

Something Meaningful - mahesh_rm
http://blog.coffeestrap.com/2013/05/06/something-meaningful/

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potatolicious
Very cool, but I bailed on the signup: your Facebook login asks for my email,
friends list, and public profile. Why is all of this necessary simply as
authentication?

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mahesh_rm
Hi there, I apologize for delay: posting on HN before flying looks like a bad
idea :-). We are not at all collecting your friend list in our DB. Just your
name, gender, and email. We may have erroneously asked fb login to ask for
friend list too, checking it right now. But again, I guarantee you we are not
storing any information in DB apart from name, email, and gender!

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kafkaesque
Are you trying to combine dating, learning a language, and collaborating on
'work stuff'? It wasn't very clear to me.

Anyway, when I first moved to a new city, I tried doing the whole 'language
tandem' thing, which, by the way, is not a popular phrase in the US. In fact,
many people don't understand what that is. People usually call it 'language
exchange'. At least in my experience.

Anyway, I used <http://conversationexchange.com>.

It _was_ frustrating. But it depends what you wanted out of it. I wanted to
genuinely learn a language, but had heard a lot of people use it to date.

It didn't work out for me because I was a beginner, and I needed a little more
structure. The people who I met just wanted to 'chat', with no real learning
material. And many didn't even know what books to recommend.

I think it would've been better if there would've been two people who
genuinely wanted to learn a language and were at the same level. But even
then, switching back and forth from teacher to student is challenging,
especially amongst beginners.

I think it worked out great when both parties had sufficient knowledge to not
use a book, and were just learning vocabulary and a small set of new rules.

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mahesh_rm
Hi, you seem to summarize, in this post, the kind frustration we have been
experiencing so far by language exchangers telling us about their experiences
(commonly known as tandem learners in Europe). This also answer your question:
We don't do dating. We do language exchange. For free, done right, and
modulated upon your interests. Because you pick up a language much faster if
you actually enjoy what you are talking about, and the person you are talking
to. :-)

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mtowle
Hey Mahesh,

I'm still a bit confused too, but I think it's because I'm American: the terms
"language exchange" and "tandem learners" don't mean anything here.

So is it like: say I'm fluent in English and conversational in German; I'd
meet up with someone who's fluent in German and conversational in English, and
we'd help each other learn? Is that the idea?

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alemhnan
Hey mtowle, Alessandro from CoffeeStrap. The idea is exactly what you have
said. We are still tuning the format so to deal with different levels of
languages.

So far for example here in San Francisco we have a lot of people willing to
learn Mandarin(or actually speaking! I am looking at you Zack! :) ) and fluent
in English. Another trend here in the bay is about Korean/Japanese. And a lot
of Spanish speakers and Portuguese as well. Those are the main languages so
far!

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gknoy
Thank you for your explanation. The blog post didn't really detail that, so I
mistakenly thought it primarily was about getting together to discuss Creating
Things -- like a blind date for hackers to find coding/project partners --
rather than what seems to be primarily about learning languages.

Fortunately, your main page is VERY clear on this main goal. Well done! It
makes me wish I were trying to learn a language, as I expect that there's not
much use for someone who only speaks English.

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scott_s
I had the same impression from the blog post. I think it's a good idea, even
in a blog post, to always say, "Our project is a tool that ______".

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tnorthcutt
Please, please, please, please: link to your website from your blog, in the
header. Just do it!

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mahesh_rm
OK. Now it takes a double click. One click to blog root. Another click to
website. But we'll do that. :-)

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itsybitsycoder
The thing is, once I've clicked the CoffeeStrap/blog header once, and it takes
me to the blog index page, I'm not going to click the identical
CoffeeStrap/blog header again because I expect it will just take me back to
the page I'm already on.

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scott_s
I did the same thing, and didn't even realized until now that there even was a
way to get to the their real site.

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benjamincburns
Really cool idea - I've already applied!

Two quick suggestions, though. First, In this blog post, every one of your
images is a guy and a girl together. kafkaesque and others expressed confusion
about whether or not there was a dating overtone. Maybe this is adding to the
confusion?

Second, please get some new icons for the male/female indicators in the sign
up process. If you need icons instead of text, just use the standard gender
symbols with some pink/blue as an added indicator. Maybe I'm dumb, but it took
me a long time to realize that the leaf-looking things on the side of the
girl's head were pigtails.

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mahesh_rm
Hi Benjamin. Yep, we specifically focused on organizing male&female meetings
in order to collect feedback and understand how to handle UX & UI in
situations that would otherwise be prone for confusion!

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bradbeattie
> we specifically focused on organizing male&female meetings

Okay, so it's intended. I'm sure this will be followed by an explanation.

> in order to collect feedback

Doesn't really explain the male/female pairings.

> and understand how to handle UX & UI in situations that would otherwise be
> prone for confusion!

Maybe I'm off my rocker today, but that doesn't really explain the start of
the sentence. The only thing I'm getting here is that the pairings are
intentional.

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benjamincburns
> Maybe I'm off my rocker today, but that doesn't really explain the start of
> the sentence. The only thing I'm getting here is that the pairings are
> intentional.

You're not off your rocker. I'd imagine that I'm just as confused.

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icesoldier
I love this idea and have this bookmarked. The only things that make me
hesitant to sign up are:

(1) I'm definitely not conversational in any language other than English. (I'm
very slowly working on Japanese, but I haven't really built up much vocabulary
or much of the grammar. I'm less driven about learning than I probably should
be, but I figure I can continue to work on it this slowly until I get to a
certain point.) Have you had any stores of people with differing relative
skills doing a language exchange?

(2) I live in a not-quite-densely-populated area (Amarillo, Texas), so I can
only wonder how vibrant the CoffeeStrap user-base here would be. There's
really no solution to this one other than to sign up and try to start
something myself. It's what really kills me about living out here and seeing
all of these cool services, but I suppose it comes with the territory.

~~~
mahesh_rm
Hi IS,

(1) yes language proficiency is definitely one variable that inputs in our
matching algorhitm (2) you never know, we are now observing CoffeeStrappers
signing up form VERY remote areas of the world. of course more dense of CS is
your area, more accurate matches you will have, but I wouldn't say you are
apriori condemned to a Japanless CS future if you keep on living in Amarillo!
:-)

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asr2bd
Is there any significant trend of people leaving academia for the tech world?
I spent 4 years grinding away on cancer drug development. Between the billions
of dollars it takes to commercialize such drugs and the single digit
percentage that actually advance from human trials to clinical use, I wondered
if the work I was doing was not going to be put to good use.

More importantly, I didn't feel like I was learning every day. Much of the
work is absurdly repetitive.

I started learning how to build web applications and found it more mentally
rewarding... but what are the ramifications of that for research? It's
incredibly important but not seen as very exciting these days.

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alemhnan
Hey asr2bd, Alessandro here from CoffeeStrap. I think that research in the
field of web application & Co could, and should, be done way more than today.
The whole architecture of the web is incredibly complex and we are using tools
that could be improved a ton. Now I am rushing to catch a flight, if you want
to share some thoughts on that give me a shot: alessandro at coffeestrap dot
com

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Mithaldu
You need to do some testing in Opera, the page looks pretty funny:
<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10190786/badfont.png>

Edit: In my Firefox it's broken too. Turns out only Chrome renders it legibly.

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icesoldier
Same in IE9. The language list is nicer, but the instructional text is just as
hard to read.

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softbuilder
Side note: What is it about graduate work that burns people out on their
field? I've met quite a few people with masters and PhDs who switch fields
afterward and basically run away.

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alemhnan
That's a good question, I was too almost to the burning point. But honestly I
still have to figured out which was the problem or which solutions we could
adopt. I have that slight belief that there is a more general pattern over
there, not sure yet about the whole thing.

As "defense" of PhDs program I could say that it definitely trains your mind
to look at things with a deeper perspective.

~~~
breuderink
Could this training effect of a PhD perhaps be the reason that people switch
fields? When starting, one's field of research seems very promising and
exciting. At the end though, one knows enough to see limitations in the field.
In addition, PhDs are trained to approach problems differently. I think this
knowledge and a different mental attitude can make other fields seems more
worthwhile.

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ser0
At this point in time, I would say yes. The start of a PhD teaches you a lot
of useful research skills. However, the academic/research environment do not
necessarily put them to good use.

This can lead people, such as myself, to investigate the value of a PhD itself
and find that the career prospects, financial rewards, and even intellectual
rewards, are difficult to align/justify.

I think that a reasonable conclusion is indeed that switching fields would
generally be a good move, unless you know yourself to be an outstanding
researcher within your field of expertise.

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danso
Good luck and congrats on following your dreams...I remember when you first
mentioned CoffeeStrap on HN and I thought it was some bastard product
involving CoffeeScript and Twitter Bootstrap.

Hopefully you find the technical person you need to help execute your
idea...it's not just tech expertise you need, but someone who understands and
buys into your idea well enough to see how tech can make it uniquely (and
practically) executable.

~~~
alemhnan
Genuinely thanks for the good luck. Day by day we are figuring out things over
things. We got some attentions in this past months and we'll definitely need
advise in a lot of fields. Hopefully you will hear from us again in future!
(still not about a bastard mesh-up between CoffeeScript and Bootstrap! :)

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andrewtbham
So... it's like a real world verbling?

<https://www.verbling.com/>

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mahesh_rm
In some ways, we can say this. I see it as a tool to allow language exchangers
and tandem learners to meet people in one to one interactions, according to
their interests. This, safely, for free, and over a coffee. :-)

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simonebrunozzi
Good luck!

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mahesh_rm
thank you Simone! :-)))))

