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Hacker News For Africa
- cjbenedikt 14y agoExcellent - I am trying to do the same thing for Impact Investing www.impact4change.com
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- greg_mazurek 14y agoMobile 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?
- qompiler 14y agoThe nokia 3210 is very popular.
- stkni 14y agoWAP! 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.
- Isamu 14y agoIf 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.
- peteridah 14y agoThis 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.
- zedr 14y agoNot from Africa, but very interesting indeed. Added to my bookmarks. Thanks!
- Mahn 14y agoMakes me wonder when will HN consider creating subcategories ala reddit. Surely the site gets enough traffic to take it to the next level.
- jiggy2011 14y agoyes, then we could have /h/hngonewild, shudder.
- Mahn 14y agoIt 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.
- brudgers 14y agoWhat benefits do you foresee from it?
- petercooper 14y agoAbility to just see all programming and science posts and not, say, finance/VC or political/latest geek soap opera ones.
- obviouslygreen 14y agoThis 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).
- 1337biz 14y agoand /h/jailbait for any languages not older than 24 month
- thomaslutz 14y agoWhat software did you use for this?
- Shank 14y agoIt's hosted using Arc, the open source variant of HN. http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
- quarterto 14y agoHow long before there's a Hacker News for "Hacker News for X"?
- kyro 14y agoIf someone feels there's a need for it, then perhaps not too long from now.
- s10r 14y agoIt'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.
- kmfrk 14y agoI'd love a HN for Europe with moderate activity.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- untog 14y agoSigh. Please tell me you're trolling? This has nothing to do with race. Africa is a geographical location, not a skin colour. Tech in Africa has a different set of challenges than the hugely US-centric Hacker News crowd- not to mention networking opportunities, etc. It makes sense to create a space like this.
- peterjancelis 14y agoThere is also a Hacker News for India: http://hackerstreet.in/ http://hackerstreet.in/
- kofemanas 14y agoIt's very sad to see with what problems they are dealing right now. They're late for probabbly 5-10 years in startups.
- why-el 14y agoA website that I really like and follow regularly is wamda.com. Its only for the MENA region though.
- skc 14y agoThis 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 :-)
- Yaggo 14y agoWhy all of these "HN for x" sites also copy HN's less-than-optimal¹ look? (¹ I'm being nice here.)
- jordyatkins 14y agoIt'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.
- Shank 14y agoIt's hosted using Arc, the open source variant of HN. http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
- Shank 14y agoIt's hosted using Arc, the open source variant of HN. http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/
- marssaxman 14y agoIt'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.
- dcaranda 14y agoNeeds a favicon. But this is great! Super excited to dig in.
- dcaranda 14y agoAlso, 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.
- 87689769867 14y agoThis 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.
- daniel-levin 14y agoAs 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/ http://africa2point0.org/web/index.php/en/ - "creating an enabling platform for African entrepreneurs to flourish" [2] http://www.newsofrwanda.com/featured1/17405/oxford-university-says-rwanda-to-eradicate-poverty-in-20-years/ http://www.newsofrwanda.com/featured1/17405/oxford-universit...
- tamersalama 14y agoHas anyone regarded this as fragmentation? There's a definite plus side of taking things local/regional, however we should avoid the brain drain imo.
- hack_edu 14y agoLet's save the world... with my startup!
- porker 14y agoPlease add it to the list of sites like HN! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399879
- randomafrican 14y agoI dont get it
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoI wouldn't object to seeing interesting posts that happen to be Africa-related here on HN proper...
- sharon2012 14y agoAnybody 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.