When anyone tells you some app idea you have already heard a thousand times, do you throw a OutOfFucksToGiveException?

So you have billion dollar idea, keep it to yourself.....

Had a team with

1 entrepreneur who has this great billion dollar Idea and want me to sign an NDA before he can share the idea

1 newb who thinks that X language is the coolest because that's what everyone on Hacker news says

1 person who spends more time with other team than yours. I'll be fortunate to even spot him during the hackathon. Aka, "networking guy"

And then there's me, wondering why was I even here in the first place

Oh wait, that's the every hackathon I've been to.

Uncle- What do you do?

Me- I'm a software engineer

Uncle- My brother's friend's son is also a software engineer.

Me- (so what am I supposed to do about it?) yes that's nice

Uncle- I have a great idea, u should implement, I'm just telling you, it is a revolutionary idea

Me- (oh fuck, not again) yes tell

Uncle- you should make a matrimonial site which tracks what people do on internet and tell their to-be-spouses about it

Me - (yeah, I'll get sued for breach of privacy, and it has got nothing to do with my current line of work, and will probably cause divorces before marriage) yes great idea uncle

Uncle- see I told you this billion dollar idea, u should do hard work and make it

Just WHY in god's name do all uncles think laptop is a magic box in which I just have to type their idea in and it will spit out a website/software in 2 minutes. I don't go around advising them about their line of work.

Idea Guy repellent:

Next time they tell you that they have a billion dollar idea and want you to build it, don't get angry.

Just point them to a code learning website and tell them if their idea is truly worth a billion dollar then they should spend the time learning the tech.

Then laugh as other idea guys come to them with ideas about their billion dollar apps while the rest of us are finally left alone.

Right hand working on that "billion dollar" website idea of mine; Left hand holding our 4month baby who won't sleep when put down!!!!

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

" i have a billion-dollar-idea"

A mate from highschool contacted me the other day, offering me a job on this grand new idea he had.

So I said: "Allright, lets hear it, whats the idea?"

Him: "Trust me, its the next billion dollar app! It is a whole new social network for..."

I don't think it's to complicated...

Dumb clients, no matter who they are if they want you to fix their computer ... Create a new Twitter , hack, when you don't hack.
They make our lives hell .. why ? Because ignorance.

My favourite is when they expect you to work for nothing.oh but you can have 2% it's a billion dollar idea you'll make like 20 mill!😒🙄 All I'll do is sit here since i was the genius if the idea you work out the details ? 400 hours you say? I'm sure it'll take 20 don't be silly now.

Just finished my aMaZinG biLlioNairE aPp. It was easier than I thought

Friend: i have an idea
Me: what is it?
Friend: uber is not yet here, lets do the app exactly like uber only for the city, can you do that like in one month?
Me: uber is a billion dollar company with several and the best engineers in the world
Friend: so what, just copy the exact same idea, of course the money comes when the app is done
Me: sure... ill call you in a month. (delete conversation)

when life gives you lemon, buy vodka and stuff. prepare good vodka martini. then develop an app to sell it across countries.

I am sick of misrotated videos.

Sometimes, the phone camera software saves a video vertically because the user hits "record" before the software has detected that the user is holding the smartphone horizontally, because the software stupidly launches in vertical orientation by default.

So the software wants the user to wait until it has finally detected horizontal orientation, which causes the user to miss out on a moment.

How about the camera software actually saves the video in the orientation it was recorded in for the most time, rather than only the beginning of the video?

If I can think of this idea, billion-dollar companies surely can.

In the meantime, misrotated videos can be fixed using this ffmpeg command on Linux or Windows:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="0" -c copy output_file.mp4

And if the phone was held with the home button to the left side:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="180" -c copy output_file.mp4

This solution is superior compared to using -vf (video filters) because it only touches the metadata of the video. No re-encoding. This means no quality loss and no CPU/GPU power needed to process the video again. It just passes through.

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

How do you respond to the person who says this: "Hey #{insert_your_name}, I overheard that you are a programmer, I would like to tell suggest you a billion-dollar business app idea"?

I rarely donate money to charity, but I consider myself fairly charitable in other ways. For example, I rejected the 16th "billion dollar app idea" presented to me over the course of a few years, today. (Counting only ideas that come from semi rational people). I do believe I make the world a better place.

Uni nowadays be like:

Lecturer says everyone should come up with an idea, find out how much it costs, figure out the competition, write a business plan, find out the development costs and indicate your value proposition. Best idea gets an A.

This is more like trading an A for a potential billion dollar idea.

Alright, my very first post here was about this project and I am thinking it out loud again.

I see a problem and I am struggling to find a solution.

Now what I am thinking of is to articulate the problem well and state WHY I believe it needs to be solved. There are some reasons which must be presented in a capitalist way.

Furthermore, I am thinking of doing a market research to understand various demographics, validate the idea, and figure out the product-market fit.

Now, this qualitative research and quantitative data will help me decide whether it is worth putting in the efforts to solve the problem or not.

And since, we have an MVP already (funnily yes, we built it before all of the above), that will help me validate the tangible solution.

Once we get a confidence boost, then it will be time to get that single transaction which has net positive cash flow.

Start scaling to 'next billion users', so a billion transaction with net positive cash flow.

I won't be branching out into multiple verticals before be able to sustainably scale the core USP.

And while the second half sounds like, 'I have a million dollar idea', I am trying to be more and more realistic and rationale instead of falling in love with my idea.

I don't even have an idea (read solution) to fall in love with. Rather I have a problem that is bothering me.

So, yes, I am continuing this journey to solve the problem which started in second year of my hostel room and has evolved over 10 years.