
Hacker News For Africa - madradavid
http://afritech.org/
======
skc
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 :-)

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greg_mazurek
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?

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qompiler
The nokia 3210 is very popular.

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stkni
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.

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

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jiggy2011
yes, then we could have /h/hngonewild, _shudder_.

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

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

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jiggy2011
We already have posts like that.

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

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daniel-levin
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...](http://www.newsofrwanda.com/featured1/17405/oxford-university-
says-rwanda-to-eradicate-poverty-in-20-years/)

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

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

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

(¹ I'm being nice here.)

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

<http://arclanguage.org/>

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87689769867
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.

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peteridah
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.

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tamersalama
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.

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s10r
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.

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

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thomaslutz
What software did you use for this?

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sharon2012
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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dcaranda
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.

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

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

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randomafrican
I dont get it

