jhull

"DevOps - it’s giving a small blanket to someone who wears chunky boots before throwing himself down a slide."

Great quote.

Right. I know what technical debt is. The commenter I replied to said "I don't believe technical debt is a thing" and was hoping (s)he would elaborate.

What do you consider technical debt to be then? Just bad code?

nice thanks for that link, great site to do charity due diligence

I spent 2 months in Sierra Leone last year and a month working with Wellbody Alliance [1] in the impoverished mining district of Kono. So far that part of Sierra Leone has been spared from the virus but with the limited health resources in that area, it is only a matter of time.

I can personally speak for their effectiveness and tell you that your donations will actually end up in the form of medicine or medical services to someone who really needs them and not in the hands of some giant NGO that ends up swallowing 75% of what you send them for admin costs and first class tickets.

[1] http://wellbodyalliance.org/donate/

I didn't know these existed until a coworker of mine told me he takes one to New Jersey every day.

Reminds me of the poda poda taxi system in Sierra Leone which has no official public transport and also the matatu's all over Rwanda and Kenya which are alternatives to the official public lines.

Interesting to see that in NYC they deck out the inside of the vans/buses with TVs and other things (to stay "undercover") while in other countries the matatus and poda podas are decorated on the exterior with all sorts of amazing paint jobs, graphics and slogans. Usually they are either inspirational, religious or in homage to a favorite premier league team.[1][2][3]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=matatu+rwanda&tbm=isch&sa=X&... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=poda+poda+freetown&tbm=isch&... [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=motor+bike+naorobi&tbm=isch&...

not even Swift?

My point is, why do I need to dig to the bottom post of their blog in order to find out what they do. That should be clear on the homepage.

Exactly. They list "Create" "Share" and "Relax" but there is no "Why"

This device will do great clearing out mosquitoes from your backyard but don't think for a second that this will save lives or help solve the global malaria problem.

This is a great device for eliminating mosquitoes from stagnant water but it is completely impractical that it would work in the areas where malaria hurst the most. [1]

Firstly, it would require that every single puddle be discovered immediately. Try doing that after monsoon season in India, or in rural West Africa where malaria is one of the main killers of children under the age of five and where the roads are so bad you can't even get a truck loaded with food in, let alone these devices.

If these did make it into some of these rural villages, every single one would be picked up off the ground immediately and be converted into something that really could improve the quality of life, into something that might power lights or charge cell phones or be sold to someone who could.

[1] http://cms.travelstart.com/uploads/image/asset/92/malaria-ar...

Someone needs to make a parody video of this ASAP: "Man takes cue out of his mouth...smartphone says: You have 4 hours to live." "Woman pulls cue out of her ear...smartphone says: You are deaf"

Nice post. At Fitocracy (I work here) we see the same thing. Over time, as people workout more and document their progress and transformations, we of course start to see them expand and change their routines in order to win more points, earn badges or complete quests, but we also start to see them make life changes as well that are completely separate of fitness.

What good is technology if you are sick or hungry? If you have no electricity? It would be the first thing sold.

people could be proud of their lack of exercise as well

Was a college athlete but fell off after I graduated. For 5 years I didn't do anything and found it hard to motivate myself because I was used to daily practices, my coaches/teammates and the associated competitions motivating me. I started working at (and using) Fitocracy a few months ago and it has done wonders to motivate me again. Not for everyone, but the gamification elements and community definitely help to get you going. you can also learn a lot from the users.

Interesting take on this. I think everyone just accepts pip + virtualenv as the only way to be without questioning it. You have definitely convinced me to reexamine that on my next project.

funny that an ad comes up when you search that character on google. http://imgur.com/Y5vkbHF

what are these characters printing here?

I wonder how this performs on short text posts like tweets. At my last gig where we did social media text analysis we used a few different packages (chromium, guess-language, and our own ngram classifier) and still had pretty low accuracy for tweets.

To put that in perspective: I just backpacked a year abroad on a 14 country tour through Africa, India and Southeast Asia with my (now) fiancee. On our first day in Rwanda a guy gave us the entire 2007 Lonely Planet series (like 90 countries) in PDF format that we put on our Kindle. They were 5 years old and using a Kindle for large PDFs is an awful experience, but it saved us about 100 pounds of weight.

Thought Experiment: What would shut down if people just stopped giving away their art/photos/writing/"content" away for free?

the 5 other are things that go without saying

I would say a large percentage of people who work in the non-profit space are already paid very, very low salaries and have accepted that as the reality of working for a non-profit. There are surely a lot of people who would choose to start their own non-profit and receive the same low-salary in exchange for the added benefit of having ownership over their work.

I think a lot of people join startups for the same reason, just with the added benefit that they could end up cashing in.

ya sounds like they should say - "you can play now, download here and play for the next 45 days, but just remember us before those days are up and donate so we can make it better"

mzungu just means foreigner or outsider

Who needs cheese when you have an unlimited supply of matoke?[1]

Have you seen any positive changes in ICT ed from the Carnegie Mellon program[2] that started there?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matoke [2] http://www.cmu.edu/rwanda/

how about: <bootstrap-website linkedin-id=XXXX twitter-id=XXXX facebook-id=XXXX github-id=XXXX> </bootstrap-website>

congrats guys!

I worked with Meron on a completely different concept back in college. I moved on and and I'm not sure if that ever went anywhere, but man, that guy has got vision and can inspire people. If anyone can pull something like this off, he can. Or at least, if anyone can convince people he can pull something like this off, he can. Sometimes the latter can be more valuable.

If an American VC firm opens an office in Toronto, does that count as Canadian VC money?

Seems like a good idea for American VCs to open incubators in Canada. Would allow them to global deal flow while only worrying about the regulations of Canada. Plus its quicker to fly there.