anujkk

It depends on the city. I am living in Mumbai since 2014 and faced power outage only once which was due to grid failure caused by some cyber attack.

Otherwise, there is uninterrupted power supply 24x7x365.

There are smaller alternatives available on Photojojo :

1)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/cell-phone-lenses/

2)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/macro-lens-band/

3)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/iphone-telephoto-lens...

4)http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/olloclip-iphone-lens/

Like many other verticals there are many technological innovations happening in photography too. This "smartphone attachable lens-style camera" is one of these recent innovations. I can't comment on quality of the lens itself but they must be far better than that of a standard camera installed on mobile phones. These lenses can be used both attached/detached to the mobile phone. They use NFC (if your phone is into that sort of thing) or create their very own Wi-Fi signal to connect with the phone.

I first read about such lenses and other similar products on http://photojojo.com/store/ . They have such products for both android and iphone.

Now, is it worth it? Depends on your requirements. If you don't want to get into professional photography but still want to improve the quality of your photographs you can use one of these. However, remember that these don't replace DSLRs.

1. Mobile Camera : average quality/almost zero creative control/very good mobility

2. Mobile Camera + Lens accessory : better quality/almost no creative control/good mobility

3. Point & Shoot Camera : decent quality/little creative control/good mobility

4. Hybrid/Zoom Camera : decent quality/very high optical zoom/decent creative control/poor mobility

5. Mirrorlesss/Interchangeable Lens Camera : Good quality/Good Creative Control/average mobility

6. DSLRs : Good quality/Good Creative Control/Poor Mobility

I personally prefer to keep [1] in my pocket & [5] in my bag(along with lenses). I also have an old Zoom Camera that usually sits in my home. I occasionally use it together with a teleconverter lens to take photographs of sun, moon & objects/people that are far far away.

What about those in India who traded using localbitcoins.com? Is there any possibility that they too can get into legal trouble or affected in some other way?

Here is what I will suggest :

1. CSS Preprocessing Language : Any one of LESS or SASS.

2. Twitter Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation.

3. Concepts of UI/UX Design.

4. Let him do some projects and hone his skills. How about making his own website/portfolio or making some HTML templates/themes and try selling it on marketplaces like themeforest?

5. Once he becomes good at UI/UX Design & Development he can then focus on back-end. I would suggest him to go with Python & Flask. Learning Python language will not only help him in web application development but it will also allow him to explore & play other interesting stuff like Machine Learning, Computer Vision, etc.

Check the comments here : http://notes.envato.com/authors/dealing-with-rejection-part-...

My email to founder :

I would like to suggest that you need to improve the quality of feedbacks you provide to theme developers when their submissions get rejected. Theme developers work hard to develop themes and they atleast deserve a proper feedback about what are the exact reasons their submission got rejected. This will help them make changes and improve the design if possible. I understand that to maintain the quality of themes in your marketplace you need to reject some themes but why not do it with a proper feedback? Is it that much time consuming?

At them moment they just get a standard reply that their item must be improved in one or more of the following areas:

- Visual quality and appeal

- Technical quality

- Originality

This is a terrible form of communication and a terrible user experience for theme developers who provide all the themes you sell at your marketplace. I wish you take some time out and do something about it.

I don't know how different are the work environment of ISRO and DRDO but I guess it must be same. One of my colleague at Tata Consultancy Services, an ABAP developer, left his job with decent salary and an opportunity to go to UK for an offshore project of 2 years. Why? To join DRDO at salary 4 times less than what he was getting coz he hated his work and was passionate about working on something that is not just interesting but also makes a difference.

I may be wrong but what I understood is that currently you have wordpress-like setup for theming your web application : Theme developers upload theme files(html/css/images) to publish it on production server. What you now need is the ability of average non-technical user to modify and save any standard theme online without the need to touch html/css code. Something similar to tumblr : http://oi39.tinypic.com/339lpfk.jpg

Right? I don't know about any SAAS that will let you do that and even if it does it will be difficult to integrate with your system. Why not develop it yourself or outsource it to some professional developer? All you need to do is-

- present copy of a default theme to customize

- let user change text using inline editing

- let user change/upload images

- let user select different colors/fonts using forms

- optional html/css editor for advanced users

- Save and apply the changes

Agreed. Thanks for the input. How about the other two color schemes(You can check them in demo)? I will make the required changes to improve the design.

I guess you are confused between web development & web design. Django is a web application development framework and has nothing to do with "design".

I am primarily a python hacker and not a professional designer but to answer your question, I made http://getquicksite.com in 14 hours this weekend. Of course, having a framework like Bootstrap to start with helps.

added

Oh! I wasn't aware of that. I will take care of that.

I find some serious issues with the design, not in terms of aesthetics, but in terms of usability. I am a programmer, a web designer, a marketeer and a business guy.

don't ever let a programmer to tell you how a proper design should look like...

Don't ever let anyone tell you to ignore genuine feedback from anyone especially when he can be a potential user of your site. Focus on what the feedback is and if it is good for your project and not on the "profession" of the person who gave you feedback. Also, I have all the reasons to believe the person who you are giving this advice, who created this site, is also a programmer.

Reading some comments on Designer News [1], I can already see some HN-DN clash.

[1] https://news.layervault.com/stories/608-designer-news-on-hac...

It's amazing how many UI/UX experts you can find on Hacker News.

Not everyone who makes a comment is an expert but even then they can have an opinion and they have all the right to express it. Whether you are a hacker or designer you should be professional enough to be grateful that people are even making an effort to express their true opinion. BTW, there are many real UI/UX experts here and I guess there must be some great hackers on Designer News. Can't both peacefully co-exist without making nasty remarks on each other?

Ha ha some of the comments are funny. - "I have no idea what the links do, I only can guess when seeing the icons. The smiley icon is the most confusing."

so CLICK THEM if you're not sure. Sheesh where's people sense of adventure and discovery these days. And c'mon you don't know what a plus sign might mean?

It is amazing how one can find it funny when someone points a major flaw in design that results in terrible user experience. Beautiful icons are of no use if they don't convey clear message to the user. Such designs are similar to a beautiful girl who is mad. When will we learn to accept our mistakes?

The discussion in that thread left me with a sour taste. Forget about the design of site, now I have serious doubts about the quality of the actual community there.

Haha nice. So you already started working on it? How many signups you got? :)

You raised some very valid questions. Let me address them one by one.

Why do this instead of using Google to find out the most popular niche sites?

- because not all good sites can be discovered using Google. For example, there may be a Facebook group for a niche that is far more active than a dedicated forum site. There may be some good niche sites that are not ranked high enough. The idea is to let people submit good sites they know about.

- to make all such sites available at one place for quick access, not only for me but anyone else who is interested.

people have to remember that this list exists when they are thinking of ideas

- It is not just about discovering startup ideas. It is about interacting with people outside hacker community through these sites. You may know about problems they face and it can result in some good ideas but it will also be helpful in marketing some existing products for that niche.

- One thing I would like to make clear is that if enough links are provided I will make a website/google doc for this where anyone can submit new websites. May be I will do it anyway but there is no harm in asking for more such sites from community.

Who will take it upon themselves to categorize these and present them in a helpful way? Who will curate this list to ensure that only the "right" sites are added?

I will do that on a dedicated site/google doc. I don't think it is a very time intensive task. HackerNews isn't a good place to keep and maintain such information but people here can definitely help by submitting the sites they know about.

who will curate this list over time by adding, removing, and editing it?

If I make a small web app for this(it will take just few hours) anyone can submit sites and people who are interested in maintaining it can be made moderator. In any case some effort is definitely required and if people find it valuable it is worth the effort.

I guess you raised all these questions because you thought I am proposing that this list should be created and maintained on HN itself. That is simply not most effective way to do that. May be I didn't made it clear but the objective of this post was to just collect such links not make a wiki on HN.

jdrake3, from your comment history it appears that you have been hell-banned.

Do you mind sharing which singing course? Is it online?

I'm also interested in "3. Visualization". Can you share how are you going to approach it? I'm interested in knowing what topics to cover, which books to consult, which tools to use.

This reminds me of what my grandfather told me once -

"I often hear many people(mostly teens) claiming that they are independent and they can live life as they wish. They say they don't care about society. They wrongly perceive society as something evil that is stopping them to live the life they want. They forget that in society we are neither independent or dependent, but interdependent. It is next to impossible to live completely independently."

Thanks. I will try these. However, I use python/flask and I prefer resources that are language/framework agnostic so that anyone can learn from it and implement it in his preferred language/framework.

I have a better idea. How about charging users to get access to someone else's account?

At Instagram, the backend, API and web applications are built using Python/Django but not mobile applications. They are made with native ios/android technologies.

I don't know if my story is same as yours but I have gone through a similar phase in my life. I started programming in 2001 as a student, continued doing it for 2 years in my job at one of the largest IT company in India. Programming was fun. Back then I was able to code all day without getting bored. There was no time and motivation to do things like watching movies, dating, etc. which other people of my age found a fun thing to do. As a student I found it great to do technical things my peers(or even teachers) weren't able to do and I liked when they called me a "hacker". As an employee I found it very satisfying to find solutions to problems that no one else in my team was able to do. Then after 2-3 years at job, things changed. I lost my interest in coding. I was not happy anymore. I got depressed. Why?

After few months of soul searching I found the reason. My excellence at programming was due to external motivation - to be recognized and applauded by peers. When I got that I lost my motivations to do that. Given the quality of work done in big Indian IT companies it was really difficult to find people who were better than me. I was thinking about it in a wrong way. I needed to change myself, my goals and vision. I did that. I asked myself what I want from life? I learned all that I wanted was to do something meaningful with it. I don't need the recognition and applauds from others but I need to feel that I am making good use of my life to contribute something back to the world. I realized I never loved programming itself but I did it for other reasons - to get recognized by peers. I changed my reason to do it. I now do it to create value. I now do it to make things that people need. I now do it to make a small part of world better. I feel better when I know that my work is creating value for someone.

I don't love programming anymore. I don't need to but I can find it very satisfying to do things that are even more boring to do than programming if it helps me in achieving what I want - "Creating Value". It doesn't matter what others think about it. I need to feel that I made a contribution.

My suggestion - Start Contributing.

1. Get someone who is a good web developer to help and guide you.

2. Understand that web works on a client/server architecture and a web developer has to deal with both client side technologies(that your browser renders e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and server side language/frameworks/databases(you've got many language choice in PHP/Python/Ruby/JavaScript/C#/java/etc)

3. Focus on front-end first. It will make you a web designer if not a web developer. You don't need any web server to do this. Just write code in files and run it using your web browser.

- Learn how to make web pages using HTML5.

- Learn how to style it using CSS3.

- Learn how to do client side scripting using javascript. I will recommend you to use the book - "JavaScript : The good parts".

- You can then learn javascript libraries like "jQuery" or front-end frameworks like "twitter bootstrap" which will make life easier for you.

4. Setup server environment on your PC. I would suggest you to start with PHP programming language, MySQL database, Apache Web Server. You can also choose python, ruby, etc but php will be easy to learn if you are new. If you are using linux you can install LAMP(Linux Apache MySQl PHP). If you are using Windows you can install WAMP. If you are using Mac you can install MAMP. Learn how to serve your html/css/javascript code using server and access it on your browser using localhost.

5. Learn server side scripting using PHP. Use MYSQL as database if needed. Learn to use tools like phpmyadmin.

6. Do a small web development project like making your own Website/Blog. Don't use blogging softwares like wordpress. Make everything yourself.

7. Buy a domain for your personal website and a shared hosting account from a web hosting provider(e.g., http://www.webfaction.com/). Use a FTP client to upload your code and host your website online.

9. You can then choose to learn MVC architecture and any MVC php framework like codeigniter, kohana, symfony, etc. Rewrite your website/blog using framework.

9. Once you are comfortable you can think about switching to any other language/framework combinations like Ruby/Rails, Ruby/Sinatra, Python/Django, Python/Flask, JavaScript(Node.js)/Express.js , C#/Asp.net MVC, etc.

10. Remember that it is a long and slow process and it will take you years to evolve as decent web developer. Focus on "learn-do-learn-do" approach. keep learning new things and use it to make new things. Best of luck.

I believe it depends on the personality of person. I like to work in an environment where I am able to do my work alone, in isolation, have full control over process and schedule, and interact with others only when necessary. It's not that I hate interacting with people. I like to socialize but not when I am working.

The best way to be productive is to focus more on actual work and bare minimum on management. This is what I do :

1) Take one project at a time.

2) Make a vision document, basically what features I want in full fledged version of my application - Plain text document on my desktop.

3) Reduce the number of features to minimum required for MVP and make a to-do list for MVP - plain text document on my desktop

4) After 2 & 3 is done focus only on actual work(coding/designing) ticking off to-do items one by one.