I reckon that there are plenty of HN type of sites in many languages around the world. I wonder if there are enough of non-native English speakers that also read HN to provide us with insights and links. While English might seem to us to be the lingua franca of "tech" there are clearly big pockets around the world that dominant tech footprints and/or dominant economies/geographies/population/critical mass to sustain local HN variants. One could assume that there would be ones in Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Hindi etc...
However, a caveat that might make HN unique is that it is subsidized, funded, maintained and actively run by private enterprise as a "marketing" arm of YC. Maybe that's what might be lacking in other ecosystems and language hemispheres.