Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to repeat other comments here; but this app smells of a very dangerous attitude: Built with love by novices with grand intentions, with complete blindness to the real consequences that happen when novices are ignorant in their field.

If your goal is to "find a learning project," I suggest finding a very different "learning project." Otherwise, keep "Kate's app" private, word-of-mouth, invite-only for under 20 people.

The 1980s and 1990s are long-gone, you can no longer "learn as you go" when the consequences of your application malfunctioning have real-world implications.

---

A few years ago, my employer used an HR app that appeared built by a novice. In that time period; they sent me a PDF with tax information for half the people in the company; and then they royally screwed up the tax information sent to the IRS for me.

View on HN

How do you know that the authors are novices with "complete blindness" to real consequences? Where are you getting the "find a learning project" goal from?

It sucks that you've been burnt by that before, but it sounds like your employer was the one who screwed you there, not the author of the application.

Uh, this is appears to be an application that collects data that is regulated in most legal jurisdictions, lacks a published terms of use, doesn't have a published privacy policy, and at first glance is missing rudimentary security controls related to TLS and content security.

The sparse documentation makes claims about privacy and security, but there is no evidence to back those claims.

They don't know, it's a total guess. That's why they hedge with phrases like "smell" and "if your goal..."

Total guess implies that they closed their eyes and made a random choice. There's a reason why the top posts, including one by a lawyer (who recommends immediately shutting down the site before getting advice), are saying caution is very warranted.

Reminds me of the (so called) engineering teams I’ve worked with at high profile startups who dealt primarily with their software based on “code smell”. It was amazing. If you accomplished something that didn’t make your boss look smarter than you then it was a bad “code smell”. Logic be damned

Complete lack of legal compliance in the area that they are operating; the style of the name.

The issue of my employer is an example of real world consequences when a novice builds a product without understanding the rules they need to follow.

Unfortunately, there is a cohort of people in the startup scene, and who also participate in Hacker News, who don't like to hear negative feedback even when there are very clear consequences that that feedback is trying to address. Don't be one of those people, especially around issues of legal compliance.

Should it be called “healthily” or “contactful” instead? Lol

Startup names are so stupid

I had the strong urge to scroll down that page to see if there's anything more to this site: who made it, legalese, etc, but no. While it claims data safety and privacy...

Yeah, that smells amateurish. Maybe OP can code well, maybe they have domain knowledge in healthcare, but damn, definitely utterly clueless in the legal area.

Telltale signs of application immaturity like using ids as urls

https://katesapp.org/patients/41

Never mind that URLs are identifiers.

From the blurb at the top: “ The app is 95% complete, […] I intend to clean up the rest of it, and go GA within a few weeks. ”

Assuming the last 5% is going to just take a few weeks is naive from a development point of view. Everyone learns this the hard way, so I don’t mean it as a dig.

Every completed project was at one point a few weeks away from being done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com