Hacker News For Africa | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News For Africa

afritech.org

165 pointsmadradavid56 comments

This is awesome. Thank you so much.

We in Africa are just as geeky as anywhere else in the world, but we tend to face problems unique to living on the continent. An HN-like site should yield some great "uncanny valley"-esque discussions :-)

Mobile phone usage is very high in Africa compared to the big screen experience. Wouldn't it be nice if your design was a better mobile experience?

The nokia 3210 is very popular.

WAP! I had totally forgotten about it until you mentioned the 3210. It's an interesting take though, because there are technologies that are effectively abandoned that might still be pretty useful in certain areas of the globe.

If most mobile designs were better than this, then yes. Sadly while I do most of my casual browsing on a mobile device, I usually wish the web devs would stop trying ... just lower the bandwidth of the original site (I want this anyway) and give me that.

Makes me wonder when will HN consider creating subcategories ala reddit. Surely the site gets enough traffic to take it to the next level.

yes, then we could have /h/hngonewild, shudder.

It doesn't necessarily have to turn into a jungle, we could limit it to 10 or 15 subcategories max. for the whole site and see how it goes.

What benefits do you foresee from it?

Ability to just see all programming and science posts and not, say, finance/VC or political/latest geek soap opera ones.

This would actually be extremely useful. Even a basic tagging system would make the site a lot more useful to me (though who gets to tag and whose tags get taken seriously would probably have to tie into the rep system, so it'd hinge largely on how interested the most active users here were in accurately tagging entries).

and /h/jailbait for any languages not older than 24 month

Would these be chroot jails?

Good lord this would be hilarious, I can see it now --

First time coding in [P]ython, be gentle ;)

We already have posts like that.

E[le]ven year old, just released this generic iOS game, how did i do?

To be honest, in the last few days, most of HN has already been /h/wtf

or /h/hndrama

and not /h/secretpopcorn

Hackernews isn't that active, it has a very big user base that view but the number of people actively contributing (comments, submissions) is pretty small. During the last 6 minutes there has been 30 comments on HN, for reddit there has been over 100 in the last 10 seconds. The new queue is a good place to look to decide if creating subcategories would be a good idea, most submissions don't seem that great and giving them air time would be more inclusive, but would it be for the better?

Also for me personally I enjoy that HN is just one big list of submissions centred around one goal ("Anything that good hackers would find interesting") it means it's easy enough to discover new fields of interest I'd never have thought to search out, whereas on reddit discovering new fields of interest is much more difficult.

It might be too few buckets for too many things to talk about. Maybe jedberg will pop up and answer if I ask what Reddit looked like before subreddits.

HN is at its best just the way it is right now. There no need for subcategories.

"HN is at its best just the way it is right now. " How exactly is it the best? It doesn't even have a "forgot password" button.

True hackers don't forget their passwords

It doesn't need one. Leave the password field empty when logging in. This is a site whose user base is very technical. Figuring out password resets is not really big of a deal.

Why would anyone want HN to be on that level?

It would be interesting to discuss and share some news in a different language other than English. I had in the past stopped my self to publish some interesting stuff because I am too lazy to translate content.

I'm a big fan lobste.rs's many-to-many approach of submissions and categories.

I've thought this for a while. At least having subcategories for /programming and /startups would solve a few issues that people have - if you only want programming related links, only read /programming.

Though personally I think there should also be categories for /illinformedrants, /pointlesstechdramaoftheweek, /motivationalfluff, etc. The people who like that kind of stuff can have it, and the people who don't like it can not have it.

Makes me wonder when web fora will go all the way and simply recapitulate everything Usenet has allowed since the 1980s, by pushing all the complexity involved in threading and filtering into the clients and making servers just big, dumb message storage bases.

That way, all of these discussions would be rendered moot because threading/no threading and subreddits/no subreddits and troll filtering/no filtering and so on would be under the individual's control, as it should be.

As a South African, I am excited by the prospect of this. That said, I'm often frustrated by the signal-to-noise ratio that so often accompanies discussion about technology and entrepreneurship in Africa. Often, I hear substance-free palaver [1, 2] about how X can be done to solve some problem or alleviate some woe in Africa. As a result, I hope that this site will focus on real entrepreneurship - like M-pesa and the Silicon Cape, and less on enthusiastic but ultimately futile or non-actionable content.

[1] http://africa2point0.org/web/index.php/en/ - "creating an enabling platform for African entrepreneurs to flourish"

[2] http://www.newsofrwanda.com/featured1/17405/oxford-universit...

There is also a Hacker News for India: http://hackerstreet.in/

I wouldn't object to seeing interesting posts that happen to be Africa-related here on HN proper...

Why all of these "HN for x" sites also copy HN's less-than-optimal¹ look?

(¹ I'm being nice here.)

It's probably because it's a familiar format.

Personally, I like the fact the layout is straight to the point, it allows for the articles/posts to be the main focal point.

It's hosted using Arc, the open source variant of HN.

http://arclanguage.org/

It's not optimal? Why, what would you remove? I can't see anything further you could take away without starting to detract from the content, so it seems pretty much optimal to me.

This really does not sound like a good idea. I come from a third world country/region too and I would hate having an HN for my own region. What is the purpose? I want to hang out with the best and the best are here in HN not in some backwater forum that none of the top echelons of HN will visit. It will just become a ghetto. Who in their fucking right mind would want to live or hangout in a ghetto.

Unless your purposes is something else this is just a terrible idea. But if your purposes is really something else why the heck call it a hacker news.

This is a good initiative and something I have had on my todo list for a while. If I understand correctly, you are trying to target the african tech/startup community. I wouldn't want to see it become yet another political forum as some of the posts are pretty off-topic. The true value of hacker news is in the community and building that out for Africa is the real challenge/opportunity here. Would be glad to help where I can.

Has anyone regarded this as fragmentation? There's a definite plus side of taking things local/regional, however we should avoid the brain drain imo.

It's great initiative. For Europe, we also have similar thing but unfortunately it is not active. Maybe admin can update the UI for HN Europe.

I'd love a HN for Europe with moderate activity.

What software did you use for this?

Anybody here willing to prepare video tutorials (or text) on how to code a HN clone on Google app engine for me?I always wonder how HN works. Its design appears pretty simple for a beginner coder like me.

Please add it to the list of sites like HN! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399879

It's very sad to see with what problems they are dealing right now. They're late for probabbly 5-10 years in startups.

Let's save the world... with my startup!

A website that I really like and follow regularly is wamda.com. Its only for the MENA region though.

Excellent - I am trying to do the same thing for Impact Investing www.impact4change.com

Not from Africa, but very interesting indeed. Added to my bookmarks. Thanks!

Needs a favicon. But this is great! Super excited to dig in.

Also, I'm curious to what degree Africans reject being grouped in the monolithic term "Africa". That's a billion people. Cape Town / Nairobi / Lagos / Cairo are completely different places.

How long before there's a Hacker News for "Hacker News for X"?

If someone feels there's a need for it, then perhaps not too long from now.

I dont get it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com