The deserving 4,000 startups are not getting a devalued experience. They will still have an advisor in groups of 25 startups. The remaining ~11,000 won't have an advisor (at least not yet).
I went to bed after the false acceptance email and had a beautiful sleep! Woke to the kinda bad news and then the acceptance but no advisor email. What a roller coaster!
I don't think hunger and war are a major problem to hackers actually. I thik war-tone countries are a minority in Africa and only affect rural people who are a majority and obviously non-hackers. I'm a hacker in Malawi and have never experienced war or hunger but that's because I'm a minority living in city.
Internet connection yes. Most hackers in Africa have internet access at work only where they work on custom enterprise software or general IT (non-programming) jobs and have to code hacker-interesting stuff off-line at home (if they have a computer) or evenings and weekends at work.
I think it's possible and more likely so in a niche specific to developing countries like Malaria/HIV software, low-bandwith solutions, etc.
Otherwise it's much easier to produce a 37signals, just like everywhere else, I guess.
Disclaimer: I'm an African in Africa. In my day-job, I work for a non-profit developing a Rails application for managing delivery for HIV medication (baobabhealth.org)
And innovators always make mistakes. YC has actually admitted to being "always slightly broken" https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/14/y-combinator-is-zeroing-in...