Google Code-In winner whose Cameroon hometown is cut off from the internet

[wzy]

Some of you guys have no idea how lucky you are to have good, fast and reliable internet.

I've been around computers since 1998 and it's been 4 weeks since I have a good enough internet connection to watch my first 1080P internet video

[noobermin]

I moved in 1998 (ironically) to an isolated island my parents were from and lived there till 2008 and moved back here for college. It was like walking into and out of a time-capsule, I missed the emergence of the internet into what it is today.

I still learned to hack and everything else in Palau regardless, it was just like playing with a handicap, it's still possible to learn and all, it's just harder.

EDIT: to clarify, I didn't have it that bad, there was <20 kbps internet with a monthly total hour cap, but it was expensive and not very reliable and slow.

[dahart]

I've been around computers since the early 80's, and I think about how lucky I am to have amazing internet pretty much every day. Not to mention the supercomputers we have in our pockets now. I remember watching my first "streaming video": ascii animations on a 110 baud dialup connection - that's a blazing 110 bits per second. And it was awesome! ;)

Sometimes I use my internets to virtually travel to places I've never been and read as much about life there as I can... That usually makes me feel extra lucky about the internet access I have. Same with reading about Nji!

[TheOneTrueKyle]

Story time?

[mattnewton]

Another great reminder that top talent could be born anywhere, and America's edge is that people want to move here to work for American companies.

[pizza]

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould

[akhilcacharya]

And start American companies.

[ScotterC]

Talent is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not.

Check out Andela :)

[rak00n]

"Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." - Anton Ego

[searealist]

Top talent: https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-module-referenceapplicati...

[rwoodley]

What a great story! Cameroon is highly dysfunctional; the government is one of the most corrupt in the world. The fact that this boy can prevail regardless is impressive in a way those of us in more functional societies have trouble appreciating.

[dankohn1]

I will show this article to my sons this weekend and redouble my time with them teaching them to program. As with many things in life (healthcare, food, peace, schools), we also need to appreciate having high-speed Internet access and two parents with programming experience and the time and interest to mentor our children.

[vermontdevil]

I also found the part about cutting off mobile for the English-speaking part of Cameroon to be scary.

Esp when Africa relies on mobile for financial transactions and banking and now these people are stuck.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38895541

[sangnoir]

> Esp when Africa relies on mobile for financial transactions and banking and now these people are stuck.

"Africa" has no such mobile money reliance - you are probably thinking of Kenya. Africa is 54 countries and 1 billion people, your generalization is overbroad.

[j_s]

This is the firs time I've heard about this competition for high school age developers.

Glad it finally got some traction here on HN; I apparently need to find a more education-specific technology news site!

[mooveprince]

Good read to end the week

[Cyph0n]

Kind of ruined by an unusual number of toxic comments. But what an inspiring kid.

[cryptozeus]

And then just a day after the deadline for final submissions, the internet went dead.

[tw04]

I fully expect Ajit Pai to use this as proof we don't need any improvements to infrastructure in the US.

[dang]

Ok, we've put "Google Code-In winner" in the title since it's more specific.

Still please don't comment like this here. The combination of harshness and niticking is particularly unwelcome.

[analogmemory]

Jesus, get some coffee or something. 34 Grand Prize Winners out of 1300 isn't something to scoff at. Considering his situation. It's not like he's being coddled with a participation trophy like some white kid in Beverly Hills.

[chinhodado]

You're just being too harsh. Most people have no idea what Google Code-In is. Sure, you can change it to "Google coding competition winner" but "champion" is not that bad anyway.

[relics443]

Was just going to say that. I'm all for getting teens involved, but it's dangerous to puff up too much. I'm sure he's very proud of his work, but I'm not sure I would categorize it as a "series of complex technical tasks". I can't find exactly what he worked on, but from a blog post he wrote [1] it seems like pretty basic stuff:

I made a few PRs on the OpenMRS source code (had to squash a lot of commit though), and a PR on the reference application to allow login using only the keyboard! That was the most tricky task I did

[1] https://collingrimm.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/gci-week-7-over...

[maged]

Is it not a coding competition?

[dang]

Ouch. First, please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread even worse. Second, please especially don't do personal attacks. Third, please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. You've done that more than once and we ban such accounts.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13617192 and marked it off-topic.