251 karma · joined June 23, 2013
If not, I'll stop working on/maintaining it and devote my time to other pursuits - preferably ones that might bring in some money eventually.
PS: It is currently running on a Heroku instance because I can't afford to 'launch' it yet. :(
> give you a very thorough groping which includes putting their fingers into your waistband and feeling your junk and buttocks with the backs of their hands
> fingers into your waistband and feeling your junk and buttocks
> feeling your junk and buttocks
Wat? Are they expecting that the bad guys will walk in with explosives stuffed up their private parts and extract them out later for their intended purpose? Also, honest question: why would anyone want to go through this? I mean, given the option, I'd probably opt to walk through the scanner than let someone handle my junk. (I felt extremely uncomfortable just saying that.) Surely the scanners cannot be more invasive than THIS?
Or am I reading the whole thing wrong? Is the rejection of scanners not because of privacy issues but because of health issues? So many questions...
I kept reading and a few lines later, you said:
> ...given an even more thorough search.
I can't even begin to imagine what an 'even more thorough search' would be/look/feel like. The closest word I can think of is 'rape' but surely it can't be THAT bad, can it?
Where I am from, we do have pat-down searches at private places like malls, but the public places are largely ignored, surprisingly. Even the pat-down searches at the private places are more customary than anything else. Then again, our record at homeland security isn't all that great, as witnessed by recent events. In comparison, your track record since 9/11 seems to have considerably improved, though how much of it should be attributed to all of this is another question entirely.
As a white male living in the US of A, I think I understand your outrage. If this were to happen to me, in my country, I'd probably be up in arms, and so would the rest of the country. However, as a brown male, living outside of the US of A, and having never been to your country so far, I wouldn't know what it truly feels like, so I might just be talking out of (pardon my french) ass here.
I'm just too confused, surprised and horrified at the moment to fathom the weirdness of it all.
Thanks for your detailed reply, though. I hope the situation resolves into something amicable for both parties - you and the authorities.
PS: As a brown male who has never been to your country but who would like to visit some day, your comments have unsettled me somewhat. I like to keep a lush beard and I have long hair. Sure, I'm an atheist, but does that even count?
Caveat: I don't know Rails. I've only recently started teaching myself to code/program/develop. So I guess now is a good time to start with Rails as any, eh?
8 months ago I jumped straight into working with Django/Python - one fine day, I made a list of project ideas that I've had in my head for a while and started chalking out the corresponding algos & coding them without a care about how 'bad' my code was going to look. (Yeah, I belong to the 'learn first, refine later' school of thought.)
8 months since I first started, the score is two ideas done, six more to go. Wait, scratch that, seven more to go. Wish me luck!
I'm asking out of pure curiosity and prefer not to search those keywords and get added to some list and have an eye-in-the-sky suddenly trained on me. It is completely understandable if you choose not to answer this question.
Thanks for reading, though. :)
Also, I wistfully disagree with you about the "highlighting creation" bit. I mean, FSM knows I want to agree with you but my experience so far says otherwise. In all the time I've spent on HN (most of it as a lurker) I've found HN to be quite snobbish about the show-and-tell attempts.
Then again, maybe I am experiencing sour grapes since my own Show HN posts seem to disappear rapidly even before I can say, "Hey HN, loo-"...
:(
I'm thinking of creating an HN spin-off for young, upcoming devs to do a Show-And-Tell about their recent attempts at learning/developing. Heck I've been dying to give discourse ~~(the django-based discussions platform)~~ a try, maybe I'll finally get around to it now. In fact, I'm going to go and write it now... (Sorry, couldn't resist. ;) Not meant as a dig.)
Question is, should I do a Show HN, when it is done? :P
EDIT: Turns out discourse is rails-based, not django-based. Still gonna give it a try, I guess... :(
OT: We have just managed to carry out a conversation about a word that was not even mentioned once within the conversation itself. And yet, each one of us knows exactly which word we are alluding to. Voldemort, anyone? :)
I've been lazy about writing a good filter to weed out the nasty ones. I considered quite a few approaches - ranging from an NLTK-based algo to basic brute-force list-search with word-stemming. Then I realized, it would take me a lot more time to develop that, than the rest of the project.
So, I chose the easy way out. Turn out it saved me quite a bit of effort, too. :)
The Instagram API returns an APINotAllowedError (response code 400) when you search for one of these hashtags. I'm using it to automatically identify and categorize NSFW hashtags for one of my projects, HashPix. You can see it in action at http://hashpix.herokuapp.com/
Previous programming/development experience: a couple of self-hosted WordPress blogs - one of them, a short-story magazine called d.ustb.in.
Currently: Learning Python, Django and applying every bit of new knowledge into executing the million ideas that keep bouncing around in my head.
I started seriously learning programming with Python last November because I wanted to scratch an itch. There was this idea for an Android app that I had - a food-related Android app - that did not exist in the market. There had been a few attempts but nobody had done anything concrete in the direction that I was thinking of taking. I pitched the idea to a few developer friends and found that the idea seemed to excite almost ALL of them. Unfortunately, none of them could spare me the bandwidth. Frustrated, I finally decided to take the plunge myself and created a prototype using Google AppInventor to knock up a very shoddy-looking app that was served with a Django-Python -TastyPie backend running on a free Heroku instance.
Since then, I have gone on to indulge myself with a few other projects:
1. Hashpix - http://hashpix.herokuapp.com
2. @updt_me - http://update-me.herokuapp.com
...and a few more in the pipeline.
Now, we come to the most important question: Do I have offers related to my programming 'expertise'? Well, no. Seeing as how my experience in the field is next to none, I find that my skill set has few or no takers. Does it make me happy? Hell, yes! Does it scratch my entrepreneurial itch? Well, somewhat. None of these ideas are making me any money, you see. Does it put food on the table for my family? Abso-fucking-lutely not. I'm pretty sure it won't put any food on the table until I reach a good enough level of expertise - something that I am sure is (at least) another few hundred thousand lines of code away.
Long story short? If you have the bandwidth, the energy, the ideas, the time, the inclination, the burning desire and MOST IMPORTANTLY, the savings in your bank account to scratch your entrepreneurial itch, go ahead and take the plunge. Otherwise, wait for a while, build up those zeros that follow the $ sign and THEN take the plunge.
Of course, the standard universal disclaimer applies: YMMV.
The answer is also kinda obvious. It started it as a matter of convenience ("I'm too fking bored to type out my long-ass password" or "I have so many passwords, I can't be bothered to remember them all" or "LastPass? What's that?") and has remained so till date. In fact, it will continue to do so until a zero-day exploit appears that can uncover these plaintext passwords, which, judging by current events, doesn't seem too far away
Are you sure your company isn't downsizing? All of his actions so far point to the possibility that he (the company?) wanted you to quit. And if he (they) did want you to quit, he (they) could have given you the pink slip?
The most obvious question that follows is, why you. Well, you did say you joined them recently, so there's less to worry about the knowledge transfer. Maybe they want to save on the severance package? Maybe they want to do it quietly without spreading panic?
The whole thing seems a bit suspicious to me. If you choose not to investigate, just make sure you deal with it professionally - see vishaldpatel's response [1].
A part of me tells me that you may just have dodged a bullet. Good luck for your future. :)
Long time lurker. Made an account just a few days ago.
I recently started to teach myself programming (a little bit of Python and Django, nothing spectacular) as a challenge of sorts and also to see if the various ideas that kept buzzing in my head could be brought to life. Through this process, I kept lurking in various communities soaking in as much knowledge as I could. I attempted my way through a few online courses to hone my (non-existent) skills and six months later, I bring you HashPix.
The first few projects that I attempted didn't work out all that well. Some due to my poor knowledge of the subject, others due to poor execution, and yet others simply because they were bad ideas. This one is still quite raw and I was quite terrified of posting it here but thanks to some encouragement from /r/Django over at reddit, I finally decided to take the plunge and get some input from you guys.
So, here I am. Suggestions, feedback requested. Criticism invited. Bouquets appreciated. Brickbats welcome. Looking to learn as much as I can. And then some... :)
Thanks for reading!
As an Indian, I'd like to chip in with the actual meaning of "Karma" - the closest synonym in English is "fulfilling your purpose".
The Indian culture is heavy with assumptions that everyone has some purpose in life. The concept of karma urges you to act upon your purpose in life - intended or perceived. It never promises any rewards or punishments by itself. That is primarily taken care of by the rest of the philosophy in these books - unsurprisingly similar to all the other religions of the world.
By itself, karma has no positive or negative association. In fact, one of the holy texts dissociates your "karma" with the fruits reaped subsequent to it. "Continue fulfilling your purpose in life without expecting any rewards for your actions whatsoever." In other words:
Happiness = Reality - Expectations.
The lower the expectations and 'better' the reality, the greater your happiness. :)