I find this article interesting in that part of what's necessary for successful start-up industry is freedom of which Zimbabwe has none. As a person of African descent and a Latin American living in the U.S. I am constantly struck by leaders who do not understand the world economy or simply dont care. A country like Zimbabwe, if they were to invest in their youth in say OLPC for instance or sending x number of students to study Computer Science or Engineering abroad; they would see an untold benefit societally in 15 to 25 years. Unfortunately we cant account for human greed and corruption which drives the Mugabes of the the world.
The problem is that giving kids laptops does not make them smarter. OLPCs are not magical teachers.
Also, especially in Zimbabwe, if you invest in sending children abroad to study, they will probably never come back. One of their biggest problems for the future is the mass exodus of intelligent, educated people from the country.
I of course was referring to some system where if I pay for your education you come back and work in the country fro x number of years. It cant just be a system where the government pays for the education of a few hundred or thousand people and they move to New York or London. There have to be other factors whereby the government and private industry make it attractive for people to come back and start technology start-ups.
I see this as a knee-jerk solution, but once these educated children see the western world, they will not want to stay in Zimbabwe; to force them to stay is tantamount to indentured servitude.
I've been thinking about possible solutions for Zimbabwe, but there aren't many. The first step is to remove Robert Mugabe from power and, probably with international help, instill some sort of civility and credibility in the government there by appointing a just governor. But there are no protections against what happened to Mugabe happening to the new president/ruler. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Orwell said.
In the short term, Zimbabwe is kind of screwed. They have a hyperintelligent criminal dictator, a mass exodus of their most intelligent and rich people, and inflation so high that conducting business is impossible. And the government there doesn't seem to be doing anything drastic to fix these problems.
It's sad. More than ten million people live there in extreme poverty. And just ten years ago, it had some of the highest standards of living in all of Africa.
You can make it attractive, but trying to force them to stay for x years is probably useless. You have to let people go where their abilities take them. Maybe offer loans to start businesses for those who chose to stay. The mandated stay stuff won't work, I would venture.
I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I'd argue that we should simply flag accounts as hackers, thereby, by definition, greenlighting anything they post, except I wouldn't be one of them.
Vanity Fair, Matt? That's what you want to see on this site? Look, I enjoy your blog but if HN starts with the NYT, VF, US News, et al posts all day long, this won't be a place you or I want to visit. And that's the problem everyone one of us (myself included) who post as the off-topic police are trying to prevent. We have a fun group and this is not where we come to get news; this is where we come to talk to other really smart people about hacker/startup-related topics.
I know nothing about Vanity Fair, but that article was good. So yeah, that's what I want to see here.
When you post as the off-topic police, you're defining off-topic in a different way than this site's guidelines suggest, and that is what I find annoying.
I'm interested in Isaiah Berlin too, but I wouldn't submit that link. It's not particularly good. It probably wouldn't get many hackers interested in Isaiah Berlin. But if you felt the article was particularly good, I don't see why you shouldn't go ahead and post it. It would be within the HN guidelines to do so.
It's impossible to follow the guidelines precisely, because good hackers aren't all interested in the same things. For any post outside the safety zone of, say, programming, startups, math and maybe physics, there will be some good hackers who aren't interested. But it doesn't follow that others won't like it a lot. The trouble with the "off-topic police" is that they're trying to speak for all hackers about what's not interesting. Le HN c'est moi.
Sure. Though I generally dislike Wikipedia entries, this is meant to be a marketplace of ideas, rather than a site that appeals to my tastes above all.
I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.
I am tired as well, with all these off-topic articles. Giving it is a rest is a bad idea, since that will only accelerate HN going the reddit way. For all practical purposes it is going that way, just that you are helping accelerate it.
But they are, by definition, not off-topic. Given PG's guidelines, for something to be off-topic it has to not gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity and not be of interest to any hackers.
So to say that something is off-topic here, you have to be willing to assert that it is not of interest to any hackers, which means that whoever posted it and whoever voted it up are not hackers. Are you willing to assert that for something that now has 22 points? I wouldn't be willing to assert that for anything that was submitted at all unless it were blatant spam.
It seems that everything posted here is, by definition, either spam or on-topic. Perhaps you are looking for a social news site that defines on-topic as being CS-related, but at least according to the current guidelines, that is not this site.
That's why I'm constantly annoyed at the off-topic police. They're trying to make this site into what they wish it were, rather than what it is. Please reread the stated purpose of this site and explain to me how it is possible that that article does not fall within the guidelines.
Edit: I would appreciate that anyone who downmodded this explain my logical error. Not because I care about the karma, but because I'd like to see at least a reasonable explanation as to how I'm incorrect.
I like articles like this, but what I'm really worried about is the fact that they attract non-hacker types who just want to talk politics. Next stop: reddit. First come articles like this, then more, good, interesting in-depth articles about Obama, then just plain old Obama articles, then McCain is a big old dufus articles, and so on down the drain. See, for instance, maxklein's comment below. That's exactly what I fear happening when these types of articles turn up.
Perhaps we could create a HN-offtopic on some site that implements social news, by invite only, for HN users, and use that for politics/economics/whatever. Any other ideas for a constructive solution to this problem(+) that don't involve lots of PG's time?
(+) With "the problem" being defined as: "we are interested in off topic articles, but are afraid of what they'll do to the site in the long term".
Once again, I take issue with your definition of off-topic, since the guidelines seem to suggest that anything intelligent is on-topic. This a good, interesting, in-depth article about Obama would be on-topic, whereas anything below that in your progression would be off.
I don't think PG will allow it to progress to "McCain is a big old dufus articles". He has stated that he would not, and that he has constructive solutions to that problem that he will implement if he feels it necessary.
I'm a hacker and I read reddit quite regularly. I browse the politics, business, programming and world news sections.
I quite enjoy it. I find those articles interesting, though the debate is usually less so. Yet I'm a hacker. Does that mean that reddit is publishing hacker news?
Of course not.
Just because it's interesting to "some hackers" doesn't make it hacker news. Similarly, if an article about fluffy toys is interesting to some people in the medical profession, should it be published in the British Medical Journal, as a medical article? No.
You're talking as if the site guidelines don't exist.
Off-topic submissions are a smaller problem here than the kind of complaining you're engaged in. Looking through the HN posts I've upvoted, I see that I've learned things about history, music, language, physiology, mathematics, economics, and psychology, in addition to much about computing and startups. That's obviously the point of the site. People have been complaining about HN "turning into reddit" for a year or more. It hasn't, and it isn't.
The mechanism for politely expressing your tastes is the upvote. I see no evidence that it needs augmenting.
> You're talking as if the guidelines that have been established for this site don't exist.
They are, perhaps intentionally, rather fluid and vague. I mean, if you wanted to argue about it, you could say that the problems with Zimbabwe are politics, and certainly aren't new: they've been covering that country's decline for years in The Economist, and if I recall, had one of their reporters kicked out of the country.
Naturally, reasonable people will disagree. How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here? That some stuff seems uninteresting is a feature, not a bug; it's an aspect of the intellectual diversity that is the raison d'etre of the site.
Speaking of the guidelines, I don't think anyone pointed out the one that actually addresses the "off-topic police" explicitly:
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
> How many things are there that are interesting to everybody here?
I know this one! Hacking and startups:-) My concern is not 'uninteresting' at all, but the slippery slope that reddit went down, where a trickle of genuinely interesting articles on politics and economics became a flood of crap.
I did not complain, I merely pointed out, in a fairly neutral tone, for other people like myself, that this article is not hacker news. That you chose to interpret it as a complaint is your problem.
No, the problem is people trying to enforce their vision of off-topic (stuff that is not CS/startup related) on a site whose guidelines define it as something entirely different.
No, because both hackers and non-hackers use the up arrow. Which is fine if you don't mind content drift, but the people you are responding to do mind.
HN doesn't have to be news about hackers, just any testy brain food that hackers like. If it's been voted up and it's not link bait then it's what the userbase wants
I don't mind, and am often quite fond of the 'tasty brain food' articles when they completely avoid politics/economics/other controversial stuff that generates more heat than light.
Wait until your VCs (econimist) force you to hire a new CEO (politician)and watch him drive the company you and your co-founders have worked hard for and you will see how much politics/economics there really is in the startup environment.
At that period you will start to understand. Be more concerned.
I'm quite interested in economics and politics, thanks, I just think they are likely to drag this site down because they start attracting people who are uninterested in the 'hacker' stuff (and ultimately outnumber us by orders of magnitude, because politics are of interest to most people), and result in long, drawn out and often nasty discussions.
Look at the posting history at the following link. It seems we already have one person who seems to come around mostly for this type of article:
Not especially interesting things sometimes make it to the frontpage for a little while because a couple of people voted for a new item together, but they quickly drop again if more people don't vote or comment.
I think it's fair to point out it's nothing to do with Hacking. I also think it's cool it's on the frontpage. There doesn't have to be a disconnect.
I think that comments are a great way to add meta-data to a story. People often read the comments before investing time into a link, in that scenario this simple note is fine.
Swombat, now look what you've done, you've turned the comments section of this post into a debate about rules...
Anyway, yeah this sucks ass. I love how China just spent $300 billion staging games while Russia invades Georgia, there continues to be a war in Iraq, and Zimbabwe suffers 9000% inflation.
Zimbabwe is War 2.0. You know how things moved online? Well, Zimbabwe is what happens when a media and economic war is waged against a country. The war is between Britain and Zimbabwe, and the REALLY sad part is that all of you have been convinced by the one-sided propaganda you read. How many of you who think you know the entire story have actually ever read the Zimbabwean side of things?
It's war 2.0 folks, and you don't even realise it. Africa has a completely different perspective on the Zimbabwe conflict, but in your freedom to read whatever they provide for you to read, you have no other sources of information.
I was in Zimbabwe in September of last year. This article matches very closely with our impressions of the political climate of the country and seems consistent with the opinions of the Zimbabweans we talked to -- at least, those who were willing to talk openly about politics. Certainly there's an economic war going on, but it seems a civil war, where any semblance of a functioning economy has long since been manipulated into uselessness by Mugabe's hand. I carry my own biases to be sure, but it was hard not to draw this conclusion from what we saw last year and the terrible decline since then.
Zimbabwe's current situation is complex, charged, and forged out of decades of conflict among groups inside and outside the country. I can't argue outright there isn't another broad perspective on what's happening, but I'd like to read about it for myself. Please post links.
I didn't really want to respond to this off topic post. I didn't read the article, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by it been war 2.0 or Africa having a different perspective of Zimbabwe than the rest of the World.
I live in South Africa. I've spoken to many Africans who seem to agree with the rest of the world, as do I. This war between Britain and Zimbabwe? That's the sad delusions of Robert Mugabe and his friends... Used to fuel hatred.
I'm utterly confused and actually disgusted that you're comparing the situation in Zimbabwe to the movement of the Internet?
I believe that this is one of those situations where there is no "other side". Robert Mugabe has destroyed his country's economy and stolen an election, all for the sake of his own personal power. This is pretty much par for the course in most of Africa.
Please would you justify and/or provide some evidence for your claims that this is and economic war being waged. It seems to me, a briton with Zimbabwean friends whose tales back up those expressed in the article, that you are being misinformed.
