Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa | Hacker News Reader

Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa

arstechnica.com

46 pointsmajani16 comments

Open articleView on HN

This is a pretty poor headline. Africa is an enormous landmass.

Equivalent headline:

World developing its first supercomputer outside of countries which already have one.

How about instead:

Kenya developing its first supercomputer, the first one in Africa outside of South Africa

I think this places the focus rightly on Kenya, rather than implying that somehow this is an effort by all of Africa.

Or even better:

iHub developing the first supercomputer in Kenya

That's probably the best one, since it places the focus correctly on iHub (which deserves it) and Kenya indirectly (which also deserves it). The fact that it's the first country outside ZA to do so can then be mentioned as a lead-in hook in the article, instead of delivering this silly title...

Africa is an enormous continent that is sadly very, very, very far from being able to function as a unit.

On the other hand, the submission headline here is simply the original article headline, "Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa," with its subtitle (too long to be added to a headline on HN by the eighty-character rule) "The first 24-node HPC cluster should launch at iHub in Nairobi this summer." That is consistent with the Hacker News guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

which say, "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it." I generally find it is helpful for submitters on HN to submit original article titles. Then if we disagree with the original article title, as you evidently do here, we can agree to hold the person who kindly submitted the article harmless, and blame the editors of Ars Technica this time for a less than ideal title.

(For what it's worth, I have observed one case where an HN submitter submitted an original article title, which was then changed by the curators when commenters howled about it. The title changed from

http://independentsciencenews.org/news/23andme-disproves-its...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270

I still think it was correct for the article to be submitted here on HN with the original title that time and this time, even if the title is subject to legitimate disagreement.)

I agree with your basic geographic point, hence an upvote from me for your comment.

Africa is an enormous continent that is sadly very, very, very far from being able to function as a unit.

It's not like Europe is functioning that much better as unit. And almost continent sized new world countries like Brazil and the US are not something the old world should try to replicate.

Idd Salim, one of the guys building the cluster has a pretty interesting blog: http://www.iddsalim.com/blog

Terrible headline. This is like saying "America developing its first supercomputer outside of the US", referring to Mexico or somewhere.

No, since America can be used to refer to both the USA[1] and a continent/two continents, but there is no country commonly called just "Africa".

[1] Please don't argue with this. This is common usage in modern day English, even if you might not like it. You know it, I know it, we all know it. Also note that the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United Mexican States) are commonly referred to as just Mexico, so why should there be a problem with calling the "United States of America" just "America" for short?

Err, yes. My point is saying "Africa" is so broad as to be meaningless. It's a vast and diverse continent, of which Kenya is just one country. I wouldn't expect an American to know this.

Alright, I misunderstood (But I disagree. "Up until now, no African country except SA has developed a supercomputer" gives me quite a lot of information (55 states in Africa don't have supercomputers); it's not at all meaningless.)

Also, you seriously don't expect Americans to know that Africa is made up of many countries, nor understand the difference between Morocco and Kongo (for instance)? As a non-American, that's rather shocking.

Only about 5% of Americans even have passports. They just aren't interested in the rest of the world.

Sorry where did you get this number from? This seems [0] to be a very popular myth and therefore, incorrect.

[0] http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2008/10/20/debunki...

I think that's part of what makes the headline surprising and interesting. Africa is vast and diverse, and I was surprised to read that there weren't supercomputers in, say, Egypt or Nigeria.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, rather) while the geographical terminology is correct, I'm not sure the technical terminology is. The Ars article (and the blog it was largely copied from) says there is "little to no capacity for cloud computing" (outside South Africa) which is not the same as "no supercomputers."

I wouldn't expect an American to know this.

You can't be serious.

To further your point, there is no continent "America;" There is a conglomeration of two continents called "The Americas" with two constituent continents North America and South America.

It makes sense from a South African point of view, though. I am in South Africa and our company deals with clients in Kenya, Tanzania, etc.

When we refer to the market on the actual continent we refer to it as Africa (or the african market), so in a way it's implicit that we're talking about countries in the north.

I agree. As someone who grew up in Nigeria, I think Africans would understand this headline and find it acceptable. Also, as someone who grew up in Nigeria, I wish Nigeria would get its own supercomputer! It has 4 times as many people and 6 times the GDP of Kenya, and needs to pick up the pace in information technology! :)

tl;dr: It's in Nairobi, Kenya. Nairobi is the capital of, and the largest city of, this central-east African nation.

yay for them! :)

tl;dr It's in Washington D.C., the United States of America. Washington D.C. is the capital of, but not the largest city of, this North American nation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com