biggest problems for the future is the mass exodus of intelligent, educated people from the country.
I've been thinking about possible solutions for Zimbabwe, but there aren't many. The first step is to remove Robert Mugabe from power and, probably with international help, instill some sort of civility and credibility in the government there by appointing a just governor. But there are no protections against what happened to Mugabe happening to the new president/ruler. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Orwell said.
In the short term, Zimbabwe is kind of screwed. They have a hyperintelligent criminal dictator, a mass exodus of their most intelligent and rich people, and inflation so high that conducting business is impossible. And the government there doesn't seem to be doing anything drastic to fix these problems.
It's sad. More than ten million people live there in extreme poverty. And just ten years ago, it had some of the highest standards of living in all of Africa.
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I'd argue that we should simply flag accounts as hackers, thereby, by definition, greenlighting anything they post, except I wouldn't be one of them.
I am tired as well, with all these off-topic articles. Giving it is a rest is a bad idea, since that will only accelerate HN going the reddit way. For all practical purposes it is going that way, just that you are helping accelerate it.
So to say that something is off-topic here, you have to be willing to assert that it is not of interest to any hackers, which means that whoever posted it and whoever voted it up are not hackers. Are you willing to assert that for something that now has 22 points? I wouldn't be willing to assert that for anything that was submitted at all unless it were blatant spam.
It seems that everything posted here is, by definition, either spam or on-topic. Perhaps you are looking for a social news site that defines on-topic as being CS-related, but at least according to the current guidelines, that is not this site.
That's why I'm constantly annoyed at the off-topic police. They're trying to make this site into what they wish it were, rather than what it is. Please reread the stated purpose of this site and explain to me how it is possible that that article does not fall within the guidelines.
Edit: I would appreciate that anyone who downmodded this explain my logical error. Not because I care about the karma, but because I'd like to see at least a reasonable explanation as to how I'm incorrect.
Perhaps we could create a HN-offtopic on some site that implements social news, by invite only, for HN users, and use that for politics/economics/whatever. Any other ideas for a constructive solution to this problem(+) that don't involve lots of PG's time?
(+) With "the problem" being defined as: "we are interested in off topic articles, but are afraid of what they'll do to the site in the long term".
I don't think PG will allow it to progress to "McCain is a big old dufus articles". He has stated that he would not, and that he has constructive solutions to that problem that he will implement if he feels it necessary.
I quite enjoy it. I find those articles interesting, though the debate is usually less so. Yet I'm a hacker. Does that mean that reddit is publishing hacker news?
Of course not.
Just because it's interesting to "some hackers" doesn't make it hacker news. Similarly, if an article about fluffy toys is interesting to some people in the medical profession, should it be published in the British Medical Journal, as a medical article? No.
Off-topic submissions are a smaller problem here than the kind of complaining you're engaged in. Looking through the HN posts I've upvoted, I see that I've learned things about history, music, language, physiology, mathematics, economics, and psychology, in addition to much about computing and startups. That's obviously the point of the site. People have been complaining about HN "turning into reddit" for a year or more. It hasn't, and it isn't.
The mechanism for politely expressing your tastes is the upvote. I see no evidence that it needs augmenting.
They are, perhaps intentionally, rather fluid and vague. I mean, if you wanted to argue about it, you could say that the problems with Zimbabwe are politics, and certainly aren't new: they've been covering that country's decline for years in The Economist, and if I recall, had one of their reporters kicked out of the country.
Speaking of the guidelines, I don't think anyone pointed out the one that actually addresses the "off-topic police" explicitly:
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
I know this one! Hacking and startups:-) My concern is not 'uninteresting' at all, but the slippery slope that reddit went down, where a trickle of genuinely interesting articles on politics and economics became a flood of crap.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find some articles about Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" to post here. :)
- Off-topic articles are not interesting.
it is:
- Off topic articles are interesting also to off topic readers & off topic readers jeopardise the nature of the site/community.
Do you think I should submit this link?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin
(I read it today to satisfy my intellectual curiosity.)
It's impossible to follow the guidelines precisely, because good hackers aren't all interested in the same things. For any post outside the safety zone of, say, programming, startups, math and maybe physics, there will be some good hackers who aren't interested. But it doesn't follow that others won't like it a lot. The trouble with the "off-topic police" is that they're trying to speak for all hackers about what's not interesting. Le HN c'est moi.
Edit: How about this? Do you think I should submit it? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858701285435131.html
When you post as the off-topic police, you're defining off-topic in a different way than this site's guidelines suggest, and that is what I find annoying.
Not especially interesting things sometimes make it to the frontpage for a little while because a couple of people voted for a new item together, but they quickly drop again if more people don't vote or comment.
At that period you will start to understand. Be more concerned.
Look at the posting history at the following link. It seems we already have one person who seems to come around mostly for this type of article:
I think that comments are a great way to add meta-data to a story. People often read the comments before investing time into a link, in that scenario this simple note is fine.
Anyway, yeah this sucks ass. I love how China just spent $300 billion staging games while Russia invades Georgia, there continues to be a war in Iraq, and Zimbabwe suffers 9000% inflation.
Also, looking at the other comment threads, it seems to me that there isn't much genuine discussion about this anyway.
It's war 2.0 folks, and you don't even realise it. Africa has a completely different perspective on the Zimbabwe conflict, but in your freedom to read whatever they provide for you to read, you have no other sources of information.
I live in South Africa. I've spoken to many Africans who seem to agree with the rest of the world, as do I. This war between Britain and Zimbabwe? That's the sad delusions of Robert Mugabe and his friends... Used to fuel hatred.
I'm utterly confused and actually disgusted that you're comparing the situation in Zimbabwe to the movement of the Internet?
Zimbabwe's current situation is complex, charged, and forged out of decades of conflict among groups inside and outside the country. I can't argue outright there isn't another broad perspective on what's happening, but I'd like to read about it for myself. Please post links.