okal

11 ms·

61.
by okal 11y ago
The financial services are offered by the telcos themselves, who run their own infrastructure. There's no intermediary. M-Pesa by Safaricom, Airtel Money by Airtel, and so forth.
62.
by okal 11y ago
"Pesa" just means money in Kiswahili. No one uses the word to refer to "M-Pesa". Maybe you caught a snatch of conversation out of context.
63.
by okal 11y ago
I think the wiki is specific to M-Pesa, not mobile money transfer services in general. Not sure what about it you consider misleading. I wonder why they didn't standardize on a single interface. We had trouble integrating with Kenyan p
64.
by okal 11y ago
Not that it matters greatly, but did I say something incorrect/untrue/horribly offensive? I don't get the downvotes.
65.
by okal 11y ago
Thank you. The numbers were a pleasant surprise.
66.
by okal 11y ago
Let me construct a scenario: I come across some well done (by some objective measure: good references, background checks), long form investigative piece. It seems interesting, so I read it, but then find that it clashes with some deeply hel
67.
by okal 11y ago
This is really problematic, IMO. The idea of paying only for what you like, rather than what you read. People will inevitably end up "voting", as it were, only for stories that line up with their biases.
68.
by okal 11y ago
We had an SMSSync integration when I worked at FrontlineSMS[1]. It's a gateway, period. Any smarts have to be built into whatever server it interacts with. It has little in common with Myra. [1] http://www.frontlinesms.com
69.
by okal 11y ago
I use it every day, but there's always some aspect of its behaviour that it turns out I didn't understand the first time round. Perhaps that's because I jumped into the project with only a very rudimentary understanding of Om
70.
by okal 11y ago
Should be fine as long as you're not distributing binaries, and the code stays internal.
71.
by okal 11y ago
> "Most of my git knowledge comes from having to fix something that went awry." Can relate to this. > "spend a week..." I didn't mean it in a literal sit-down-and-read-all-the-man-pages sense, but frequent use
72.
by okal 11y ago
I've also used some visual tools, but I always end up abandoning them after a short while, since I don't feel that they add to my workflow. Probably just a matter of taste and familiarity then. It's possible that I'd be
73.
by okal 11y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I suppose if you use a tool frequently enough, you become blind to its warts :-)
74.
by okal 11y ago
I realize this is a pretty broad question, but what is it about Git that people find painful ? Could be Stockholm Syndrome on my part, but I have a pretty hard time understanding why someone can't spend a week getting up to speed with
75.
by okal 11y ago
That was my hope 1198 days ago when I started the website https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3589963 :-) I would have titled it "Free Computer Books" otherwise. If you know of any books that fulfill the "fr
76.
by okal 11y ago
> "loose definition" How so? I state quite explicitly what sort of content is welcome. If the contents of the book are available for free from a site controlled by the author(s) or publisher, it is free enough for the purposes
77.
by okal 11y ago
It is http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contri... If it isn't, all you need to do is flag it.
78.
by okal 11y ago
It also says "community curated". The books are crowdsourced. Most contributors are clearly what you'd refer to as hackers, but there's nothing stopping you from posting a Philosophy book. I think it mostly points to the
79.
by okal 11y ago
It's a little presumptuous to assume that everyone who could possibly need access to a technical book has a loose $15 to spare. I know I didn't when I built it, as a 2nd year undergrad not living in a First World economy. The au
80.
by okal 11y ago
You're welcome. Glad you like it :-)
81.
by okal 11y ago
Thank you. I'm not actively maintaining it anymore, TBH, but I've been getting bug reports/feature requests lately [meaning actual people still use it] so it might be time to reconsider that stance.
82.
by okal 11y ago
As with any proper crowdsourced website, you can edit broken links yourself ;-)
83.
by okal 11y ago
I built http://hackershelf.com just for this. It's a crowdsourced listing of legally free books on just about any topic.
84.
by okal 11y ago
I had the same feeling about Clojure, but it mostly has to do with non-standard libs. It's forced me to rely on reading source code a lot more than I did in other languages, so I'm not entirely sure that's a mark against it.
85.
by okal 12y ago
AGPL would make VoltDB unattractive to most, I'd imagine.
86.
by okal 12y ago
I didn't personally read any malice into your comment, for whatever it's worth. Sorry if my comment made your day less pleasant. I could have made my point more kindly.
87.
by okal 12y ago
No worries :-)
88.
by okal 12y ago
"Known by whom?", is what I should have asked. The claim makes assumptions about its audience that simply have no way of being substantiated.
89.
by okal 12y ago
"most widely known novel to come out of Africa" [Citation needed]
90.
by okal 12y ago
Countries like Africa?

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