Something Meaningful | Hacker News Reader

Something Meaningful

blog.coffeestrap.com

58 pointsmahesh_rm36 comments

Very cool, but I bailed on the signup: your Facebook login asks for my email, friends list, and public profile. Why is all of this necessary simply as authentication?

Hi there, I apologize for delay: posting on HN before flying looks like a bad idea :-). We are not at all collecting your friend list in our DB. Just your name, gender, and email. We may have erroneously asked fb login to ask for friend list too, checking it right now. But again, I guarantee you we are not storing any information in DB apart from name, email, and gender!

Are you trying to combine dating, learning a language, and collaborating on 'work stuff'? It wasn't very clear to me.

Anyway, when I first moved to a new city, I tried doing the whole 'language tandem' thing, which, by the way, is not a popular phrase in the US. In fact, many people don't understand what that is. People usually call it 'language exchange'. At least in my experience.

Anyway, I used http://conversationexchange.com.

It was frustrating. But it depends what you wanted out of it. I wanted to genuinely learn a language, but had heard a lot of people use it to date.

It didn't work out for me because I was a beginner, and I needed a little more structure. The people who I met just wanted to 'chat', with no real learning material. And many didn't even know what books to recommend.

I think it would've been better if there would've been two people who genuinely wanted to learn a language and were at the same level. But even then, switching back and forth from teacher to student is challenging, especially amongst beginners.

I think it worked out great when both parties had sufficient knowledge to not use a book, and were just learning vocabulary and a small set of new rules.

Hi, you seem to summarize, in this post, the kind frustration we have been experiencing so far by language exchangers telling us about their experiences (commonly known as tandem learners in Europe). This also answer your question: We don't do dating. We do language exchange. For free, done right, and modulated upon your interests. Because you pick up a language much faster if you actually enjoy what you are talking about, and the person you are talking to. :-)

Hey Mahesh,

I'm still a bit confused too, but I think it's because I'm American: the terms "language exchange" and "tandem learners" don't mean anything here.

So is it like: say I'm fluent in English and conversational in German; I'd meet up with someone who's fluent in German and conversational in English, and we'd help each other learn? Is that the idea?

Hey mtowle, Alessandro from CoffeeStrap. The idea is exactly what you have said. We are still tuning the format so to deal with different levels of languages.

So far for example here in San Francisco we have a lot of people willing to learn Mandarin(or actually speaking! I am looking at you Zack! :) ) and fluent in English. Another trend here in the bay is about Korean/Japanese. And a lot of Spanish speakers and Portuguese as well. Those are the main languages so far!

Thank you for your explanation. The blog post didn't really detail that, so I mistakenly thought it primarily was about getting together to discuss Creating Things -- like a blind date for hackers to find coding/project partners -- rather than what seems to be primarily about learning languages.

Fortunately, your main page is VERY clear on this main goal. Well done! It makes me wish I were trying to learn a language, as I expect that there's not much use for someone who only speaks English.

I had the same impression from the blog post. I think it's a good idea, even in a blog post, to always say, "Our project is a tool that ______".

Please, please, please, please: link to your website from your blog, in the header. Just do it!

OK. Now it takes a double click. One click to blog root. Another click to website. But we'll do that. :-)

The thing is, once I've clicked the CoffeeStrap/blog header once, and it takes me to the blog index page, I'm not going to click the identical CoffeeStrap/blog header again because I expect it will just take me back to the page I'm already on.

I did the same thing, and didn't even realized until now that there even was a way to get to the their real site.

Really cool idea - I've already applied!

Two quick suggestions, though. First, In this blog post, every one of your images is a guy and a girl together. kafkaesque and others expressed confusion about whether or not there was a dating overtone. Maybe this is adding to the confusion?

Second, please get some new icons for the male/female indicators in the sign up process. If you need icons instead of text, just use the standard gender symbols with some pink/blue as an added indicator. Maybe I'm dumb, but it took me a long time to realize that the leaf-looking things on the side of the girl's head were pigtails.

Hi Benjamin. Yep, we specifically focused on organizing male&female meetings in order to collect feedback and understand how to handle UX & UI in situations that would otherwise be prone for confusion!

> we specifically focused on organizing male&female meetings

Okay, so it's intended. I'm sure this will be followed by an explanation.

> in order to collect feedback

Doesn't really explain the male/female pairings.

> and understand how to handle UX & UI in situations that would otherwise be prone for confusion!

Maybe I'm off my rocker today, but that doesn't really explain the start of the sentence. The only thing I'm getting here is that the pairings are intentional.

> Maybe I'm off my rocker today, but that doesn't really explain the start of the sentence. The only thing I'm getting here is that the pairings are intentional.

You're not off your rocker. I'd imagine that I'm just as confused.

I love this idea and have this bookmarked. The only things that make me hesitant to sign up are:

(1) I'm definitely not conversational in any language other than English. (I'm very slowly working on Japanese, but I haven't really built up much vocabulary or much of the grammar. I'm less driven about learning than I probably should be, but I figure I can continue to work on it this slowly until I get to a certain point.) Have you had any stores of people with differing relative skills doing a language exchange?

(2) I live in a not-quite-densely-populated area (Amarillo, Texas), so I can only wonder how vibrant the CoffeeStrap user-base here would be. There's really no solution to this one other than to sign up and try to start something myself. It's what really kills me about living out here and seeing all of these cool services, but I suppose it comes with the territory.

Hi IS,

(1) yes language proficiency is definitely one variable that inputs in our matching algorhitm (2) you never know, we are now observing CoffeeStrappers signing up form VERY remote areas of the world. of course more dense of CS is your area, more accurate matches you will have, but I wouldn't say you are apriori condemned to a Japanless CS future if you keep on living in Amarillo! :-)

Is there any significant trend of people leaving academia for the tech world? I spent 4 years grinding away on cancer drug development. Between the billions of dollars it takes to commercialize such drugs and the single digit percentage that actually advance from human trials to clinical use, I wondered if the work I was doing was not going to be put to good use.

More importantly, I didn't feel like I was learning every day. Much of the work is absurdly repetitive.

I started learning how to build web applications and found it more mentally rewarding... but what are the ramifications of that for research? It's incredibly important but not seen as very exciting these days.

Hey asr2bd, Alessandro here from CoffeeStrap. I think that research in the field of web application & Co could, and should, be done way more than today. The whole architecture of the web is incredibly complex and we are using tools that could be improved a ton. Now I am rushing to catch a flight, if you want to share some thoughts on that give me a shot: alessandro at coffeestrap dot com

These are our same questions. We don't have an unitary answer to this. I personally think things will drastically change in academia within 10 to 20 years from now. Probably for the better, but we can't know yet. Let's be optimistic, as always! :-)

You need to do some testing in Opera, the page looks pretty funny: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10190786/badfont.png

Edit: In my Firefox it's broken too. Turns out only Chrome renders it legibly.

Same in IE9. The language list is nicer, but the instructional text is just as hard to read.

whoops. yep, step by step we are going to support all browsers! :-) thank you for this feedback! :-)

Side note: What is it about graduate work that burns people out on their field? I've met quite a few people with masters and PhDs who switch fields afterward and basically run away.

That's a good question, I was too almost to the burning point. But honestly I still have to figured out which was the problem or which solutions we could adopt. I have that slight belief that there is a more general pattern over there, not sure yet about the whole thing.

As "defense" of PhDs program I could say that it definitely trains your mind to look at things with a deeper perspective.

Could this training effect of a PhD perhaps be the reason that people switch fields? When starting, one's field of research seems very promising and exciting. At the end though, one knows enough to see limitations in the field. In addition, PhDs are trained to approach problems differently. I think this knowledge and a different mental attitude can make other fields seems more worthwhile.

At this point in time, I would say yes. The start of a PhD teaches you a lot of useful research skills. However, the academic/research environment do not necessarily put them to good use.

This can lead people, such as myself, to investigate the value of a PhD itself and find that the career prospects, financial rewards, and even intellectual rewards, are difficult to align/justify.

I think that a reasonable conclusion is indeed that switching fields would generally be a good move, unless you know yourself to be an outstanding researcher within your field of expertise.

Plenty of people (myself included) burn out and switch fields after their undergrad degree. They just don't stand out as much.

The constant uncertainty. You are not given a check-list which says "Do these things and you graduate." You have to come up with that check list, and justify that check list to the people who will grant you your degree. And you have no real way of knowing just how hard - or even possible - that check list is until you start doing it. But, it also has to meet a minimum level of "hard" to be considered enough to earn the degree.

There is also the isolation factor. Many people do work in groups, and many people do work closely with their advisor. But, in the end, the student is expected to own some research themselves. That is the work that is the core of their thesis. Requiring the student to own some significant piece of work on their own contributes to the pressure people put on themselves, and the isolation they tend to feel.

Good luck and congrats on following your dreams...I remember when you first mentioned CoffeeStrap on HN and I thought it was some bastard product involving CoffeeScript and Twitter Bootstrap.

Hopefully you find the technical person you need to help execute your idea...it's not just tech expertise you need, but someone who understands and buys into your idea well enough to see how tech can make it uniquely (and practically) executable.

Genuinely thanks for the good luck. Day by day we are figuring out things over things. We got some attentions in this past months and we'll definitely need advise in a lot of fields. Hopefully you will hear from us again in future! (still not about a bastard mesh-up between CoffeeScript and Bootstrap! :)

So... it's like a real world verbling?

https://www.verbling.com/

In some ways, we can say this. I see it as a tool to allow language exchangers and tandem learners to meet people in one to one interactions, according to their interests. This, safely, for free, and over a coffee. :-)

Good luck!

thank you Simone! :-)))))

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