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Comment by jimmyed | Hacker News Reader

Every once in a while, I get to read about what I call the "Invisible countries". These are the countries that are apparently there, but have no weight at the global scale. I don't know anyone from there, don't know what their cities are called, don't hear any news from there. Peru falls squarely in that category. Others are Turkmenistan, Gabon, Monaco, Senegal etc.

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I created a little news site (https://magnetoid.com) specifically to try to get stories from every country in the world. Most countries are directly represented, though there are a few exceptions like Andorra (maybe 20 total?), where there's not a terribly great English news source for me to pull from. Countries not directly represented are still covered by regional sites that I scrape.

It's made with Python, SQLite, OpenResty, and Redis. no ads, tracking, or javascript

...great site, thanks.

I love this site

Great site! nevertheless, I believe your soilurce of news from Portugal is more of tourism promoting website. Forgive me but i need to make just two suggestions: Publish your list of sources for each country; Check Euronews.com, it has news in English for most European countries.

Great job, really! It's bookmarked.

What does it mean when a link is red? Nice idea.

Hmm, San Marino seems to be strangely quiet today...

Peru has been in the news recently because of the presidential attempt to seize power + protests.

I don't think you're wrong about coverage though. People are downvoting because they they think you're saying this is a good thing, but the fact is that no major media outlet regularly features stories from the non-BRICS developing world.

I think people are downvoting because dismissing huge swathes of the planet as "invisible" because you don't know much about them could be considered an arrogant view. Not only is Cameroon not invisible to the 29 million people who live there, it is not invisible to the many millions more who live in neighbouring countries and who emigrated (or whose parents emigrated) from Cameroon to other parts of the world, etc.

Cameroon is invisible to the vast majority of people who do not have a personal connection with Cameroon.

On the other hand, the United States is invisible to nobody. There is nobody on earth with even a basic education who is not aware of the political entities of the US and China. People with no connection to the US, no relatives, no history, are aware of the US.

The average Norwegian or Vietnamese person knows the internal politics of the US, and may, if lucky, know that Cameroon exists.

This is not the same relationship. I'm not saying the imbalance is good, but it is reality.

I didn't say the downvotes were from people disputing the fact that Cameroon is less widely known than the US. It's the idea that this makes them "invisible" that is probably perceived as a dismissive and arrogant take. They are not invisible - you just haven't seen them. There is a difference, particularly in the age of the internet where you can learn about any country you choose.

I wouldn't call you invisible, and I do not like to think of myself as invisible, even though neither of us are (I presume) household names in every country on earth.

(That said, it genuinely surprised me that there are people on HN who have not heard of Peru, as I would have thought Machu Picchu at least was a very well known thing in the developed world.)

There are a fair number of Peruvian restaurants in the Bay Area, due I believe to a fair number of Peruvian immigrants. There are apparently 720,626 Peruvians in the US, and 91,511 in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian_Americans

Not even Lima, the capital? Is it not common to study what all countries and their capitals cities are called in school where you're from?

It's not about not knowing the name about the capital.

It's about not hearing any news from the country ever and maybe not knowing a single distinguishing thing about it because they never come up in regular life in the western world.

Like Cameroon, Gabon or Suriname. I know they are countries, but couldn't tell you a single fact about them.

> never come up in regular life in the western world

If you watch any kind of global sports like the Olympics or football (not american), you immediately hear about these countries.

And if you live in Europe you also know a lot about Suriname if you're in the Netherlands or about Cameroon if you're in France, and by extension if you interact with people from there. Maybe they don't come up for a regular American.

I know Suriname from Miss World (or Earth) competitions.

But still, I couldn't name you a single fact about any of those countries past the fact that they have a name and they are a country.

Okay but my answer was about these countries never coming up in regular life, they do come up! You not researching random countries that come up in life is obviously normal - but they do come up. I've pooped every day of my life, sometimes multiple times, and know almost nothing about pooping or pooping techniques as I never felt like researching it, for example. Frequency of encounters vs facts known are not completely correlated.

Not judging you, but havent you heard of machu pichu. That is in Peru.

Hmm, I don't understand this classification at all. Monaco is pretty well known for its population. There are countries with huge populations that I think most US college students know very little about like Indonesia.

And also well known for hosting the Formula One Grand Prix.

If nothing else, you need to go out of your way to get familiar with Peruvian food, which is some of the most interesting in the world. It’s a blend of pre-Incan (relevancy to the article), Incan, Spanish, Japanese, and Cantonese cuisines. You end up with wonderful stuff like ceviche, chifa cuisine, and pisco sours.

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