thebenedict

+1 for Startup. I listened to the last episode of season 1 this weekend -- the first half is the most honest discussion of entrepreneurship I've encountered.

All good thoughts, but not specific to web dev! Applies to any career path you're serious about.

A few folks showed up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837397

Hapana, tu programmers mzungu hapa ;)

The tech community is smallish but it's an easy place to live. Feel free to ping me with specific q's, or if your brother wants to grab a coffee if he passes through Dar. My email is my HN handle at gmail.

Hi! I use Smile because it's a little faster and significantly more reliable than the others. Most of my business and personal communication abroad happens via video Skype. Voda and Airtel are sometimes fast enough, but often aren't especially during peak times. I hate having to tell clients that my connection isn't good enough for a scheduled call.

For an idea of what I'm talking about, here's 70 second pings to google.com from an especially frustrating morning in January on Vodacom TZ: http://i.imgur.com/5urJcd7.png. This isn't typical but happens often enough to be a problem.

With Smile I'm paying rates comparable to 4G service in the US, e.g. TMobile[1]. The service isn't nearly as fast (peak I've seen is ~3.5 Megabytes/sec download) but the reliability makes it worth it. I suspect I'm paying as much for lower contention ratios on the towers as for "4G" infrastructure, but the end result is the same.

[1] (http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans/mobile-internet.htm...)

Hi! I've heard good things about Habari Node[1], and Angania[2] is a startup working on Nairobi-based hosting. That said, I and most developers I know in the region host internationally. As others have mentioned latency is usually a bigger problem than bandwidth. Happy to take a look at your site if helpful (just add it to the form).

[1] (http://www.habari.co.tz/) [2] (https://angani.co/)

Neat. My rough understanding is that carriers here route traffic through SEACOM, EASSy (and likely others) to minimize cost and traffic. I don't think I can choose SEACOM specifically -- but I'm always up to test Cunningham's Law.

Sure. I'm on Smile Tanzania atm, a 4G carrier (though slower than 4G in the US or Europe). This isn't the carrier I'll use for web app tests.

http://dpaste.com/129AKD2 http://dpaste.com/37YE2VY

I clearly see blue and black. Thought this was nonsense until I showed the picture to my girlfriend without context, and asked what color: "White and gold. Why?"

Fun, but at best this article and the linked blog are missing critical details. Other organizations (e.g. http://ianxen.com/) have been working on similar technology involving optics, image processing and a blood sample -- and the associated consumables.

Even assuming the tech is sorted the more interesting questions involve how, from a health systems perspective, these things can be deployed in rural health centers at a scale that matters. Some hard training/security/procedure/money questions to figure out, and I haven't heard much about these issues yet. Unclear if it's because the technology isn't ready for prime time or other reasons.

The existence of a petition site is better than absolutely nothing. I'll even grant that a petition response isn't the right forum for addressing a personnel question. But like user 'btilly' says below, "The wording of the petition may have been very specific, but it still provides an opportunity to address the issue."

There are smart people at the White House and they understand the intent and emotional response behind the petition. To lean on the TOS to avoid a substantive response to issues raised by Aaron's case is callous disregard for the 60,000 people who signed.

It sounds like ADS-B can do that:

"It does, however, have an air-to-air capability designed for use in environments like the ocean that allows aircraft to “see” each other—the FAA is now trying out this technique."

Sounds like it could work in much of the US and Europe, but planes are more sparse in other parts of the world. Africa for example has minimal ADS-B coverage and a relatively small number of planes in the air at once: https://flightaware.com/adsb/coverage

Love it. I started my career in International Development and one of my team's first projects was figuring out how many miles our organization's 1000+ staff flew in a year (why is a separate story). The travel agent could only provide records in PDF. 1000's of them.

The intern I shared an office with was assigned to go through each record, type the origin and destination airport codes into an online flight distance calculator, and enter the results in a spreadsheet. After two days of watching this I volunteered to take over and spent a few nights learning enough Java to read/write CSV and make the HTTP request. Saved days of pain for the intern and was a satisfying accomplishment as a novice.

Same. I've had more success with Spotify's recommendations than other services I've used (most recently Pandora and 8tracks).

Just think! When you've built the app and captured 100% of the diesel fishing boat mechanic rating market, you'll make dozens - nay, hundreds - of dollars! Users could search, sort and filter all 6 diesel fishing boat mechanics in town!

I'm being sarcastic but you're right. I live in a small town (in a small country) and there are a lot of unmet needs that software could address, and minimal technical competition. The other side of the coin is that the market is small, and capturing lots of geographically disparate niche markets is hard. Even nth runner up success in Home Automation for Rich People in Big Cities is a lot of money.

Innovating in small markets is fun and part of the reason why I'm here, but big markets are competitive for a reason. The adages about small startups being just as much work as big ones, and owning 1% of $10^9 being better than 10% of $10^6, still apply.

I understand it's meant as a joke, but starting with

"Stampedes of middle-aged midwestern women, their toothless gums bloodthirsty for 75% off the latest season of Game of Thrones at the local Wal-Mart."

Could turn off a lot of people (women, older people, Wal-Mart shoppers, etc.) from what is otherwise a fun and well written technical post. I'd like to see HN being more inclusive. That said, enjoyed and upvoted the article.

You can use it anywhere but it'll be especially helpful for long lists. Angular binds anything in double curlies, creating watchers that dirty check and evaluate with every digest cycle. It's tempting (and IMO Angular incorrectly encourages users) to use double curlies for templating everwhere, so in typical list views you can end up with thousands of watchers on data that never needs to change once the page is rendered. This is slow, especially for searching and sorting. Further reading[1]

Before this release it's been necessary to write custom directives or use a tool like Bindonce[2] to turn off data binding where it's not needed.

[1] http://tech.small-improvements.com/2013/09/10/angularjs-perf...

[2] https://github.com/Pasvaz/bindonce

“Finally, someone took me aside and said, ‘We could make cheaper technology, but it wouldn’t support the cost of our sales force, so we have no motivation to do so.’”

I don't understand. Isn't the cost of the sales force built in to the cost of the product, so if the hardware cost went down the end price would be reduced somewhat but still include the cost of sales? Is there some retailer or consumer psychology at play where people don't want a cheap breast pump?

How does Upmin approach forms for relationships? With both rails_admin and Active Admin, I found complex relationships like has many through multiple, and has one with scoped collections frustratingly hard. (in fairness I know it's not easy to automate)

Yup, I realized pretty quickly how tough of a problem detecting "jargon" is. Subjectivity aside, whether a word is jargon is often context-dependent.

I like it (and am doing something similar on a hobby django project), but will this be hard to maintain? Say you're spinning up a new non-heroku server or three. Are there good tools for moving the env variables without making mistakes?

A lot. My parents and I recently bought my 93 yo Grandfather an iPad, and even though he's smart and has owned a desktop mac for 15 years he still struggles with things like email and photos on the iPad. Senior-oriented features/ui, and maybe family remote control help, would be neat. It's also possible that 93 is just too old for some people to learn new technology.

Tangentially relevant: watching a nontechnical senior citizen use an app I worked on was a humbling experience. Things that seemed obvious to me were disorienting and discouraging, even after patient explanation that could never be offered in production.

Is the name a joke? (not asking sarcastically)

That sounds probably stupid, and like a tremendous amount of fun.

Indeed. But doing quality "break a nail" type work for a month, and then sending a big invoice at the end that gets paid without argument, feels so good you'll want to do it again.

I'm skeptical because it sounds too good to be true. How can this be a free service?

Habari, American new to TZ (but not E. Africa) here. Is there much of a tech community around? I stopped by Kinu and Buni. Both seem nice but sparse...

Markup aside, the projects take different approaches: Bootstrap is polished, opinionated defaults that can be overridden, and Pure is a minimal base to extend.

After 3 projects in a row on Bootstrap I started using Pure about a month ago, and like the clean, un-opinionated approach. It's been especially useful for learning more about SASS and responsive layout without having to override a bunch of Bootstrap's defaults.