skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the same time, this also sheds some more light on Africa's problems. One of which is logistics.

The continent's security is hampered by its sheer size and the massive borders of many of its countries. What this means it that few countries have the funds for large and capable enough security forces to exercise control over the whole of their territory. So outside the cities, large parts of the countryside exist in a security vacuum where thugs, rebels, criminals and assorted other unsavoury types essentially have free reign.

It also hampers trade and communication. With communities being spread out over such huge distances, transport infrastructure and the associated costs become vital. But few African nations can afford to maintain proper highway networks and even if they could, there's a lack of sufficient transport capability to effectively utilise it. As a result, intra-state trade is severely limited and inter-state trade even more so. This logistics problem also affects the delivery of aid.

To be fair, this isn't true of all African countries. South Africa and Egypt, for example, are notable exceptions for having a security presence throughout the country, a well-developed and advanced transport infrastructure and so on. But bringing countries like the DRC, CAR & Uganda up to the same level is not going to be an easy task.

One hope lies in having less of a top-down socialist central-planning approach and more encouragement of a federal self-organising entrepreneurial environment to encourage communities to grow themselves and gradually build their own transport and communications networks outwards. Technology will make this easier, but I think anybody expecting an economic revolution in Africa anytime soon is holding on to a false hope.
"(Shareholders besides the management team still matter. :P)"

What is your reasoning behind that statement?

It is nice to have a high stock price as a source of future cash, but companies rarely have additional offerings. Most companies take on debt. Having a high stock price also discourages hostile take overs, but the shareholders themselves don't matter.

I want to know why you think they do. Many people say that shareholders matter and use them as an excuse for their actions. I think it is just that: an excuse.
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who determines what is relevant? This is democracy and i αν allowed to comment any aspect i want. get a life and learn the basics of respect when you grow up
There are a variety of free-to-many-of-you revenue models which do not involve advertising, at least not in the sense of you-pay-me-to-rent-eyeballs-that-I-collect advertising.

Example: Nobody has paid a dime to read my blog. I have not and will not ever sell an ad on it. But I have made a few hundred dollars (hmm, might be 4 figures by now, will have to check) from mentions of my own software. And I did get a publishing opportunity from it (I wrote a chapter in a book about how to do business blogging -- see http://www.blogblazers.com if you're interested). And the increased visibility in my topical community has translated into links and an SEO advantage for my business. And all of these things figure into my worth to my company.

But nobody has ever paid to read my blog.
Sounds like a very novel and intricate way to make a game that sucks. Fascinating technology, perhaps, but who wants digital ipecac?

This is what happens when people think "I wonder if we can do this?" without thinking "I wonder if we should do this?". Or so I would glean from this article. Haven't actually played it.
Does he have a fat ass or a sex tape?
Ask HN: Anyone know how to publish code samples to Posterous?
I'd love to use Posterous as my main geek blog, but I can't figure out how to post code to it. A geek blog without code is like Santa without a beard. Anyone know how to achieve this feat?

If it's not supported, is that a feature you'd like to see on Posterous? Since Posterous is YC-funded, I imagine they'll pick this thread up, so let them know here if this is a feature you'd want (assuming it is indeed missing).
I'm also willing to donate if you enable me to.

Great work!
What about you is different, what makes a job with you not feel like a job? What is your culture like? ("not boring" is probably the wrong answer) What gives your company personality? What would the person get to work on? and why is it interesting?

I looked at the website and it didn't really grab my attention.

What a lot of people seem to forget when recruiting is that you often have to sell your company and the position just as if you were selling anything else. Companies with well known brands have the advantage of a known culture (most of the time) or simply just brand awareness, which they leverage to get quality applications (or at least more of them). Startups and small to midsize companies don't have that advantage. So, if you want the best talent, you have to sell your company like you would sell your product. Undirected marketing of your company & jobs will usually produce fairly random response.

A very well read book in the HR/Recruiting community is called "Hire With Your Head". I recommend anyone that who needs to hire read it. The best takeaway quote...

"Companies need to move away form a classified ad mentality of listing boring, hard-to-find jobs and, instead, adopt a consumer marketing approach to advertising" ~Lou Adler, Hire With Your Head
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I wasn't surprised. Africa is the world's second largest continent, it should be about the size of a collection of countries.
What is wrong with their interpretation?

The data are incomplete as they don't account for possible seasonality as brfox pointed out, and because they don't include small ad networks.
I didn't say I would never use it, I was just saying that it's hard to be taken seriously when there is so much noise from the kids. A poor community reflects poorly on its users.

I also like CL's conventions better, and not having CLOS is a huge downside.
calling "habbits"? Spell check time:-)

Is there any way you can associate those stats with money? That might make it more compelling... learn how to save or something like that.
Of course wealth is created, but let's go back to the topic of money. Every worker creates new value every day. Does this mean it's okay to pay everyone's salary with newly printed money?
More startling to me was the fact that India is roughly a third of the size of the US, yet has about 3.5x the people.

For some reason I thought India was much bigger than it is.
How do you put a <code> in your email in Apple Mail?
swombat, thanks for the suggestion!

Hm, I'll whip something up and post back here when it's ready (hopefully in the next hour).

====================

UPDATE: It's taking a little longer since I'd like to get some really slick syntax highlighting going. It's 3:25 am and I'm still recovering from a cold so I'm going to call it a night, but expect an update on the Posterous blog tomorrow: http://blog.posterous.com

====================

UPDATE 2: I couldn't sleep, so I kept working on it. I've just popped an early version of it live for you to try out. All you have to do is surround your code block with the following tags:

[code]
your code here
[/code]

Additionally, if you want to get fancy, you can specify a language with the following syntax:

[code lang='java']
public static boolean isAwesome = true;
[/code]

This should work for both through the web interface and through the email interface.

The available list of languages is:
'cpp', 'c', 'c++', 'c#', 'c-sharp', 'csharp', 'css', 'delphi', 'pascal', 'java', 'js', 'jscript', 'javascript', 'php', 'py', 'python', 'ruby', 'rails', 'ror', 'sql', 'vb', 'vb.net', 'xml', 'xhtml', 'xslt', 'html', 'xhtml'

Current known issues: HTML formatting might be a little spotty at the moment. Will be fixing asap. I also see some intermittent errors where the code isn't getting properly recognized.

Please report any bugs to me at garry@posterous.com. Thanks for all the support and ideas. Please do keep the feature ideas coming -- the best way to reach us is to email help@posterous.com, but voting up to the top of Hacker News works too. ;-)
Such overgeneralizations are useless. How much are they tied? How the effect of recession compares to the already known trends?
Unbelievably fast. This sort of user response definitely sets you apart.
http://www.copacobana.org/gallery.html

...and all other areas of data processing, where stuff needs to be done fast [and within a pure R&D environment, where the only constant thing is change].
Two things I noticed about this:

1) This sounds very similar to Gracenote and CDDB, but Gracenote wasn't non-profit.

2) Why don't the publishers include this information as part of publishing the book, so libraries don't need to dig around for the data or correct it?
I could use some feedback on this, actually.

I was thinking of just adding a [code] [/code] bbcode-like syntax for it, so you can totally still do it from email.

Otherwise if you're using the web editor in html mode you'll be able to throw <code></code> tags as usual to call into the CSS styles.

Definitely open to other suggestions too. =)
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Sunday night is like ideal coding time!
Can you just include markdown support for advanced users?
What's the market size for physical graphing calculators?
I like that too. markdown@posterous.com -- that kind of change is going to take a little more than an hour's worth of work, though... might have to wait til morning.
[code][/code] would be blisteringly simple...

Someone was mentioning on #startups that there's a google code javascript plugin to do syntax highlighting and automatically detect the language, etc...

Personally, if all it does is put the code in a dark background and monospaced font that keeps the tabbing/spacing, that's already good enough for me! Syntax highlighting would really just be extra sugar.
Ubuntu & Arm alliance, is this a step towards an Ubuntu smartphone?
"There's nothing wrong with PHP as a tool"

I think there are some things wrong with it, actually. Probably you can write good code with it, but I don't think it is encouraged, and it is very easy to screw up.
Heh, swombat just really wants his <code /> tags but I just think markdown support would be natural progression moving forward.
And what is startling to me is that US is 3 times the size of India.
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Are you talking about the continent or the country :)
>Part of NetSuite’s problem is timing. The company launched its IPO in December 2007, a few months before Wall Street headed into its downward spiral.

For the founders and VCs that was excellent IPO timing. IPO investors may think otherwise.
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Slightly off topic, but "The Soul of a New Machine" was a pretty good book.
There is a pressing need for entrepreneurial thinking into social and environmental problems - social entrepreneurs like Tim Smit of the Eden Project think the financial crisis could be a huge opportunity for social enterprise. In terms of measuring impact, I think we need a new form of accountancy, which rates social and environmental impact as importantly as financial impact.
I am not sure about other people but for me, if i cannot download the lecture videos, i wouldn't bother checking it out.

http://see.stanford.edu

it has really nice courses and you can even download lecture video via torrents. :)
Translation.

Lots of tuition provides:

+ Motivation to learn, aka grades ("OCW is not an MIT education")

+ Feedback ("OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty")

+ A piece of paper ("OCW does not grant degrees")
I'm not sure why. Because of the "neo?" There's plenty of things using that prefix that are no longer new - neoclassical economics, for example.
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How is Silverlight cross platform? Have you tried finding and installing Silverlight on Linux? If you managed to, what percent of the sites on Microsoft's showcase worked?

Hint: I know the answer to all the above. That's why I'm asking the question.
The Mercator projection has a lot to answer for. Did you know that Sudan is the 10th largest country in the world?
I condemn the killing of CEO Agrawal.

However let me share my experience in a fab automation software company in Phoenix, AZ.
80% of programming staff in this company are Agrawals and Patels from Gujarat state in India.

They are using CORBA (ORBIX) for IPC (Inter Process Communication) on Solaris platform and
they created a number of irrational config files for their software product.

The management and customers are completely confused about these config files and totally locked-in to these programmers.
There is no country called Africa. You may have been thinking of the Republic of South Africa.
This was a reference to a certain politician's confusion as to whether Africa was a country or continent.
I'm guessing it'll be much more tolerable on the PC, once you crank up the FOV and sit close enough to your monitor. The console is just a bad setup for this sort of thing.
Btw, using the html editor and adding <code> tags doesn't work too well as it messes up the spacings and/or line breaks :-(

(also has no default styling for the code samples)
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pay more, or stop complaining. Your work culture is not as cool as you think, I guarantee it.
Running on OS X, too.

For future reference, I am a she.
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After the vomit reference, the article goes on to describe some intriguing things about the game.
One thing that many people don't also realise is that Africa is internally broken into 3 or 4 major blocs. West Africa from Senegal through to Cameroun are a bloc, central Africa another, the horn, another and the southern countries.

West African countries have relatively good communication and transport across themselves, but not to the southern countries.

The average American probably knows a lot more about the Congo than the average Nigerian, hard as that may be for you to believe.
He explains the name choice by saying "A commenter named Andrew Barry suggested that I should not call it Ejacs, and the name stuck."
"Yegge ejacs in your browser."

Ejacs has nothing to do with browsers.
Anyone else having problems with VideoLectures? Most of the time the videos just hangs for me after a while and prett much always if I pause them for more than, say a minute.

But this is awesome though.
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Why? My console is attached to a much bigger screen than my PC.

(FWIW, I usually sit in a desk chair close to my TV when playing console games. If you think your monitor fills your field of view...)
That'll be C# then - but I'm guessing that's not what you meant :-)
In this economy, there are a lot of people just happy to have a job. I would recommend you try to get the passive candidates:

http://jobs.37signals.com/

http://snaptalent.com/

http://hiddennetwork.com/

http://authenticjobs.com/

You can't always expect the best programmers to come to you. You need to go out, find them, and give them incentive to work with you.
I had trouble understanding that as well, but I think he means Big Dumb Companies.
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I noticed recently that playing games like Rockband leave me much more mentally fired up

I think it could have something to do with the music. I've been playing Geometry Wars 2 a lot recently simply because I enjoy the music so much. After I finish the "Sequence" mode, it is very hard to come down from the "high" -- the combination of exciting music and intense concentration is something I really enjoy. Compare this to games like Mass Effect that are fun, but I don't really feel stimulated... it's more like watching TV.

Anyway, it's too bad that many people dismiss video games as toys for kids and never get to experience this.
It's funny how most people from the northern hemisphere don't know their world maps look funny. Particularly European versions.
People tend to say things because they sound cool, not because they mean them. (Do I mean this? I'm not sure!)
Thank you! That was exactly what I was looking for.
"your servicer will reduce your monthly mortgage payment - including property taxes, insurance and association dues - to 38 percent of your gross income"

Yikes - I have never bought a house, but how much are these people paying? It seems mad to me to sign away 38% of ones income indefinitely (like, for decades), and this sounds as if people have been giving away even more. Is that normal?

Time to invest in better maths education in school???
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Talk about "burying the lead": the 'Golden Rule for Startups' from the article is "Harder a business to start, better will be its eventual returns."
Probably you can write good code with it, but I don't think it is encouraged, and it is very easy to screw up.

I don't think so. PHP just doesn't have the right abstractions needed to create truly good code. Having some OO support is better than having none at all, but it's clear that the authors of PHP never bothered to try any object system other than Java's -- easily the worst object system of any language. (Also, I would love to know why a language with no type checking has Java-style interfaces. What is the point?)

Combine that with the lack of anonymous functions, closures, continuations, lexically-scoped variables, and so on, and you are stuck compromising your design to get something that is actually implementable. It is sort of like a brilliant novelist that is used to writing with his laptop, but is given some napkins and a dull pencil instead. Since he's a great author, he'll probably make something good -- but just give him his laptop back already.
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To add to the list of examples of places where you have to roll your own:

At my company we needed a simple CSV reader for a file submission. That's it--just something that could read CSV files. We figured that had to be available in classic .NET We look around, dug into forums, and finally got in touch with the local .NET user group guru. The ideal solution? Use MS's communication tools to open the CSV file in excel and read it there. Or? Roll your own.

We ended up doing the thing in python and imported the csv lib.
So, uhm, to bring that back to the OP's question:

I would go with Java, out of the two. It's as verbose as C#, but has, in my experience, much better support for pretty much everything.
bwahahahaha, très drôle! You probably needed to stick big blinking irony tags around it though - those of us living in the rest of the world have a poor opinion of American geographical knowledge (justified by the incident to which you refer), and sometimes we forget that the US actually has quite a lot of very well educated individuals.
> I was pretty surprised at how completely inaccurate my perception of Africa's size was.

Likewise. I'd always had it pegged as smaller than the USA.

The shocking thing is that I got a high grade for Geography when I was in school (what are we teaching our kids?!)
Ask HN: best way to become a "Numerati"?
Not sure if "Numerati" is the best word. I already have a maths degree, but did little with statistics so far. I am capable of reading a book on statistics, but it is not the same as getting some practical experience.

I guess I could just start with randomly selected data sets, but somehow that doesn't seem to be enough motivation (like stock market data: seems unlikely to discover something new, with all the Quants already working on it). So I guess what I mean is, among other things: how to find worthwhile statistical problems for starting out? I am not into sports, so betting is kind of out. Also missed the elections, since I am not from the US. I look forward to the book by the 53something website guy, though.
I was trying to be diplomatic - actually I personally despise PHP, but I acknowledge that some pretty big sites have been built with it. Also, it still seems to be the most productive language, which is odd, given it's crappyness. Try to find a popular blogging system or CMS that is not written in PHP (I know there are some, but somehow the PHP ones always have more traction).
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if only i could easily install jvm on my ubuntu intrepid ...
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Trust me, I know what you were thinking :)

The problem, IME (past sous chef) is that it is really really really hard to manage the aspect of getting the people in the door, and turning the tables in any scheduled manner. World events, the weather, another restaurant featured in the paper or on TV all can greatly affect your ability to get asses in seats.

It's more achievable to maximize revenue through sales than through anticipated table turns.
What are you on about dude? Why would the visual immersion make the game suck?
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