Hacker News For Africa

This is awesome. Thank you so much.<p>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?

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

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.<p>[1] <a href="http://africa2point0.org/web/index.php/en/" rel="nofollow">http://africa2point0.org/web/index.php/en/</a> - "creating an enabling platform for African entrepreneurs to flourish"<p>[2] <a href="http://www.newsofrwanda.com/featured1/17405/oxford-university-says-rwanda-to-eradicate-poverty-in-20-years/" rel="nofollow">http://www.newsofrwanda.com/featured1/17405/oxford-universit...</a>

There is also a Hacker News for India: <a href="http://hackerstreet.in/" rel="nofollow">http://hackerstreet.in/</a>

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?<p>(¹ I'm being nice here.)

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.<p>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.

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! <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399879" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399879</a>

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.

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

I dont get it