azundo

Redux is for state management - that could be your data store but many people use it manage their app's UI state as well. Dan Abramov himself has said many times that redux isn't strictly necessary and using local state is fine, but there are some benefits to having a full, serializable application state. You can capture and include it with a bug report/runtime exception for example. Having redux actions dispatched when users interact with your app can also be useful since you get an implicit global event bus. For things like analytics instead of littering calls to your analytics provider in all of your components' click handlers you can write middleware and keep all of that code outside of your presentation/behavior layer.

I wrote about this from a Ugandan startup perspective as well: https://medium.com/numida/a-glimpse-into-the-non-open-intern...

Columnar stores are as much about the compression benefits as the physical layout on disk. The article goes through a bunch of different relevant compression strategies.

No legal department on Earth? From what I understand there have been many examples of Chinese companies using clearly stolen IP [1] - pretty sure they would be happy to use these patents.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/opinion/china-us-intellec...

I can't recommend reselect enough if you're using redux. Not only does it save time when computing derived data from your reducer state it also isolates your components from the structure of your reducer state. Change the location of some data in your reducer? No problem, just adjust your selector in one place and none of your components need changing.

The organization was publicly claiming that cloudflare secretly supported them.

I think it is a little short-sighted to see local investment as the only path to a positive outcome. Assuming employees are getting a decent equity stake then what would be even more impactful in my opinion would be some exits that enable local staff to start angel investing and supporting the ecosystem. If there becomes a strong incentive for good talent to stay in Africa, make decent money and invest back then the fact that the current up and coming startups are backed by foreigners will matter little in the future. Overall I think the potential upside of any successful is huge and the more foreign money that can kickstart this the better.

I believe current regulations require the test driver to have her or his hands on the wheel at all times so that's not a good indication of whether or not the car is driving autonomously.

Very encouraging to see this level of interest in investing in African startups from SV investors and not just from traditional impact investors.

There is an incredible amount of opportunity to build mobile digital services targeted at markets where offline functionality is a must and low-end Android devices are the norm. Hopefully the interest and investment in fintech will also mean that payments infrastructure will continue to improve and get relatively cheaper over time.

> the overall earning that the set number of jobs would support wouldn't change

Claiming that there is a set number of jobs and the overall earning wouldn't change with more productive labor is suggesting a zero-sum game.

Another is to wrap the first option in _.memoize so you only create functions once per argument and you don't get unnecessary rerenders. Just remember that _.memoize only uses the first arg for cache lookups.

Congrats! We're based in Uganda and dealing with Internet is a huge pain point for us - we have a backup provider because reliability is so poor and we're paying much more than $30 USD/month. All the best and hope you expand Eastward soon!

We see the consequences of a non-open Internet every day where we work in Uganda. It is common there for people to have "social bundles" that only work for Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. Our users believe they have Internet access but don't understand why data from our app is not syncing when Facebook is working. It's a large barrier for us and adds a huge moat for the incumbents. We're considering more integration over WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger so we too can benefit from the cheaper data but that only locks us into those platforms and strengthens their position.

Getting a Permission Denied page for the docs at http://kq.readthedocs.io/en/master/

Isn't the point that the old hashes are out there somewhere and if cracked would reveal the plaintext password? This would then allow the attacker to access the compromised account since the password itself has not changed even if hashes are updated by doing newScheme(oldHash).

Yeah, we've decided to live with the internal ELB scaling risks for the moment as well. We had the exact same situation where a deployment without gradual connection draining (even if we kept an instance in service in every AZ) would cause the ELBs to scale and drop all of our connections every time once we were at a certain scale. Definitely caused us a fair amount of confusion as it would happen minutes after the deploy when everything seemed to be calmed down again.

We were told ELBs are explicitly not designed for long-running connections when we ran into this exact same issue so know that you will always be working around this design constraint if you do long-running connections through ELBs.

There's another case that the article doesn't really discuss (though the evidence of it is in the beginning when all connections drop simultaneously) where the ELB nodes themselves scale vertically at a particular threshold. I believe the setup described is still vulnerable to those scaling events.

There is a fantastic 99% Invisible podcast on The Landlord's Game/Monopoly: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-landlords-game/. Highly recommended.

I've been trying to explain the JS event loop to a couple of our interns recently and this is an amazing illustration of the basics and the not-so-basics. Thanks!

We're seeing similar symptoms here as well.

I wrote one of these for my work as well. Definitely our go-to for getting a sense of how well people can understand others' code and how they think about data modeling/complexity. A very small initial page of code can go a long way.

He did: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/sorkin-elon-musk-of-p...

Solving the credit problem for the developing world is a very challenging undertaking with huge potential rewards, which is why this is so disappointing.

Organizations like this should not be not-for-profits. I don't believe that a business with such misrepresentation would have lasted this long without being called out. Hiding behind the not-for-profit label in markets where for-profits should be operating does nothing but distort the market and lull consumers/lenders into a false sense of do-gooding. These are financial markets and so we need to find effective market actors instead of not-for-profits that can unfairly compete due to their status.

By using the not-for-profit label and misrepresenting interest rates, Zidisha is also painting the picture (whether they intend to or not) that businesses in this space are exploitative and that Zidisha is good. Micro-loans are expensive loans! Businesses have to charge a lot for them to be economical, but access to credit for high-turnover businesses can make a huge a difference if it makes sense for the business.

What is really needed in the space isn't necessarily a lending platform, but more data and better techniques to lend. It's tough to vet entrepreneurs cheaply and at scale, but something I hope we will continue to get better at. There is a ton of money in the impact investing sector right now that could do a lot of good through market channels but lending in the developing world is still just too expensive and too risky.

I'll close with another misleading statement from the October 2012 interview that the author of the blog post didn't discuss:

... the total rate paid from the borrower’s perspective averages 8.40%. Note that this is not much above the average rate of inflation in the borrowers’ countries.

The problem here is that this statement assumes a stable currency against the US dollar. While 8.40% may be close to the inflation rate, for many of these countries an additional several percentage points of currency devaluation against the US dollar will raise the effective interest rate in local currency. I would love to understand how Zidisha deals with the challenge of currency fluctuations, especially when educating its borrowers.

I hope the takeaway from this is not that micro credit and lending in the developing world is bad and exploitative - just that it is expensive and nobody is that great at it yet. I'm disappointed in Zidisha's misrepresentation but I hope it makes it clear that this isn't a solved problem that greed and bad business practice is getting in the way of. It's an extremely difficult, unsolved problem that we need more smart people working on to solve.

It's interesting that so much blame is aimed at tech workers who are willing to pay more but none at landlords who are happy to increase rent based on demand. Certainly landlords are profiting quite nicely from the boom, being paid more rent for equivalent properties.

If they wished, they are free to continue renting at the same rates as always, and in fact are the ones "making the rent go up", so I'm not sure how they're managing to escape similar criticism here.

Really neat idea, I like the push to get people thinking positively about what might be done to face some huge challenges in the world today.

In that vein I would love to see some of the opportunities listed alongside the challenges in your different regions as well. While Africa certainly suffers from all of the challenges you name they are not proportionately distributed across what is a huge continent. I believe that understanding what potential there is to unlock is more important than the challenges that already get a lot of press and invoke pity and a feeling of helplessness. I would challenge you to do some research into each region and what they offer in order to leverage those strengths instead of getting caught up in the bad news that makes headlines today.

Great idea though, thanks for sharing.

Khan Academy seems to have been getting a lot of criticism lately and I think this is a great response. People seem to expect perfect teaching tools from them over every subject immediately.

As a former employee of a not-for-profit I wonder if some of this comes from their not-for-profit status. If you run on charity dollars there sometimes seems to be an expectation that you will use resources 100% efficiently and do no wrong. If Khan was a startup would people be more forgiving of potential areas for growth?

Great suggestion, I'll try to make that more clear in the future. Thanks for the feedback!

Whoops! Thanks for catching that, must have made a mistake on an edit somewhere, I'll fix it up.

EDIT: Now fixed.

Thanks for the note on the gist, I was editing that as I went along writing the post and obviously have mistakenly made an edit somewhere. Will fix it up ASAP.

EDIT: Now Fixed.

Yep, see the One More Thing section near the end.