diwank

A very interesting example of relatively lesser-known scientific innovations. It is a surprisingly rare knowledge. In fact, it is one of the evidences scientists use to refute the claim of the moon-landing deniers.

It is also worth mentioning that this project has now been axed (in 2009 to be precise) as the mirrors have gotten dusty and no longer provide the same worth of scientific data they used to [1]. The above post was written in 2004, long before such problems surfaced.

[1]: www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/21/mcdonald-observatory-space-laser-funding

I hope you found some comfort in what I said. And yes, Hackers & Painters is a truly amazing read.

Anyway, take care and have fun. :)

Hey Zack,

To put it simply, you rock. You know and understand programming a lot better than most people ever do in their lifetime. And to be honest, you are really better off than I am. Please don't underestimate yourself.

Being a script kiddie on Hacker News especially sucks. You see everybody bouncing around with their Phd’s in CS or engineering from Stanford or MIT talking about how there are so many people out there who are terrible programmers because they don’t know the difference between a linked list and a vector.

I know the feeling. It often gets at your nerves. But here's the thing, those people too were at some time in the past very much like you are right now. In fact, I know a lot of people who'd agree that it is really * what you do with your skills * that really matters.

The primary reason you feel like that is because, in essence, you are a hacker and not a computer scientist. Read pg's brilliant thoughts on this. (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html)

Confession: I have no idea what the difference is between a linked list and a vector. Well, before I wrote this I had no idea.

I didn't too. Big deal? :)

I looked it up so I know now in theory what the difference is.

See, that is the whole point of learning things. You always have to be ready to assimilate new things and look up the strange bits as you come across them. And you're doing a blimey good job at that.

I can glue things together as fast as the next guy.

An invaluable skill for two reasons:

- Most great ideas/products come up when two or more existing ideas are glued together.

- This helps you understand how things connect and inter-operate.

But I have no idea how to make my programs go faster or take up less memory. Or why the program actually works.

Don't worry. You will, in time.

I got on the phone with the interviewer and one of the first things out of their mouth’s was “Sorry, I don’t really understand functional programming at all.”

My take on this one? Find people with overlapping interests. There'll be plenty of startups working with Lisp and Clojure. Keep looking in the HN Jobs section. Maybe this one for instance. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3580917)

I suspect it will give me more confidence when talking to people about computers. But I don’t really know.

I read a very good article recently - "The Biolar Lisp Programmer" (http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm?)

I don't know about you but I feel like that all the time. I think hackers often suffer from a huge lack of confidence. (Note: confidence is different from self-esteem; in that it is your perception of other people's image of you.)

You seem to have a decent amount of self-esteem. (ready to accept things) So here's to you - Cheers, my friend, you are doing great!

you can write to me here: singh@diwank.name

Hey there,

I like the way you've responded to some of these comments. You're a class act.

Thanks for the encouragement! (Really hard to come by these days.) :)

Interesting blog too (the bootstrap frontpage confused me for a moment though).

I just stitched together the design in a hurry. Redesigning the blog is lower in my priority list right now. Expect an overhaul soon though.

found the post about the conversation with your co-founder rather interesting.

I'm glad you did. This is why I put it there in the first place. I thought people like you'd help me figure out if we're on the right track.

IMHO, younger founders who're thinking of startup life as a career (long haul), should work on maximizing (2), (3) and (4) primarily.

I totally agree. It is easy to take these things for granted. Especially the value of connections and the fact that you have to be constantly working to make new ones.

It's possible you wouldn't cross off that entire list with a single startup.

Like I said, I think connections are a perpetual work in progress. It's more than likely that we won't cross off even half of it.

Before I get carried away, answering 'what you do' can get you massively different reactions varying with the audience, locality etc.

Don't even get me started on that one! A few relatives of mine are actually horrified by the idea that I despise the idea of a regular job and would rather start my own thing. Sigh.

I think the above holds extreme importance, especially if you're going on an 'what would you like me to build for you' marathon.

Haha, exactly. In fact, the whole point of this (even-if-you-have-to-make-a-fool-out-of-yourself) exercise was to get two things into our heads:

- Ideas are like girlfriends. Have fun with them but think twice before getting emotionally involved.

- The hardest thing for startups (and for most things in life) is to be able to talk to people and successfully get your idea across. Practice it.

Good luck. Looking forward to updates on your blog.

Thank you. Trust me when I say that I have derived great value from your comment.

Take care.

Someone suggested the United Nations Millenium Development Goals to draw inspiration from. It is a good place to start with for startups looking for ideas. High time we started working on 'real' problems.

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

We are not trying to create someone else's product. Basically, we are looking for what people need everyday. The problems they face and any existing solutions they use. So that we can look for patterns in users' needs and build something that adresses them.

Image resizing seems to be an easy-to-implement idea. App Engine + Stripe + A Good API can do the trick. Will get to work on it!

Receipt tagging is a different beast. The format is inconsistent, mining data would be difficult and I don't know if people would be willing to send potentially sensitive details of business transactions to anyone.

But I'm up for it given it has a substantial market. Any other takers?

Haha. It's just there for the time being. Actually that's my personal website. My name is Diwank Singh. ;)

Blag: blag.diwank.name

Poems: poet.diwank.name

Home Page: singh.diwank.name

Nice one!

In fact, why limit to just movies? You can take this idea and implement it everywhere. Associating and tagging real-life objects with entertainment and web media. You know, so you can facilitate searching real objects within virtual contexts.

Could be a mind blowing technology. :)

Thank you so much for compiling this entire list in one place. Great inspiration. Handy as hell! :)

I don't know why you made the harsh comment but it is unfair to judge people on the basis of a single post/comment.

I think maybe you miscomprehended the purpose of this post. So let me rephrase this: Please give me instances when you face problems in your everyday life. This can help us identify common trends in what people need.

Model answer: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250749

Thanks for the advice. I'm trying to land myself an internship at some good corporation to get a taste of problems they face.

Though, I'm a little vary of companies with bad work environments lest I end up getting a net negative worth out of the whoe experience.

SimpLESS and less.app have been around for quite some time now. Yet, it is really painful to see so many developers copying-and-pasting compiled css from the chrome dev console. Further, client-side less.js uses ajax, forcing you to setup a web server on some development environments.

SimpLESS is highly recommended, as it lets you focus on the code rather than figuring out the compilation bit. Auto-minification is a big plus too.

P.S. It's nice to see a good and usable Titanium application. :)

Brilliant design, thoughtful processes and an incredible toolset for designers. It is really indispensable. I think anyone who wants to build things for people should keep a printed copy with him.

In fact, it is encouraged to add to, modify and share it. People with a unique design process/tool should send it along to bootleg@dschool.stanford.edu

A 'greater chance of success' is too loose a variable to really correlate with something like intuition. Success and its magnitude are highly variate. The best you can do is, as PG says, don't make the stupid mistakes.

Speaking of examples, a lot of products have come from building things for oneself (BaseCamp for instance.) Building a product you use may not be much of a help if you're making any fundamental mistake. However, it makes the life of the developer a hell lot easier.

When you are designing a service you use, intuition comes to your aid. Some things just feel right and some things just wrong. It is not something I can really put into words. Intuition, like determination, may not be something you could measure or plot on bar graphs but boy, it does matter.

The point you make is really important but I think its relevance here may be doubtful. Civil disobedience at a massive scale is surely a compelling way of protest though you have to keep in mind that civil disobedience is about voluntary display of indignance by EVERYONE participating (read here as the users.)

The Pirate Bay cannot take that decision on behalf of their users. It has to be an active and voluntary enagagement.

Further, this TPB post stands for something more than mere access to paid content. It is essentially a protocol infused with freedom. No bar on content; no censorship; no policing. How one uses it is immaterial but as long as it exists, it offers people that freedom. Dissidents, political prisoners, protesters can always look to it as a last resort to share things.

I think that coming out the way you describe is just not feasible for the TPB, the same way surrendering never made sense to Robin Hood.

Duarte's work at Android as Director has been really impressive. Honeycomb was the first major release with an element of his design influence.

Besides, I really loved Web OS UI. It was built for user-friendliness from the ground up and brought some very bold design decisions to the table. It sadly never took off.

The application would have access to see your email address i.e. <paul's-id>@gmail.com

The app uses it to send a welcome message to users. Unfortunately that's the default minimum permission set granted by App Engine Users API. Further, I promise not to be evil:

      iheartpy.com/privacy.txt

Feel free to write to me for any feedback and/ or help.

       diwank@iheartpy.com

This conversation seems to be getting a little off-topic. So if anyone feels that, please feel free to send me a word at

      diwank@iheartpy.com

Huh? I actually use the App Engine Users API and zed I'm truly sorry for the crappy message that put you off.

What it meant was that the application would have access to see your email address i.e. google will disclose the address zed's-id@gmail.com

Unfortunately that's the default minimum permission set granted. I use it to send people a welcome message. Further, I promise not to be evil here: iheartpy.com/privacy.txt

Thanks for the encouragement!

I too tried my hand at it in a side project: iheartpy.com

See if there's anything you find useful in it. Although, I think this comment needs to be someplace else.

tl;dr -

I think I fixed this problem in my app (iheartpy.com) using AIML. Caution: Still a work in progress.

The whoe thing -

I am a self-taught programmer. And I had been an extensive user of codeacademy myself. I realized this rather serious design flaw early on and tried to do something about it.

Initially, I tried to right my own engine based on JSON but midway I discovered AIML. It suited the task perfectly. So I downloaded pyAIML library [1]. It is surprisingly simple to get started with. I hacked around a bit and got a workable python app.

Finally using pyAIML + regexp, I ended up with a crude engine that takes something like this (in Python):

      def foo(param1, param2)

and spits out:

      FUNCTION foo PARAMS param1 param2

which can be easily manipulated and replied to by the pyAIML parser. It worked flawlessly. And moreover, designing lessons is as simple as creating an XML file.

Then I threw together a minimal UI and got it up and running on App Engine here:

      iheartpy.com

I used CodeMirror [2] for the editor. The focus of the UI was to be extremely minimal ( = blazing fast) and delightfully non-distracting ( = no post-to-facebook rubbish). This being a side-project, I thought I could easily get away with that. :)

Honestly, this is my first project and looks more like the work of a script-junkie at this point of time. The lessons are not done yet. I wasted a lot of time in trying to optimize my app for App Engine. And now I'm an 18 year-old who has a LOT of exams on his head and this unfinished project. It is kinda disheartening.

Anyway here's the github repo [3]. It is not very neat. Psst.. I added some LOLPython magic as well [4]!

Finally, I made something that is essentially an MVP. I'm new to both design and coding. Plus, I don't think I'm proficient enough in Python to teach people.

In short, I need help. Would be happy enough with some feedback, though. ;)

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/PyAIML

[2] http://github.com/marijnh/CodeMirror2

[3] https://github.com/creatorrr/IHeartPy

[4] http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/diary/archive/2007/0...

Maybe you're right about learning 'the hard way'. I too strongly believe in learning with rigorous practice. But, one has to understand that people take various approaches to learning and teaching.

There cannot be a right way to teach given the multitude of learners now online.

One must account for the relative sophistication packed into the Mars Exploration Rover too. Moreover, there cannot be a fair comparison between a probe and a long term rover.

Hundreds of engineers had worked on it. A community's confidence was shattered with this failure. Trying to measure the extent of this failure in terms of money does not do it justice.

Such a failure is a loss to the entire world. Science has no boundaries.

I have had 'normal' schooling for the most part of my life. Two years back, I got into web dev. Made an app or two. Now working on others. I learnt everything about it on my own. For the first time in my life, I REALLY understood the meaning of an effective pitch and the value of expression. I taught myself to write well, to be able to communicate with the developer community, do a lot of math and well, coding. I spent time learning how to sketch too. I had so much fun studying the boring subjects - arts, writing etc. In fact, the 'boring' subjects were made boring only for lack of application! Had I gone the 'normal' way: I don't know whether I'd have been better off but what I do know is that I could never have learnt so much.

It's really circumstantial. What works for someone may not work at all for someone else. So, there cannot be a fair comparison, so to speak.

Plus, people who are really looking forward to something like this are waiting in anticipation (Like me!)

Unbelievable for having been written in 1995. It bears testament to Bill Gates' vision and incredible foresight.

Quote: In the next 20 years the improvements in computing power will be outpaced by the exponential improvements in communications networks. The combination of these elements will have a fundamental impact on work, learning and play.

Amazing! Map Reduce couldn't get simpler.

Brings a smile to your face! :)