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diwankon Ask HN: Coming out of a long bout of depression, need some life advice.

It's great to hear that you've gotten better and want to pursue programming. A vital piece of advice I'd like to share is to Live Curious. Never stop learning. Keep trying new things. Connect with as many people as you can. Learn to cook. Get a bike. Visit random places. But most importantly, don't forget to have fun and make friends.

> I've been going through a very long period of anxiety and depression... I can’t help but feel guilty.

Life is arduous. It can really get lonesome pretty quickly. But take my word for it, you have no reason to feel guilty. The time you think was "wasted" was actually spent morphing you into a better human being. Be proud of the fact that you were able to get over your depression. We are all here for you.

On a different note, I'd love to help you learn programming. Shoot me an email if you feel inclined to.

singh@diwank.name

You could also look around for people looking for freelancers here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783658

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

I guess I did misunderstand you then. You're right. A rapist won't probably need this app. All I was trying to say is that leaving the rapist issue aside, this app is misusing unsuspecting people's privacy and personal info.

Just because the data is publicly available, it does not warrant such misuse.

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

> They could simply wait outside close to where drunk girls would be likely to be.

Hold on. What do you mean by that?

This is clearly a horrible violation of people's integrity and privacy. It's not about "chicks" getting raped. Would you wait for a Nerds around me and see people getting bashed by goons just like that?

It's a serious threat to people's security if it makes it easier to stalk unsuspecting people. Maybe I just misunderstood you but wouldn't the threat of just a single incident facilitated by such an app be enough to reconsider the importance of privacy?

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

Just a UI? Maybe.

But every application has a specific action. See data is just well, data. What you do with it defines your application. Take something non-intrusive for a change, say the books a bookstore sells most. There's a wealth of information there. We could predict locally trending topics or the most common problems students face. But you could also predict what kind of audience the bookstore receives. It may not sound that creepy unless you find that the store gets a lot of depression related sales. That could get creepy very fast.

> The only solution to this is awareness on the users part and nothing else.

Awareness is extremely important even vital. But that is not it. Thousands of Girls Around Me apps probably exist and it is fairly possible though tough to find them. All I am saying is that efforts should be made in that regard as well.

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

I agree. The way people evaluate the importance of other people's information is so damn skewed. It's a social problem and it has nothing to do with just privacy.

> Does it really affect my life? What benefit do I gain from knowing these things?

For instance, what harm is there otherwise? In fact if you come to think of it, a main reason why you would want to disconnect is the prevalence of people ready to take you for granted. This cannot be avoided entirely but we can atleast make sure things like Girls Around Me don't thrive.

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

Indeed, it is a very important thing to include a mature explanation of privacy and it's importance in education. What I meant was that this is not going to fix this problem. We need to figure out ways to stop the misuse of user data.

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

> If you don't like this app and don't like the people behind it, stop making sure that every person who might be interested in it hears about it so they can add it to their phone.

It's not about free press for the devs as you make of it. I bet this app must have been doing rounds at anonynous image boards, porn sites and the like since the day it was launched. The Girls Around Me coverage is instead actually bringing to light the intense security threats such misuse of data can bring.

Merely 48 hours since these reports surfaced, the app has been yanked from the app store and its access to Foursquare data turned off. That says something about the need to bring these things to light. People who want it will find a way to get it anyway.

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

Maybe the responsibility and the legal loopholes of such a possibility are too high. But that does not absolve social networks and the like to acknowledge the fact that people have an associated intent with what they share online. It is their responsibility to guard their users' intent and motivations at all times.

In fact, I'd be ready to accept your challenge. I can risk a lawsuit in order to protect my users. After all, when have patent trolls ever stopped passionate people from creating amazing products?

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

I think you're right about the patronizing tone. Most responses to this issue are plainly trying to raise the possible security implications of such misuse of publicly available user information.

Other than that, I think the author makes a strong case for people sharing their info publicly. Yes, they need to be aware about the implications but efforts MUST also be made to find and penalize apps that clearly misuse the data and violates people's intentions with which they shared the info in the first place.

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

> in practice it's like getting angry with individual spammers. It's futile.

Completely agree. In fact, I think the author makes that point later in the article too. What is worth highlighting is the fact that "Educate people about privacy" cannot work. People share things publicly with a lot of different motivations. A potential employer may be interested in where we usually travel to but so would a stalker too.

Instead of trying to discourage people from sharing such info, I think we need to standardize the associated intent with a user's data. Most of us won't be bothered by targeted ads but anyone surely will be about Girls Around Me.

diwankon Creating Victims And Then Blaming Them

I think the author makes a very very important point. The entire issue needs to be viewed from the perspective that a user is not equal to his data. Every facebook user shares his/her information with varying intents and motivation. People maintain a fairly public facebook profile say for potential employers, old friends etc.

We are NOT as privacy-illiterate as we are made out to be in recent articles about Girls around me. For instance, I recently applied to YC and enlisted my Facebook profile. And, I have been posting a lot of public content with that very intention in mind for months now.

I came across another instance of this when I was trying to "teach" my sister the importance of heightened privacy. She plainly refused as she often needs to plan open events and she needs to put up a lot of her information public.

We need to understand that just as you cannot ask women not to go out for fear of stalkers, you cannot ask people not to share information publicly. In fact, we need to keep up with the shift in social media to increase law-enforcement. Girls Around Me is a clear violation of the intention with which millions share their information publicly.

I think we need to standardize and associate User Intents as a first class attribute to a user's data. And find and penalize miscreants like Girls Around Me who violate the intention associated with people's information.

diwankon Ruhoh another static blog generator. from the creators of Jekyll Bootstrap

I must say Ruhoh API is very well thought out. Kudos for the great work!

How about extending the Universal Blog API for storing user comments? That'd make it a complete out-of-the-box blogging solution (a user may opt for using a comments service provider like Disqus OR use the inbuilt comments API). The spec could look somewhat like so:

- Directory Structure:

          _comments //folder with json files containing user comments

- Comments file:

          {{post identifier}}.json //could be simply the post filename.

- Comments structure:

       {
           "comments" : [{
                         "id" : "1123",  //unique comment id
                         "author" : "Chuck Norris",
                         "author_handle" : "chuck@norris.com", //or a website
                         "date" : "yyyy-mm-dd", //comment date
                         "content" : "Hei! Chuck makes dumb comments."
                         },

                        {
                         "id" : "1124",
                         "author" : "Superman",
                         "author_handle" : "superman.com",
                         "date" : "yyyy-mm-dd", 
                         "content" : "Superman is scared of Chuck."
                         },
               ]
       }

We can leave the comment id and author details up to the login implementation.

diwankon Poll: What is Your Favorite Programming Language?

Fell in love with Python the first time I saw it. Most of my projects are written in Python. It is simply elegant.

I really like CoffeeScript as well. (Javascript is a real pain to handle sometimes!)

diwankon Today I wrote some code

Completely agree. Even though I am quite new to coding, I was shocked to see how much more time I spend on debugging a piece of code than actually writing it. The ratio is closer to 3:1 and sometimes even higher. Writing tests has brought that down to roughly 1:1 (varies from project to project).

I still don't do as extensive testing as I want to (primarily because I am lazy) but I have seen the shift in the way I think about solving a problem. Writing tests forces you to assign structure to your code (in my case I put it down on paper). It helps you think in terms of "pipes" as in what is going in and what comes out.

But, I think a lot also depends on the nature of the project. Parsers and frameworks may need thorough tests while simple apps may do without many. And for some people, it may be too much of an overhead at times.

diwankon Ask HN: How do you tone down your idea to something fesible?

@revorad: Thanks for the links. I liked the Ladder of Abstraction.

On a different note, this discussion is slightly off-topic. Can I shoot you an email some time? (If you don't mind.) Also, I'm really sleepy now (yawn!)

diwankon Ask HN: How do you tone down your idea to something fesible?

> create good new learning material and curate good existing material

Great advice there and I totally agree with you. In fact, we are looking into incorporating great Python tutorials in the public domain to supplement our content.

Actually, we took the interactive approach because to people with little background in programming, the biggest deterrence is fear of breaking things on their PC. On iheartpy.com they can easily try out basic commands without that fear.

diwankon Ask HN: How do you tone down your idea to something fesible?

It's only a few weeks since we began working on it. And we've been working on the backend all this while. The design has received a wide spectrum of opinion: some seem to love it, others find it confusing. I think we'll redesign it once we get the backend finished.

We're filling in the meat right now! There's a lot of work to do and we hope to get things in shape so we can call it a beautiful pig and go from there.

Thanks for the feedback though. Would love to bug you some more if you don't mind. :)

diwankon Ask HN: How do you tone down your idea to something fesible?

> Boy, [1] is a long document. I scanned through it quickly and noticed some good ideas

I understand. It's a whole bunch of neat design processes. But it's huge! You can take a look here for the separate ideas. http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/

> Have you shipped any of the ideas in [2]?

Yup. We're currently building IHeartCode (turned out to be the most popular). A rough prototype lives at http://iheartpy.com

diwankon Ask HN: How do you tone down your idea to something fesible?

You nailed it. Either way, I think the most important thing is to go out and talk to people. Our mental models are pretty limited in that we see and feel what we wish to see and feel. Talking to people helps open up whole new ways of looking at things. There's always another perspective you failed to see.

I recently came across the Stanford design Bootcamp Bootleg [1]. It outlines the whole process for getting from an itch to a working product. And they obsess over empathy. It's all over the Bootleg. Interview potential users, learn how they currently solve the problem you're trying to solve and show them how your idea could help them.

The Bootleg is highly recommended. Even if you don't follow the practices it describes, it pays to have those mental models.

We were brainstorming recently. And we did this entire exercise. We went to meet students, shop owners, teachers and even some folks at the local administration. It was extremely tedious but our efforts paid off. We gathered insights that range from pretty obvious to mind-numbing and some even rather stupid.

We then made a small web presentation [2] of the most interesting ideas and asked people to vote and give their suggestions. It has been a very rewarding experience.

[1]: http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Bootc...

[2]: http://idea.diwank.name

diwankon Ask HN: Looking for a great personal hosted blog alternative

Haha! Feel free to shoot me an email in case you get stuck somewhere (it's pretty simple but just in case.)

singh@diwank.name

diwankon How to describe without loosing ownership of idea

There is no secret ingredient. ~ Kung Fu Panda

To be very honest, in my opinion you're laying too much emphasis on the idea. I don't mean to be harsh but there really is no secret sauce for solving people's problems. Further, you don't 'lose' ownership to an idea that easily because:

1. Ideas are extremely personal entities. It is really hard to appreciate someone else's idea as your own. (Especially, if they are 'ground-breaking' as nobody would have seen it before)

2. It is insanely hard to actually build something. So, it is extremely unlikely that anyone would just rip your idea off.

Now, in case the above does not help answer your questions, let us assume that you do have the 'secret sauce' to be the next Google (in whatever field you are). In order to safely look for people basically boils down to trust. You can begin with your friends and see if any of them is interested. Or you could try and secure an investment and just recruit.

And no. Patents/copyrights are a bad idea. You may want to read this: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/11/23/protecting-ideas-can-yo...

You may also consider reading this http://paulgraham.com/start.html for the value of ideas.

diwankon Shutting down a product? Open source it.

This is so important and yet most people don't realize it. A tremendous amount of effort goes into maintaining an open-source project. No software is "bug-free" for instance; and you have to continuously seave user feedback for bugs and fix them quickly.

This is a worrying trend. Most of the projects on github have become 'orphans'. I see no docs and worse - no activity for years even on some pretty interesting ones. Contrast that to Apache projects and their communities.

@patricksroberts I think @nirvana meant this in a more general sense.

diwankon Is my non-computer hack what YC is looking for?

I think that's definitely good enough. You see an important metric in gauging _good_ answers is also how succinctly you've been able to express yourself. It is not merely good enough to have done something cool. Especially for YC.

...of groups good enough to make it to interviews, more than half blow the application.

Indeed not surprising. Rephrase what you're trying to say so it brings out why this was so brilliant a hack in the least number of words possible. Rewrite it again.

We're looking for people who like to beat the system. So if the answer to this question is good enough, it will make me go back and take a second look at an application that otherwise seemed unpromising.

It is definitely one of the most important questions in the application. Think of other things you have done that might seem trivial to you but might be really brilliant. Talk to your friends. They might help.

In any case, best wishes for your YC Application.

* Excerpts from http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html

diwankon Ask HN: Will Y Combinator accept you if you don't come from MIT/Stanford/etc...

You have a rock solid point there. IMHO, a very important thing a lot of people don't understand is that there is no 'magic' in real life. Success is not easy to come by. You have to keep working on going from where you are and where you want to be.

Extensive networking. Learning things. Acquiring new skills. And making stuff.

That's it. Even if you do make it to YC, there is no guarantee that you'll succeed. In fact, it's more likely that your startup will fail than not. Start a startup if you truly have to (just want to is not enough). And go start working.

It may seem like a paradox but your chances of getting into YC are higher if you don't need them as bad (ie you already have a product that people love). In plain english, be successful to be successful. Think it through, get a good friend along, brainstorm and make something. Figure out how you'll get past the inertia involved in making things. Talk to people. Network. Iterate.

To be very honest it does help if you are from MIT/Harvard. But, you can always substitute that with a strong portfolio. To re-iterate ewokhead's point: yes, you do have a chance if you create it yourself.

diwankon Ask HN: Looking for a great personal hosted blog alternative

Go for Jekyll-Bootstrap [1]. I think it's pretty much what you're looking for and is a breeze to use. I use it for my blog [2] too and here's why:

1. Static blog generator = blazing fast and no more managing databases.

2. Hosted on Github for free.

3. Love writing posts in Markdown!

It's pretty easy to set up and has nice documentation. In case you have trouble using it I'll be happy to help. (You could even fork into my blog's repo [3] if you like and get started.)

[1]: http://jekyllbootstrap.com/

[2]: http://blag.diwank.name/

[3]: https://github.com/creatorrr/I-Blag-Too/tree/gh-pages

diwankon Ask HN: Is there any point in using mailto: links any more?

I agree. mailto: links firing Thunderbird for people who don't use it is so not cool.

Actually, I think the mailto: protocol has a lot of potential but has been mostly neglected by browsers. Only recently did Chrome announce the support for using gmail as an alternative for opening mailto: links.

Anyway, I decided to do something about it and cooked up a small snippet [1] that opens up a modal window every time a user clicks on a mailto link and lets him send a mail via MailerJS [2]. Just paste the snippet in your web page and skadooosh, all mailto: links get so much more awesome!

Might also write a Firefox extension that enables using gmail for mailto: links when I get some time.

[1]: https://github.com/creatorrr/Snippets/blob/master/mailtofix....

[2]: http://mailerjs.com/

diwankon Sad, Tired, and Alone: My Ongoing Battle With Startup Depression

Keep moving. Inward, onward, upward.

An absolute gem. If there is something I could possibly add to this wonderful summary, it'd be to further stress the importance of peace in our lives.

I am yet to really experience a startup first-hand but have had a strong bipolar commotion only recently. I really can connect with what Zak feels and no amount of persuasion can repel that feeling of emptiness.

When you go through the lows it's hard not to get hit by the enormity of it all. You begin to see just how puny an existence you truly are. And at the same time how lucky to have all those people who are there for you no matter what. Deep gratitude overwhelms you.

I don't think I can add much about fighting startup depression though I wish to share this one thing I came to learn. And that is that peace cannot be bought. You have to earn it. And that success does not cut it. You have to let go of things that hold you back.

Happiness is essentially a habit. Fall in love again. Do crazy things. Life is hard and startups harder. But kudos to friends that make the gloomy bits easier to handle. :)

diwankon Ask HN: How do you choose a good font for your next project.

Typeface is to design what salt is to cooking. It never feels that important but it can be the difference between an average design and a brilliant one.

Usually, I use this incredibly helpful chart for choosing typefaces: http://img.labnol.org/files/font-selection-chart.png

You could also take a look at these Smashing article for some Typography essentials:

http://smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/18/10-principles-for-rea...

http://smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/24/how-to-choose-a-typef...

diwankon Internet Engineering Task Force: April Fools' Day RFCs

These guys have an amazing sense of humor. Vint Cerf himself keeps making hilarious RFCs, for instance:

"Twas the Night Before Start-up" [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc968] that ends with:

      At last he was finished and wearily sighed
      and turned to explain why the system had died.
      I twisted my fingers and counted to ten;
      an off-by-one index had done it again...

and "A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY" [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1607] that talks about the letters discovered in September 1993 in a reverse time-capsule apparently sent from 2023.

My favorite is one by S. Christie about implementing The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS) [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2795].

diwankon What Neil & Buzz Left on the Moon (Other Than Footprints)

A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena. All theories are only provisional, in that they are upholded every time an observation supports the predictions they make. In principle, a good observation that is inconsistent with a theory's prediction can falsify it.

In this case, Einstein's theory predicts the lunar orbit to be slightly different than Newton's gravitation model. If someone could find a discrepancy in new observation he would have found a flaw in Einstein's theory of general relativity.

As of this writing, no flaws have been found in the theory of general relativity. Though such claims pop up every now and then.