Google dedicates engineering team to accelerate development of WordPress - <AUTHOR> https://searchengineland.com/need-speed-google-dedicates-engineering-team-accelerate-development-wordpress-ecosystem-291214 <comment><USER2> So after taking over one blogging platform and mothballing it (Blogger), then wiping out a host of 200X startups with Google Reader and _then_ killing Google Reader, which effectively killed RSS... after all that Google has woken up to the fact that the last source of independent content, that's not big- media-owned or stuck in a walled garden like FaceBook is Wordpress?

And back in 2007ish I remember bloggers crying out to Google for help with some tools /APIs to help combat comment spam and Google basically ignoring it, leading to the eventual death of blog comments and blog based discussion.

Looking at all that, it's great to finally see Google trying to support bloggers - the people that have delivered some of the most interesting content in their index.

Or am I too jaded?

<comment><USER3> I still hate Google for killing Reader. I imagine its death was only a minor inconvenience in the US, but it was a sad day for internet freedom in Iran.

At the time, Iran had for a couple of years implemented an internet censorship platform, blocking access to much of the internet. Nearly all international news agencies (CNN, BBC, NPR, etc.) were inaccessible; so were most of "web 2.0".

Despite the widespread censorship, there was a large active community of independent blogs, non-sanctioned news sites, and small e-publications. The reason this structure could thrive was that even though these websites and weblogs were blocked, they were accessible through Google Reader.

Because of the way Google services were implemented, the government could not block Reader without also blocking GMail and Google Search, which was not an option. As long as authors had a way (like a not-yet-blocked VPN or a friend outside the country they could email to) to post articles, people could read them, like them, comment on them, etc. Iran's censorship was to significant degree neutralized by this setup. The community was large, strong, and thriving. They even had their own jargon: the community was referred to as blogestan [1]; Google Reader was called Gooder, etc.

And then, Google, for some (now obviously incorrect, but ultimately irrelevant to my point) financial calculation, decided to kill Reader. Just like that, overnight, the breadth of the web accessible to an average Iranian decreased by orders of magnitude. The entire community of freethinking authors and their followers disappeared. The only news websites remaining accessible were those sanctioned by the government, pushing the official narrative.

Google put a large nail in the coffin of internet freedom in Iran. For that, I will never forgive them.

[1] with the -stan suffix, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan)

<comment><USER4> How is it Google's responsibility to help you defy your country's onerous laws?

<comment><USER5> Google declared many times that they do care about freedom of information, do not endorse censorship, etc.

If their policies were a bit more cohesive, maybe the people who killed Reader would have remembered these declarations, and maybe decided differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've worked with WordPress for over 9 years and set up probably over 100 sites, but can't wait for it to die.

It's easy to setup and the ecosystem is great, but the security issues are massive and there's really no reason for content to be stored in a database for the majority of sites.

I hope a static site generator comes along with an intuitive UI for non- technical people to easily update their own content.

<comment><USER7> > I hope a static site generator comes along with an intuitive UI for non- > technical people to easily update their own content.

Does this not exist? Would love to offer that to some of my non-technical team members.

<comment><USER8> There are a number of them. Jekyll and Hyde are two of them. Wordpress is a security disaster, IMHO.

<comment><USER9> I can't speak for Hyde, but Jekyll requires you to edit text files which makes it unaccessible for non-technical people.

<comment><USER10> There's Netlify + GatsbyJS - takes git know-how to setup, but once you're there it's a Rich Text Editor on a webpage controlling your content

<comment><USER11> Add contentful and you have a admin dashboard and hundreds of integrations.

I set this up last week and it's amazing. It costs $0 for my small project.

I've aleo rolled out it out to event websites. And they love it too.

No database is a big win for bloggers, who should focus on content and not security.

<comment><USER12> $249 lowest pricing package after you stretch out pass the free limitations.

<comment><USER11> I won't be hitting a million hits on the api for 99.9% of my projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, the Google Developer's Advocate blog post ([https://medinathoughts.com/2018/01/29/wordpress- google/](https://medinathoughts.com/2018/01/29/wordpress-google/)) sounds like Google is very serious about Wordpress.

Hopefully it leads to great stuff. Historically, there's been near zero interest in php/wordpress amongst the engineering ranks. Everyone wants to learn the Next Big Language/Library/Framework, which is understandable.

Many current/former Googlers have been interested in helping out with a project I'm involved in (GXJam.com), but the conversation ends quickly when I tell them it's WP/php/MySQL.

</comment><comment><USER14> It'd be interested to know what percentage of WordPress sites are 'content- only' static sites. i.e. users are not logging and/or getting personalized content.

WordPress seems overkill for that niche, and this may be an opportunity to build and sell tools that allow easy publishing for static sites, given the July 2018 update.

<comment><USER15> Wordpress has comments and statistics, so there is no blog that is strictly static.

<comment><USER14> there are still options to handle comments (disqus, facebook comments etc.) that don't need a database on your server.

there's solutions for pretty much every dynamic aspect of a blog. If wordpress is slow, and google is going to penalize your search ranking, it's worth looking into.

<comment><USER16> And by using said other options, you give control of your users to a walled garden service. Do we really want more of the internet centralised around Facebook and its ilk?

<comment><USER17> Maybe then Talkyard ([https://www.talkyard.io/blog- comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments)) is interesting to you:

It's hosted & serverless, like Facebook and Disqus.

But at the same time, it's open source, so you will be able to export your comments from Talkyard's servers, install Talkyard yourself and import the comments.

(But I haven't yet built export and import functionality :- P )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> WordPress by itself is pretty fast, but some 3rd party plugins really add up to load times by making lots of queries to database and loading unoptimized or unnecessary assets. In mean time most online WP tutorials "solve" issues by suggesting to install yet another plugin.

<comment><USER19> Really 99% of the arguments I hear about WordPress are because of the community of "developers". Don't get me wrong, there are tons of great developers in the community that are actively working on great features for WordPress either in the form of core or plugins. What I'm specifically referring to are content maintainers that know some CSS, use themes like Avada, and know their go-to plugins to make bloated and convoluted, hard-to- maintain sites.

Really I think where WordPress actually lacks is in the API department. The almost non-sensical approach to partially implemented OOP kills any ambition I have to create a site without my own weird abstraction layer I wrote on top of it all.

<comment><USER20> Wordpress has built-in REST API, beginning from their 4.7 release. [http://v2.wp-api.org/](http://v2.wp-api.org/)

<comment><USER19> I'm talking about their PHP API

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How long until WordPress themes are all AMP-enabled as a part of WP core and the option is enabled by default?

<comment><USER15> It's already the case.

<comment><USER22> That is not true, you need a plugin to enable AMP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if this is intended to be competition with managed Wordpress providers such as WP Engine? the article doesn't distinguish between Wordpress.org (domain.wordpress.org) and Wordpress.com (self hosted) platforms. Perhaps both, with such a large partnership. But in the developer's linked blog post he seems to be referring to the self-hosted platform by mentioning themes and plugins. Very interested to see how this progresses.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, it reads like self-hosted is their focus. Make sense too.

If Google offered a WP hosting solution (a la WP Engine) on the Google Cloud, I'd be very very interested. I don't think Google will do it anytime soon though.

<comment><USER24> WP Engine is a GCP partner: [https://wpengine.com/try/google-cloud- platform/](https://wpengine.com/try/google-cloud-platform/)

And GCP has a page dedicated to Wordpress: [https://cloud.google.com/wordpress/](https://cloud.google.com/wordpress/)

(I work for GCP)

<comment><USER20> Yes, I've seen GCP documentation on WP get better and better each year. Still very different from a managed-hosting offering like WP Engine.

Can you put me on GCP/WP waitlist if such an offering is in the works? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe this bug I filed two years ago about how WordPress loads every version of a post into memory when you go to edit it (and does that three times) will finally get fixed? "High memory usage ( and possible server error) editing post with many/large revisions" [https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/34560](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/34560) "Right now, you will unhappily see "500 server error" and "white screen of death" results eventually if you, say, edit a 400K page for hundreds of revisions, even with a 256MB server memory limit. ... So, it seems that WordPress was indeed loading all the revisions of a post _three_ times when editing it with the edit_form_advanced: once to count the revisions, once to list the timestamps and other metadata of the revisions, and once to check for the latest autosaved revision (if any)."

</comment><comment><USER26> Wordpress runs major league newspaper sites too. Not to disrespect the blogoverse, but there may be a direct efficiency statement for major time, ad revenue sources of daily news. Google may well be feeding the beast, to feed themselves, but not blogs per se: blogging s/w for news websites.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just last night I found myself watching some Wordpress-related videos on the Chrome Developers Youtube channel [0], building on a talk given at the Chrome Dev Summit last year [1]. The Docker implementation is something I'd been considering for a complex Wordpress install recently, so it caught my eye. Building in more PWA features is no harm either.

I have no idea what it all means for the bigger picture of Wordpress/Google/Automattic, but these are nice little tips and ideas to start with anyway.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jav5hPmUaUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jav5hPmUaUw) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di7RvMlk9io](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di7RvMlk9io)

<comment><USER28> If deploying WordPress using Docker, and WordPress scalability interests you, please have a look at this [0] article I wrote, as it shows how you can get a really good WordPress install up and running. I used containers and deployed on CoreOS (yes, it is a bit old -- Kubernetes was not very stable back then). For the deployment stuff, you can read that here [1].

[0] [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scalable-wordpress- architectu...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scalable-wordpress-architecture- lars-larsson)

[1] [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automation-scalable- wordpress...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automation-scalable-wordpress- using-docker-coreos-etcd-lars-larsson/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Glad to see more pro coders helping with wordpress, if ya'll get a few extra hours, buddypress could use some help too! and that could put the screws to fcbook if someone makes an easy to deploy droplet / docker / nextcloud like thing with a few plugins and anti-spam / privacy settings.

Unfortunate that this announcement has the cloud of Google over it. Just about anything google is untrusted and tarnished, not just in the tech circles that know how it profits at the expense of others, but more and more by average people who are getting a clue that google today is nothing like it once was, or once tried to make itself be perceived anyway.

More and more searches are censored, more ads on screen and less of the interesting things to find, services killed off, no customer service, frustrated web site owners... I still have a smidgen of hope for google fiber, but the rest of the brand is not much different than fcbook in my mind, and many others are starting to see the tech companies that put money ahead of giving people what they really expect.

This announcement would get more exiting cheers if it read "ex-googlers team of engineers to help dev wordpress"

Of course we all wonder if the politics that hit the browsers and standards will come to play - but honestly it would make sense to help shore up a product that runs so much of the web, even if google wasn't trying to get it's claws deeper into other software - just producing faster sites that are hacked less will help with the google search results - so just that alone is win win win.

I'm cleaning up hacked wp sites tonight actually, yay.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sounds like a good thing! My company's WordPress site[0] takes 4-8 seconds to load, with a couple paragraphs of text and a few images.

To be fair, I should really switch it over to being a static site, I am using a complicated templating engine to pop out a few paragraphs.

Of course that is the ultimate irony about WordPress. Like any other swiss army knife framework, it will always be slower than a proper dedicated tool.

Another issue (one that a lot of modern development practices share) is that WordPress lets you quickly pull in components to Get Things Done Quick, but those components pull in more dependencies. I was looking at adding some more smooth scrolling effects, and the suggested way was to pull in jquery (fair enough), even though the template I'm using already pulls it into the page. Repeat that a dozen or so times to get the page looking Just Right, and, well, there goes perf.

[0][https://www.thawd.net/](https://www.thawd.net/)

<comment><USER31> There's no reason a PHP based site should take that long to load. It would seem that you are missing some caching settings, regenerating something every page load, or have something wrong with your server setup.

Make sure you are using a recent version of PHP and appropriate WP caching plugins.

Also check to see if your DB is hanging when a connection is made to it, perhaps due to trying to reverse lookup the IP for logging purposes and waiting for that to time out, or something else simple like that.

<comment><USER30> > There's no reason a PHP based site should take that long to load. It would > seem that you are missing some caching settings, regenerating something > every page load, or have something wrong with your server setup.

Out of the box settings, ugh.

Full second to parse jquery, 1/2 for jquery, 1/2 for jquery migrate. Something called wp-emoji-release.min.js is taking another 396 ms.

And this is after repeatedly visiting the page in my browser. I thought the browser was supposed to cache stuff? Heh.

Then again, according to Chrome, the page only took 1.4 seconds in total. I'm wondering where the remaining 4 seconds of me staring at an empty browser tab is coming from. :/

Then again, switching pages on my WordPress admin page takes ~6 seconds, so I think there is just a significant probability than my VPS has miserable performance.

Edit: Installing a caching plugin makes the page load not as horribly slow. It is at 3 seconds now, which is still 2 more than I'd like, but at least acceptable.

<comment><USER31> Look at the Cache-Control header and see if the site is telling the browser not to cache the JS.

Also, look at the time-to-first-byte . . . if that is high, maybe further tweaks to the cache plugin settings may help you. If you are not using at least PHP version 7.0 you will get a noticable improvement by getting to that as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Goodbye Wordpress.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hope some of these speed tweaks make it into other CMS like Drupal.

</comment><comment><USER34> maybe it gets object storage?</comment>


Ask HN: I'm 15, won a grant to develop a suicide prevention app, what next? - <AUTHOR> Some background: I'm 15 years old, attend high school, do well in terms of grades and extracurriculars (business clubs/competitions), and also am a pretty good front-end developer experienced with HTML/Jade,CSS/LESS, JS/jQuery/AngularJS, and Phonegap/Cordova. I've worked on several web projects in the past, such as http://teen2geek.com, and my portfolio is at http://krrishd.github.io, just to get an idea of what I can do in web development (not so good at the backend though).
I recently took part in a social entrepreneurship competition to prevent suicide, and I envisioned a specific app, and the idea won a grant. This app is somewhat similar to some social networks you've seen, and is a bit complex to develop for a front-end guy like me. The grant is a "micro-grant", so it isn't anything substantial, and I'm not sure if outsourcing can retain the quality necessary for such an app.
What do you think I should do? <comment><USER2> I would encourage you to write the entire thing, frontend, backend, content, PR releases, etc.

Two reasons:

1\. You're young and still figuring out what you love doing; no better time to experiment and learn. I still have fond memories over the php site I wrote in high school. You could visible tell which functions were written at the beginning of the project versus the end because you'll improve drastically. [1]

2\. The project will be more successful with someone who cares for it. Hiring a contractor will make it difficult for you to maintain and improve. Contractors will also expect a specification with penalties if you need to change it. My guess is that you're still experimenting with what can best serve the community so this probably isn't a good fit for contracting as well.

[1] Recommended tech stack (optimizing for documentation and availability of help). Ruby, MongoDB, Heroku (or if ambitious, Linux on Amazon EC2 + nginx). Everything else is pretty similar so once you learn these, the concepts apply reasonably well.

p.s. If money is a concern, you should look into contacting some companies PR/DevRel people and see if they are willing to donate some compute time or services to your cause. (It's probably doing this after launch and getting a better sense of usage and will be easier to convince them that you're legit).

<comment><USER3> If he's already familiar with front-end development, I'd recommend something like Meteor rather than Ruby. Because it's JavaScript, it will seem a lot more familiar than Ruby. And it will hide a lot of the complexity of client-server interaction until the point when you feel like diving into it. It's really perfect for fast prototyping and proof-of-concept sites like the poster is looking to build.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't it have major scaling problems? I've seen many recommendations that it's not yet ready for anything with complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are working on something important, and I was glad to read (and upvote) a lot of the other comments you received, and especially the offers for pro-bono help. One comment below suggested that you read the literature (I presume that means the literature about suicide prevention) and I would second that advice. To expand that advice a bit, I'll note that Martin E. P. Seligman and some other psychologists who have studied depression and suicide think that the "self esteem" movement that took over United States schools after I graduated from high school may have actually INCREASED risk of suicide in the United States--certainly the rates of both attempted and completed suicide, and the rate of diagnosed youth depression, went up over the years when those school programs were put in place. In other words, don't just rely on intuition about what would be helpful, but look into actual research. Seligman's books _Learned Optimism_ [1] and _The Optimistic Child_ [2] are both helpful, although there should be some even newer research out by now. Reading those books may help you deal with the challenges of working on this interesting project while keeping up with your school work. Best wishes.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your- Mind/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your- Mind/dp/1400078393)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression- Resili...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Optimistic-Child-Depression- Resilience/dp/0618918094/)

<comment><USER6> I second the advice to familiarize yourself with the literature, and would like to add a strong word of caution at the same time.

A disclaimer: I speak out of personal experience with this topic, and I did not read most of the comments that you've already received (sorry, wish I had the time).

So here's my word of caution:

You must be aware that you are intentionally brainwashing yourself into a biased worldview by reading all of these books on suicide prevention.

Every book on suicide prevention has the premise that suicide is "bad", after all, that is why the author wrote it, and that is what they are trying to prevent.

It does not matter a lick how scientific their "data points are", if the premise that they are starting out with is based on a biased point of view.

You will join their ranks if you don't keep this in mind.

Therefore, in addition to all of the literature on suicide prevention that you read, I strongly recommend reading literature that supports suicide.

Books that support suicide use a different word, but it is the same thing. These books employ the same linguistic trick that books attempting to prevent suicide use: they use words.

Words have unspoken meaning associated with them, that only exists ephemerally in the culture in which they are used. You may or may not find this hidden meaning in dictionaries.

These two words have in fact the exact same meaning, when it comes to the end act. Their meaning only slightly diverges when you take the cultural connotation and circumstances surrounding their use. Nevertheless, they really should be treated (by you) as synonyms, because the reasons that the people you are trying to prevent from killing themselves are usually the same in each case.

Word #1: Suicide

        - the action of killing oneself intentionally:
        - a course of action that is disastrously damaging to oneself
          or one's own interests

Word #2: Euthanasia

        - the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable
          and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. The practice
          is illegal in most countries.

For your project, I will throw a devil's advocate accusation at you, and call you, and anyone in this thread who supports your cause, a terrorist and/or sadist. I will accuse you of in fact not helping people, but misguidedly (due to complete and utter ignorance on your part) torturing people by encouraging them to experience more suffering.

Further, I will claim that unless you can see this point of view, your project will be an utter failure, and will not achieve any success beyond what existing measures have achieved.

To understand suicide, you have to understand wanting to kill yourself, and you cannot understand this intellectually, you have to have experienced it yourself (or have a great "emotional imagination", aka ability to empathize). How can you help anyone with a concept that you have no understanding of yourself? That is the road to failure.

Suicide is a very rational reaction to life. I've seen people call those who want to kill themselves "selfish", when it's clear that it is the other person who is selfish, and wants the person to stick around and suffer, only to spare themselves suffering.

So, to start you off, you may want to compliment your reading by familiarizing yourself with real suicide notes, before you even think about writing a single line of code. Here are some I found via some googling (I cannot vouch for their authenticity though):

[http://theholydark.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/some- painfully-e...](http://theholydark.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/some-painfully- edifying-reading-suicide-notes/) (references this page that is no longer online: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130112214925/http://www.well.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130112214925/http://www.well.com/~art/suicidenotes.html) )

<comment><USER7> Way to dump your own depressive tendencies on a 15 year old. Jesus.

<comment><USER6> _Way to dump your own depressive tendencies on a 15 year old. Jesus._

^-- A perfect example of the ignorance that I mentioned, thank you.

To Krish: remember, people who contemplate suicide are constantly faced with such ignorance, and so in the cultures where such attitudes are common, suicide happens unexpectedly (and this is most of the world). Then people "wish they could have said how much they loved them", etc. etc.

<comment><USER7> Ignorance? Oh my. Unfortunately, I satisfy your criteria required for understanding suicide, so I vehemently disagree with your assertion that "Suicide is a very rational reaction to life."

Especially when we're discussing teenagers, who haven't even lived one fifth of their expected lifespan.

<comment><USER8> > Especially when we're discussing teenagers,

...and who haven't finished cognitive development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a likely to be a very challenging project. A few things to consider:

* Anonymity is vitally important, especially since you are an inexperienced programmer with a high risk of introducing security holes. Don't collect any personal details (including email addresses) that could cause problems for people if they were leaked. Don't implement Facebook or Google signin!

* If there are any social components at all, consider the potential impact of trolls. This project may require 24/7 moderation.

* This is a major emotional commitment. Talking down suicidal strangers is not something to go in to lightly! Make sure you have a professional advisory network in place.

Since lots of people have offered to help, I suggest getting them added to a mailing list ASAP while they are interested.

You could consider building the project in public on GitHub - that would allow technical advisors to review your code for you and use the issue tracker to discuss features.

<comment><USER10> Simon's spot-on here as to why Google/Facebook/etc. would be a bad move. The first impulse of most projects is to pull in social, so being mindful of how a user is asked to approach your app is a great place to start.

Cole Stryker has written a couple neat books on the (often constructive) power of anonymous social networks — [http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590209745](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1590209745) — although the chasm between Anonymous and a teen support network may be too far to bridge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm quite interested in suicide prevention, having lost several friends to suicide over the years. I'd do it pro bono. If you're interested, let me know - my e-mail is in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> To everyone interested in helping- I would definitely love to get all the help possible from you guys, so I'll make this an open-source project. I'm figuring out th logistics of everything right now, I'll try to contact you guys with more details as soon as possible. Thanks guys, I'm really looking forward to this :)

<comment><USER12> Also willing to help. This is something that hits very close to home for me. I've done both front-end and back-end work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I've created a github project here - [http://github.com/krrishd/suicide- prevention](http://github.com/krrishd/suicide-prevention)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congrats man, well done!

This list of cognitive distortions and how to fix them might be relevant: [http://www.apsu.edu/sites/apsu.edu/files/counseling/COGNITIV...](http://www.apsu.edu/sites/apsu.edu/files/counseling/COGNITIVE_0.pdf)

This was created by Dr. David Burns and is supported by research in cognitive therapy. The full information is available in his book "Feeling Good". The interactive medium could afford some interesting possibilities.

Another thing that I remember reading is that tracking your happiness level and sharing that information with others seems to improve mood. Somebody was experimenting with this on the web. Seems like a perfect fit for a social app.

I second the opinion that you should make sure that you pay attention to research. Some common sense approaches might be counter-productive. For example, the cliché: "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" can make suicide sound even better to the seriously depressed. Be suspicious of common sense here.

<comment><USER14> As someone who has read "Feeling Good" and is married to a therapist, I can not suggest this book enough. The general method is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy)

The key idea is that our thoughts control how we feel, not the events or surroundings of our lives. A person who is considering suicide often has a very different view of events because of their thought process. The idea of CBT is to change the way you think and by doing so you are able to feel differently about the events in your life.

However, I would never suggest that someone simply start applying CBT on their own with out some guidance. I am very nervous about how you want to make this a social application. Depression can be a very personal and embarrassing disease for a person and even positive encouragement can cause more depression.

Lets say we have a kid named Stan. Stan is a very depressed kid who is considering suicide. He manages to let his friend Bobby know that he has been considering killing himself. Bobby is shocked as Stan is a very bright and successful kid. Bobby tells Stan that he 'can't believe that Stan would want to do such a thing' and that 'he has so much to live for.' Bobby thinks that he is helping Stan, but Stan views this very differently. Stan thinks, 'No one understands me, Bobby is just saying that to make me feel better.' While the temporary relief of telling someone was something that Stan really wanted to do, in the end it only ends up making him feel more depressed.

The reason behind this sort of thinking is because of the Cognitive Distortions. Stan's perception of reality is vastly different because of them. It is for this reason that I am concerned about how you make this a social application. In my opinion the best thing you can do for a person who is considering suicide is to get them to a trained professional.

<comment><USER15> I would recommend Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) over CBT. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy) As I understand it DBT is better at validation of emotions than CBT.

<comment><USER14> That is likely because CBT attempt to focus on your emotions, but rather on your thoughts that cause your emotion. I have not heard of DBT though honestly, and I am far from an expert on CBT, but will have to read more on both now.

<comment><USER15> I have had personal success with DBT practiced in a clinical setting. A lot of the skills taught are really great life skills that are applicable to everyone not just those with psychiatric conditions.

It seems DBT builds off of CBT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One other thing, no matter what, this is your project.

All the advice you get here, much of it good, and all the advice you will get throughout the project (especially if you open source it on github which I highly recommend) is for you to assimilate and then build into your opinion.

Listen to experienced dev's telling you why and why not a particular course will work, listen to people here on the research and the unintuitive nature of suicide, but in the end this grant was given because you seemed to have an insight or a gleam in your eye.

Trust that gleam, and tell us lot to go hang, if you think you are being pushed into something that in your _informed opinion_ is not the best for the app.

And remember, Its not the only suicide prevention work out there, so the weight of the world is not on your shoulders - your job is to do a good job and be proud of the work. Let the world decide if thats going to solve its problems or not.

Good luck and all the best

<comment><USER4> "....tell us lot to go hang"

Perhaps not the most appropriate choice of words

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Suicide prevention /app/? You don't stop suicide with an app. You're 15 and you have a grant for a gimmick. I'm 22 and I'm unemployed. I'm already depressed but this makes me angry, too, so I just made an account to let you know that this disgusts me. Empty words. At least your resume looks better with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry that his makes you feel this way.

1\. I am in no way experienced with suicide, I just thought this idea up for a contest, but it actually won, and I felt the obligation to at least try to make it a reality.

2\. This app is not really aimed at people already dealing with severe stages of depression, many organizations and suicide hotlines are already doing that well. This is more towards people only starting to feel issues that could worsen to lead to suicide, catching the issue early on.

Again, sorry if that's how it seems, but I'm just trying to help out in any way that I could possibly.

<comment><USER15> >many organizations and suicide hotlines are already doing that well.

These organizations are for much more than that. The National Suicide Prevention Line is there for your "smaller" problems too. There are more, too. Best of all, these are trained professionals, not 15 year olds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a serious project. Please find a licensed psychologist to partner with as you develop and test your app and prepare it for release.

<comment><USER19> I can't second this suggestion strongly enough. The technology will be the easy part. Connecting with people who need help will be very difficult. I don't even want to think about how hard it will be to protect against the trolls.

OP: I would recommend starting by interviewing your guidance councillor at school and any psychologists, social workers, etc.. that you know or can be introduced to. At the end of every interview, ask the interviewee who else you should talk to. Ask for an introduction. Always thank these people for their time (an email is a must but including a handwritten note a month later will pay huge dividends). If someone really impresses you, ask if they would like to be on your board of advisors. Pack your board with the best people you can find and meet with them regularly.

Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Awesome! I know other folks here question whether your approach actually prevents suicide. Personally, I respect your gumption and initiative to carry this out.

I hope you get offers to work on the backend with you. If not, here are some ideas:

(1) Find a like-minded person at meetup groups. The Atlanta Ruby User Group, for example, has a contingent actively working on public good kind of apps, things more for non-profit work than for-profit work. While your local technical meetup group is a good place to start, there is nothing stopping you from emailing the ATLRUG mailing list and asking. There are other platform meetups you can try, like ones for Node.js, Erlang/Elixir, various Python groups, etc.

(2) Use the Tim Ferris method of calling up famous people. You never know. Being someone versed in JS, you could try Resig, or Katz, or the AngularJS core folks. You could also try one of the startup CEOs/CTOs you admire. I don't think someone's work should be judged on the novelty of being young, but it happens (people think, could I have pulled it off at your age?) Older folks who have amassed experience and power like teaching and mentoring young people, as it is not as threatening to one's power base as young competition. You might not necessarily get such a person to work directly with you on the code, but you're likely to get access to a network that you normally would not have access to.

(3) Scour the web for other similar competitions and contact the winners. Maybe you can trade.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER21> I've lost people to suicide and I've felt suicidal myself so I'm very interested to know what the app does. What will it do to reduce suicides?

</comment><comment><USER22> I too am 15 years old. I'm currently working on a secure chat alternative to things like kik, what's app and skype. I've been coding the backend in node.js and the frontend in jQuery.

I suggest you check out node.JS, it's easy to learn since you have a JS background and it should handle well with what you're doing.

Also if you're intrested, I'm willing to help out for free, you can contact me at: firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER23> The response to this post surprises me a bit. Suicide prevention is a great idea. But as described, it really isn't explained well enough to capture my imagination.

There's very little description of what it would do beyond that it's an app and it prevents suicide. And that it's a social network. That really isn't enough to describe the idea.

I can see the possibility of a social network site for depressed people.

Dunno. It's a big goal, but very hard, and I think it's extremely important to take into consideration the mentality of someone who is considering suicide.

Good luck.

<comment><USER24> My initial thought: I could imagine a Facebook or Twitter app that analyses posts of all your "friends"/"followed" to establish the mood of the post and to highlight a trend that may look depressive giving a person a suggestion that their acquaintance might be having problems. This may relate well to suicide prevention.

Getting people to sign up for a social network because they're depressed seems like an impossibility.

<comment><USER23> I don't think it's entirely impossible.

On Reddit, they have a somewhat popular depression forum which is rather depressing (a typical post is something like, "I managed to shower today" or "does anyone else feel life is meaningless?") but people seem to benefit.

A service that helps people who feel down cheer up could be quite useful if done right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Idea( you have ) -> Stakeholders -> Requirements -> Features -> Evaluate -> Repeat

Considering the fact that you already received a grant, I would imagine you have a few details of what you want to build, but you will find the real tangles in the details.

I would greatly advise that you dive deeply into the various requirements and untangle the details and drive clarity throughout the design, before you start writing a lot of code.

Once you feel comfortable that you won't run into any big surprises and you understand your general feature set you should prioritize these features, I like to do the most risky and difficult features first, and then get started. You will of course have a lot of ground work to lay, but that could be counted as a feature.

After you have your first shippable set of code done, should take between 2 weeks and 2 months, shouldn't be perfect. Get it in front of someone that's relevant. As it will be hard to find somebody suicidal that also wants to review an app, probably somebody at a crisis center or a counselor that helps people in this situation.

After a few demos you should find plenty of improvements and features you never thought of, as well as defects. Now it's time to add these into your priorities and start over.

Good Luck, I hope this goes well for you. Let me know if you would like any further advisement, I would be glad to take emails and what not. I have been developing software professionally for the past 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can't believe some of the comments here. I admit I haven't read them all yet, but come on...

Background, I've been suicidal many times in my life, having spent >3 weeks in the psychiatric hospital. Been in the mental health system for YEARS. Been around many many many suicidal people in that time.

This seems so naive. You have a lot of legal issues here, and also social and ethical. You want to make sure you are cleared legally, you want to make sure you are not violating HIPPA. You want to make DAMN sure you are doing the right thing, and not encouraging the behavior you are trying to prevent. You are describing this as some kinda "social network" and there are studies that social networks can make you MORE lonely and depressed.

[http://now.msn.com/innovation-of-loneliness-video-says- socia...](http://now.msn.com/innovation-of-loneliness-video-says-social-media- can-make-you-feel-lonely)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margiewarrell/social-media- lon...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margiewarrell/social-media- lonely_b_4034744.html)

You want the help of a trained psychiatrist for god's sake.

You want to be damn sure you "suicide prevention" app doesn't get overwhelmed by trolls and well meaning people giving bad advice, and if it does, you aren't legally on the hook.

This is just way too big. This isn't some weekend project. This really really is serious business. Don't do it. It's way too risky.

</comment><comment><USER26> Step 1: Get help. Start figuring out what you don't know.

An app like this, especially if it were wildly successful in attracting users, could do a lot of harm if the underlying idea isn't thought out well and based on good ideas. You're 15. You love your idea and the competition judges did too. Great! Are you or them experts on suicide prevention?

Fortunately, your goal isn't to make money or something similarly self- serving. You're trying to save lives. That opens up tremendous resources to you what would be denied to most trying to make their first app. Psychologists, doctors, professors, etc. will all be happy to help you get the idea right, free of charge, because it could save lives.

If you see a psychologist, ask them for their input and ask them for contacts. Go to your local university and knock on doors. Find people who teach or do research in the field and ask for their input. Make some phone-calls. Email professors at other universities.

I know your instinct is to immediately try to advance your idea towards a working app, but a great app based on a faulty idea is usually pretty useless and this one could actually be dangerous. Get help immediately.

</comment><comment><USER27> liyanchang's suggestion is bang on. Even if you never touch on it again, if you actually force yourself (by working on an interesting project) to touch on the full stack of an app you will benefit from it for years.

So many of the little hobby projects I've worked on over the years (long since abandoned) have provided a fantastic base for something else. A website I managed when I was a teenager taught me all sorts of server admin skills that still pay off 5 years later. When you're 15 you have absolutely oodles of free time (it might not seem that way now, but it will when you're working full time!). Make use of it!

<comment><USER28> Seriously -- every project I had the opportunity to work on during my teen years has formed the basis for so much of my later "real" career as a developer. Each experience has provided me with invaluable skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Since you seem to have a good grasp of frontend, I would definitely checkout [https://parse.com/products/data](https://parse.com/products/data) as a backend solution.

</comment><comment><USER30> How about a native app for iOS & Android with a big red button that, if they click it and confirm, puts the user immediately on the phone with a suicide prevention counselor.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's close to wha the idea is, except it kind of prevents suicide at a more early stage. But the idea can change, that sounds interesting as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congratulations! This is an absolutely great opportunity for you to learn useful skills, make the world better and significantly improve your resume.

I think you should spend a grant on your education and skills related to the app. This is a sustainable approach given that the grant is not really large and you are in the exploratory phase of your project.

Do everything yourself while consulting with the community non-stop, lots of people will be eager to help you.

Btw, I consult startups on marketing and I think your story is straight techcrunch/mashable/thenextweb material, ready to inspire other young people to learn programming. If you need any help spreading your mission, this app or teen2geek, for the greater good, just drop me an note, I'll be eager to help you pro bono. My e-mail is in the profile.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a developer who has struggled with depression, I really dig this.

I've got a lot of years doing backend work, and I'd be more than happy to help pro bono.

I personally would not get too hung up on the stack you use. Find something that will get you up and writing tests and building pages as quickly as possible.

Discussions about various stacks usually have to do with scaling and scaling usually is a problem after the prototype stage (which is the goal I'm guessing).

Up and coding.

I also agree that you should do the bulk of the work yourself. The knowledge you gain will be priceless, and in today's software development world, it is helpful for front-end guys to know what the backend guys do and vice-versa.

Certainly lean on people here for help and advice, but I wouldn't have someone do all the backend work for you.

Good luck to you!

</comment><comment><USER33> My biggest piece of advice: Don't consider the money an investment in you App. Consider it a form of encouragement to keep you thinking and working in general.

Whoever gave you this money isn't expecting you to build a suicide prevention app directly. They are saying that they like your idea, they like you, and they want you to keep at it. It's a grant, not a loan so don't worry about treating it as a loan.

Use it to get some training you might want, use it to set up a business and learn about business, use it to buy a piece of hardware you might otherwise not be able to afford. Use it to further your chances of eventually being able to make a difference, don't put pressure on yourself to make the absolute most of it.

Lastly, put it on your resume.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm probably wrong about this, and I know very little psychology, but I am under the impression that suicidal people don't admit to having a problem. Also, they don't hope to find help, either coz they think or know it's out of reach, or don't know help is available. If this was not so, I would imagine they'd seek this help rather than take their lives, which is a sign of someone giving up hope. Now, installing an app for suicide prevention looks to me like an act by someone who HASN'T given up hope. And if you haven't given up hope, you are already walking away from the brink. And if you're already walking away from the brink, maybe you're not suicidal? My feeling here is that an app for reaching out or talking someone out of taking their life may not be the best approach to reaching such a person to make them pull back. Of course the journey to suicide is long and complex, and there must be many points at which an intervention is useful and where your app will play a part, but I just feel like there might be a disconnect between the people who should use your app and those who _would_ use your app. Be that as it may, like I said, I'm not a psychologist, and most likely my assumptions are wrong. I imagine the literature on suicide being mentioned talks about this in detail and from a professional point of view. All the same, I wish you all the best in your project and hope it succeeds.

</comment><comment><USER35> Try to do it yourself. Don't be afraid of "failure" because there is none here, you are not getting paid to realize something, people saw someone ambitious and willing to try so they "gave" you the money.

Now whatever happens next, it will only be valuable. You will only learn things from that point, outsourcing is not an option when you're willing to learn. Because this is an opportunity to learn, it is not an opportunity to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure what exactly your idea is, but may I suggest you partner with experts in the field?

I'd recommend you ping Prof. Joshi at Stanford, who was involved with a suicide prevention program in Palo Alto. And if only to run your idea by him and solicit some feedback.

This is a video of him talking about suicide risk factors in teens: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lIqp6odvp0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lIqp6odvp0)

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER37> The steps that I'd take in your position:

1) Determine how much back-end I really need (or whether I need one at all). I'm going to assume your grant proposal contains use-cases (or user stories) that describe the interaction with the back-end.

2) Decide what framework(s) your front-end will be using and make a list of the back-ends that you believe would work with the front-end.

3) Define the interface between the front-end and back-end ... an ICD or API document will help you with both sides of the connection.

4) Find a mentor who can get you started with your chosen back-end technology as well as help you out when you get stuck.

I'd use this as a means to learn at least a little about back-end architecture. On the other hand, you could ignore the typical back-end development and go with something you know - e.g. CouchDB uses a RESTful API to store JSON documents, provides facilities for making views, lists (an HTML transformation of a view) and shows (an HTML transformation of a JSON document.

4) Find a mentor who can get you started on the chosen back-end, and help when you get stuck.

</comment><comment><USER38> Lots of people have given you very specific advice about what frameworks to use, how to approach the problem, etc...

Take it all with a grain of salt. What I'd suggest to get started is create a public github project for it, put together some wireframes and sequence diagrams (publish them in the github project) so that people can see what it's meant to look like and how it's mean to work. Then just start coding.

Post the github project here on HN and ask for contributors. Keep a curated list of features, tasks and bugs in the github project and let people pick them up and help you build it.

Rule #1 though, don't let people get you down. Everyone has an opinion and we software people can be pretty harsh, especially when, frankly, we're just arguing our opinion rather than fact.

Rule #2, done is better than perfect. What's your Minimum Viable Product? Build that, maintain tunnel vision on completing that, then worry about everything else it could do.

</comment><comment><USER39> A little tangential, but listening to this might help out with perspective:

[http://themoth.org/posts/stories/perfect- moments](http://themoth.org/posts/stories/perfect-moments)

And maybe reach out to other suicide prevention non profits?

</comment><comment><USER40> On the development side: I'd go for firebase, frontender myself and the docs are pretty easy to follow. Since you know angular, you can use angularfire to easily get you started. If you have experience with yeoman you can try out this generator ([https://github.com/dsimard/generator-angular- phonegap](https://github.com/dsimard/generator-angular-phonegap)) which gives you an emulator to phonegap. Didn't try it myself, but seems interesting.

On the projectside: Cool that you would take your time and skills to work on a project like that. I had the sad experience of losing someone close through suicide, so... yeah. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER41> What is a "front-end developer"?

I can do the literal translation, and I can surmise that it means a person who builds and designs UIs, but I always thought that was a designer, not a developer.

Javascript is the only thing on what you've just listed that's Turing complete, so look into Node.js, in addition to all the other Buzz Words you see in the rest of the comments.

I also think you should come at this with a dark sense of humor. You're not going to save many lives if you don't get attention, and you're not going to get anyone's attention if it's Just Another Web App. Tasteful gallows humor is a good way to grab the audience you're looking for.

<comment><USER42> A front end developer is someone that builds the interface. Designers are becoming programmers more and more nowadays, but it used to be that the designer drew out an interface and the developer built it.

Here's a good article about it, as well: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_and_back_ends](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_and_back_ends)

<comment><USER41> I'm not sure this is a good thing for code quality and thus app quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> You may find [https://www.firebase.com/](https://www.firebase.com/) or [http://www.meteor.com/](http://www.meteor.com/) allow you to do it all on the frontend

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking about meteor, I'm just not sure how complex it would be to implement on a mobile app.

<comment><USER44> I've been using Meteor for a couple of years now, and although it does a lot of magic, I recommend using it only for very simple projects.

For this application, meteor may be suitable, but keep in mind that you'll need to build a lot of your supporting infrastructure until Meteor 1.0 comes out.

Reasons not to use Meteor:

It is currently very difficult to accurately profile memory issues.

Simple html mixups can take half an hour to debug due to the fact that they'll only show up in production, and in minimized/uglified form.

MongoDB costs 'money' to scale properly (sharding across multiple machines with lots of memory (if your database grows).

Edit: This is not a simple project, so maybe meteor is asking for trouble since it's not very mature yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I have to +1 the parse.com suggestion. Their API has an Angular wrapper if you really know it well. Or, if you haven't hit the 'Angular Wall' (meaning you haven't built something of real-world complexity with it), you can use their JS SDK, which is a backbone fork.

I suggest you open source all of it, and keep HN up to date on progress. List out what the product should do, and how you want to design your models. You'll get some solid feedback.

Web iterates fast, so I'd use web rather than jumping right into native. You'll be able to show your code to coders, and show your product to social workers and those who support at-risk people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you say the same about Firebase?

<comment><USER45> I suggested Parse because I'm personally using it right now, so I know it well. That's obviously a bias, so take it as such. Firebase looks very similar. If you are going to lean on the greater community, Parse seems slightly better, because of the fact its a fork of Backbone-more people should understand pretty easily what's up with models.

Also, Parse is owned by Facebook and has pretty solid, simple login and integration with social sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> You'd have to be more specific about how the app is supposed to work. For instance maybe it can be accomplished with the Facebook javascript api, implementing it on top of Facebook. Maybe not.

Anyway, I wish you good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its kind of a social network structure, bu simpler than things like FB, twitter, etc. it doesn't rely on any API, and would be really easy for anyone who knows what they're doing on the backend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> My favorite anti-suicide advice is 'Never commit suicide when hungover'. It sounds subversive but I think it gets the message across by first not discounting that the other person may have valid and important problems, and then emphasizing that all states of mind are subject to improvement.

You could (carefully) curate a list of this sort of advice from people who have actually felt suicidal at one point or another and pop up a random message on demand in the app. Carefully, as most cheerful advice does not sound so good when you are depressed.

<comment><USER48> It sounds like the OP already knows _what_ he wants to build, he is more looking for advice on the _how_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> You should use [http://ionicframework.com](http://ionicframework.com) when it is ready, for storage use ngStorage [https://github.com/gsklee/ngStorage](https://github.com/gsklee/ngStorage), and a guide for starting with angular and phonegap/cordova is here [http://devgirl.org/2013/06/10/quick-start-guide-phonegap- and...](http://devgirl.org/2013/06/10/quick-start-guide-phonegap-and- angularjs/)

</comment><comment><USER50> hi Krish, please let me know if I can contribute in any way! I'm probably not as experienced as most people here in terms of technical skills, but speaking from personal experience, a very good friend of mine nearly took his own life few months back. It was a painful experience, I myself had a few days of major depression during the incident, so I was able to understand how hard it is for people who suffer from long-term depression (and even then I'm sure my struggles weren't nearly as difficult as what my friend was going through at that time). I don't hope to see anyone else losing their own life, or losing the ones they love to depression/suicide again. Imo, suicide is a pretty sensitive topic. Instead of rushing to the technical details and how to build the app, I think it's much more important to carefully study and really understand the people who have had suicide thoughts, what are their struggles, what caused the thought, and how to help them resolve that thought. And it's important to analyze what are the potential issues/risks of the app's design so that it doesn't end up unintentionally bringing more harm than help. And last but not least, I'm more familiar with the back-end, but willing to do (and learn!) more front-end as well. I hope your project can succeed, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER51> What I would recommend next is recognizing that suicide is a complicated and controversial issue, and there are differing attitudes and approaches towards it. Your app, like it or not, will be opinionated. Have informed opinions. For example, read this:

[http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Freedom-Ethics-Politics- Suicide/...](http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Freedom-Ethics-Politics- Suicide/dp/0815607555)

If you disagree, fine, but have an informed opinion.

</comment><comment><USER52> Dude. make a mobile web app. Hook up with a clinical psychologist. Also focus on a target age / market. Get some data going. Hit me up i can see what to do about a clinical psychologist hook up in NYC. There are several scales psychologist use to narrow down a specific condition and you can incorporate those scales into the app via logic tree / branching based on the input a user submits to the Q&A. you can hit me on twitter @adamqureshi

</comment><comment><USER53> This is awesome. I think the main thing I did when I was 15 was sleep....

I'm actually working on an application (www.happsee.com) for tracking happiness. Somewhat similar, but not exactly. It's already had some huge benefits for me as far as understanding my own emotions.

If you want to chat more about making an app (mine is for android), machine learning (predicting stuff from other stuff), or building a backend, let me know. Email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER54> Do research, read the literature.

</comment><comment><USER55> A company local to me worked[1] on a similar idea[2] for Mind, a mental health charity in the UK. Might be some inspiration there. As for the technical side, you'll only learn by doing, and other posters have provided some fine ideas.

[1] [http://www.yoomee.com/elefriends](http://www.yoomee.com/elefriends)

[2] [http://elefriends.org.uk/](http://elefriends.org.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER56> I would suggest you to learn how to build the entire thing yourself. This is a great opportunity to get your hands dirty and understand the nitty-gritty of web development. Very useful in the long run!

Having said that, I am not sure about the time constraints you are working with. If the timeline is tight and you have never done this before, it's better to outsource it as opposed to building a sub-standard app yourself.

</comment><comment><USER57> Another offer of support - drop me a line if you want a hand with not just technical security, but Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) aspects to such a project.

I suspect a project like this has more complex Governance, Risk and Compliance issues than most. Where possible, work with an existing charity working in this area, as they should already have practices in place to manage this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good Luck OP. It's fantastic to see that you're getting many offers of help. I really look forward to seeing what is created.

Some people are suggesting research. I'd be interested in suitable papers and organisations.

One good place is the University of Oxford Centre for Suicide Research:

[http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/](http://cebmh.warne.ox.ac.uk/csr/)

</comment><comment><USER58> This is great. First off, congrats.

As others have mentioned, due to the sensitive nature of a project along these lines, I would _strongly_ recommend finding a mentor in the psychology realm. You'll want to make sure that you carefully consider some of the functionality aspects of the app to make sure things won't be unnecessarily/accidentally harmful.

</comment><comment><USER59> Hello, I would try to write the entire app myself. You will learn so much from it. That will benifit you forever. If you get stuck, just put another ask at hacker news. If you just help one person who is depressed, its worth ten times the effort.I have been there. Thanks for taking part in the competition and good luck to you.

</comment><comment><USER60> You should try using a backend-as-a-service if you aren't comfortable with databases/scaling/etc and would like to get the app out. Parse (parse.com) would probably work great for you. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get them to sponsor your application / company (assuming you create a non-profit).

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think you should reach out to those who are experts in the field and find out what they think would work, then build something that does that.

As an example my partner volunteers with a suicide prevention hotline that also has a chat client, I'm sure they'd love something mobile that works with their chat system, etc.

</comment><comment><USER62> Don't know what your idea is.. but a thought or plugin is what about an anonymous place for people to vent or answer the question.. Why I wish I were dead: I have 6 toes on my left foot. others can respond anonymously..about that... some sort of peer group online/ facilitated instant support group.

<comment><USER15> I'm sorry, but this will be overrun by trolls and give out unhelpful/bad advice. Plus, there are already forums for this.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255 There's _trained_ people to give support on these very issues. There's other numbers you can call as well. Check them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Build it. There are a lot of tutorials out there to quickly build stuff in any technology you choose. Reaching out through this question - "What do I do?" Is what you should advice suicidal people to do. There is always help if you ask for it.

</comment><comment><USER64> You could use this app for inspiration or research: [http://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/item/34863-tech- sta...](http://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/item/34863-tech-start-up-of- the-week/)

</comment><comment><USER65> Get in touch with someone from here: [http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/](http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)

They do a lot of work in this area and will have the best advice on what things you can do to help.

</comment><comment><USER66> You'll go far, kid! Glad you found someone here who can help you with the back-end.

</comment><comment><USER67> I think a more detailed description of things app ought to do would be very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER68> I happen to know the President of the American Association of Suicidology. Email me and I'll put you in touch. I also mod a Twitter chat on Suicide Prevention and Social Media. Would love to support you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I'm still sorting out how exactly I'm going to structure this and implement it, so as soon as I figure that out, I'll shoot you an email. Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Im not sure if it would be helpful for your exact vision, but there are several open source social network platforms like www.elgg.org which could give you a jumpstart on the backend to get underway.

</comment><comment><USER70> Way to go! Can I send you any books via Amazon to help you out?

</comment><comment><USER71> Figure out who are the users, research what people are already doing in this space (Samaritans) and test your ideas before building anything with paper prototypes.

</comment><comment><USER72> Why not learn Node.js? You learned almost everything else Javascript. There's got to be some decent ORM for it. How much time do you have to do this?

</comment><comment><USER73> I think you should learn how to use a version control system in an efficient way, in github you have days with >20 commits of css in a row...

</comment><comment><USER74> This is a major undertaking. IMO, you will most likely end up reaching the lower-hanging fruit of depression rather than suicide. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER68> I happen to know the President of the American Association of Suicidology. Email me and I'll put you in touch. email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER75> Ignore the crazy motherfuckers in this thread, jesus. Like I said on reddit, use phonegap, angular and maybe a simple ruby on rails backend if you need something on the server. That'll be the easiest way to build the app, and you'll develop great marketable skills.

</comment><comment><USER76> You're just started, do it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER77> Develop a suicide prevention app.</comment>


You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenation.com/article/208593/you-can-be-prosecuted-clearing-your-browser-history#

<comment><USER2> Time to disable browser history altogether? Is storing things like that on a ramdisk considered destroying evidence when you power down?

Part of David Kernell's charge was defragmenting his hard drive! Seems a stretch since it's a legitimate maintenance task, or was more commonly useful in 2008. Hopefully they gave a decent argument that it was done with intent, and didn't just bamboozle the jury.

Considering that every second a computer is on, it's potentially losing forensic data, I guess they just want you to call the police immediately after doing anything on your computer that may have been illegal. But it's not self- incrimination!

It's also interesting that in that case, they caught a break in the form of malware that happened to log Kernell's activity.[1] It was "designed to collect a lot of different data (including) banking and finance data" \-- but somehow I have a feeling they didn't lift a finger to prosecute that crime. Maybe they would if it embarrassed a Presidential candidate.

[1] [http://www.knoxnews.com/news/local-news/fbi-kernell-tried- to...](http://www.knoxnews.com/news/local-news/fbi-kernell-tried-to-destroy- proof-of-e-mail)

</comment><comment><USER3> So the thing is that when people do computer forensics, anti-forensics actions stand out clear as day on the machine and it does come up in a lot of cases. If you have some activity on a windows machine you want to hide, your best course of action is really to destroy the drive.

I think the feds essentially want to be able to "use" evidence of anti- forensics in court. This is actually reasonable, but the legal theory they're trying to do that with doesn't seem very suitable.

While genuine signs of anti-forensics should be admissible as evidence, it's hard to see how "destroying records" on a private computer (not for business use / at work) should be an actual _crime_ , in and of itself. Also, "clearing browser history" as anti-forensics is seriously a reach. I do wonder if there were other actions taken (over and above clearing browser history) that weren't mentioned in the article.</comment>


Ask HN: What can we do about ebola? - <AUTHOR>

This site attracts enough intelligent minds that surely we can find some way to help.<p>I was hoping to leave this open ended because I don't know what I don't know about this situation. I want to help, but I'm not keen on flying to West Africa. <comment><USER2> First off contact your rep. and sen. to raise concern, questions and ideas. Donate to charities that are making a difference.

Here are some general thoughts . . .

I'm not an expert on anything healthcare related . . . but I would like to throw some ideas out there of what I think could be done . . . I have been thinking about this lately . . . a lot of this is thinking out loud . . . but maybe this can generate some ideas/brain storming and be passed along to someone who can implement any ideas that would be helpful.

My first thought is containment . . . we need to quarantine anyone leaving W. African countries for 21 to 30 days . . . this might sound extreme but we have to contain the spread of the virus (this could apply to US cities as well and should apply to those who have had contact with an infected person anywhere including the US). It would probably be worth setting up quarantine areas near airports that are a comfortable place to stay during the quarantine. Internet, TV, free food, easily disinfected, etc, etc . . .

So now we generally have the virus contained to W. Africa. Now we need to pour aid and doctors in to those countries to prevent further infections and stamp it out.

-Tom Frieden (CDC) is saying that a travel ban will make the outbreak worse . . .

-Here's his quote:

"We really need to be clear that we don't inadvertently increase the risk to people in this country by making it harder for us to respond to the needs in those countries," he said, "by making it harder to get assistance in and therefore those outbreaks would become worse, go on longer, and paradoxically, something that we did to try and protect ourselves might actually increase our risk."

Frieden added that a travel ban could make it difficult to get medical supplies and aid workers to the affected regions in West Africa.

Ummm, I think controlling people leaving the country can be done while at the same time increasing supplies and medical personnel. Volunteers are risking their life to go help, I don't think they would be deterred by a quarantine before they come back.

I'm asking for a simple quarantine for people leaving W. Africa and increasing travel and supplies to W. Africa I don't see how a quarantine for those leaving would affect supplies and Aid coming in . . . they could allow pilots and ground crews to leave and fly back as long as they aren't interacting with anyone on the ground . . . and medical staff should understand a quarantine period before leaving . . .

Treat infected personnel outside the US and other countries . . . setup a state of the art hospital in Africa to treat infected healthcare workers . . . this would further isolate the virus from un-infected countries. If this isn't possible I would treat them at a central location in the US initially till they can setup a central location in W. Africa.

Ok so we have limited people leaving W. Africa if they are infected and we are pouring in supplies and experts to help.

In the US we need to prepare better.

Sounds like lots of people were exposed in Dallas before the patient was quarantined.

All hospitals and urgent care should have an area, maybe even outside where they evaluate patients with fever and other ebola symptoms where they are isolated from other patients. Basically prevent an emergency room full of people waiting in the same room with an Ebola infected patient.

Counties should have special ebola response units. Basically an ambulance that is only used for transporting suspected ebola cases. Even some that might only be pick up only where they go by and the patient comes out and rides alone in the back . . . setup the ambulance where it can be disinfected easily . . . and then other ambulance crews where they have an EMT suited up in full bio gear to interact with the patient if needed.

Family members should immediately be moved to a new location for their quarantine, not confined to the location where the patient was . . . this location should monitor their temperature, provide TV, Internet, coordinate remote work if possible with their employer, food provided, etc.

Waste disposal, setup a clean team in each county with training and a plan for cleaning houses/apartments and where to dispose of the waste.

Healthcare workers . . . how can someone get infected treating a patient in the US, I know accidents could happen but I expect everyone would be following protocol to the letter on the first one.

Lets expand the protection level/suit types for healthcare workers . . . better filtration masks, etc . . . the buddy system is a good idea . . . build ebola areas in the hospital so healthcare workers can be sprayed down with a solution to kill the virus on their equipment before removing their suits/masks after interacting with the patient . . . also setup a waste disposal plan at every hospital.

Contacting your rep. and senator is always a good idea so they know you're concerned and donations are always a positive way to make a difference.

<comment><USER3> I think you overestimate the spread big time here, you have 0% chance to get Ebola by sitting next to an infected person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Compartmentalization is key to stopping an epidemic.

1.)

Quarantine health workers caring for ebola patients in high risk setting (contact to patient, infectious material)

like a tour of duty in the military:

you take the assignment and move into combined quarantine & work, no family contact, no contact to general population.

after your tour ends you stay in post-action quarantine until your incubation period has passed and you get the all clear.

Very important:

taking are of an ebola victim even in 1st world top tier medical facilities is - as shown by the cases which have developed in america and europe - still a high risk operation. Anyone willing to knowingly take that risk is brave. Imposing a quarantine on them still is the sane thing to do to curb secondary infections from the care givers to their families and the general population.

there is no place for talking down care providers on tv or media that they "breached protocol", e.g. they did something wrong and they are to blame. Just find out what went wrong, publish it, correct it. Help the victim. no blaming.

There would be no need for panic since you quarantine the heros giving care to the ebola victims thus stopping tertiar infections to get R_0 (spread of infection) down.

2.) research if ebola survivors carry an immunity to ebola. If they do, they are the most useful group at the frontline of care. Train the survivors and let them (with reduced risk to themselves) help.

3.) Anyone with contact to a victim into quarantine, not let them stay in the house in the rooms where the ebola victim lived. Extract them to proper facility. Desinfect the places where the victim stayed.

4.) get a Vaccine

5.) get a treatment

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there publicly available data about ebola survivors? What would it take to anonymize and publish this data?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The immediate action is clear: Donate generously to an organization like [http://doctorswithoutborders.com/](http://doctorswithoutborders.com/)

They're on the ground and trying hard to treat people. They need resources.

Slightly longer term is figuring out a cure and vaccine.

Longer yet is improving the health care systems in Africa and around the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do they need any digital resources that we can provide them with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like Nate Silver's take on disasters. Model it like Earthquakes and anything else bad that happens on a log scale. Then make a plan for every possible contingency. Although it is already an outbreak there is still a range of possible endgames. Unfortunately policy planners don't do any of this IMO.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Foldit helped AIDS researchers. Is there a similar game that could help with ebola?

</comment><comment><USER7> There is not much you can do beyond lobbying for serious action to be taken. While in the long term we need drugs and vaccines, working on these will not help us in the short term.</comment>


Facts about global warming that you should keep for yourself - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2012/07/10/facts-about-global-warming-that-you-should-keep-for-yourself/ <comment><USER2> "Let us look at the predictions made in 1990: they predicted an increase in temperature of 0.3C per decade, plus minus 0.1C. Yet less than 0.2C of warming per decade was observed. To be blunt, they got it flat wrong."

How much less than 0.2C was it? 0.3 +/- 0.1 means it can be anywhere from 0.2 to 0.4, so unless it was grossly under 0.2, it wasn't flat wrong.

"there are alternatives to banning oil production: solar radiation management. We might be able to setup space mirrors or otherwise increasing the reflectivity of our atmosphere." ... "But keep in mind that we will soon run out of cheap oil in any case."

In other words, "Fear not, for we might just come up with some miracle technology or something. It might just all work out in the end so just stay the course and don't worry!"

If you're going to call out others for poorly reasoned arguments, at least have well reasoned arguments of your own.

<comment><USER3> Even more ridiculous.. the full quote is:

"We might be able to setup space mirrors or otherwise increasing the reflectivity of our atmosphere. Obviously, we cannot hope to both keep pumping CO2 in the atmosphere, and correct for it afterward: this could quickly become economically infeasible."

In the context of killing the planet and the entire human race, we still mention a plan could be "economically infeasible".

Jeez.

<comment><USER4> Sigh.

We're not going to "kill the planet," or the entire human race. Humans adapt. That's what we do. That's why we won.

Such hyperbole endangers vital rational discourse on the subject.

<comment><USER5> >We're not going to "kill the planet," or the entire human race. Humans adapt. That's what we do. That's why we won.

That is very close to the "fine tuning" argument often employed by creationists. It is entirely possible that humans have, in fact, merely been phenomenally lucky to have survived so far, and that the fact that we find ourselves as members of such a phenomenally lucky species is easily explained by the anthropic principle.

If you take all of the intelligent critters out there in the universe that are capable of discussing their adaptability, a pretty big chunk of those critters are going to be members of civilizations that got very lucky over the ages and managed to produce large cumulative populations, while a very small proportion will be critters from short-lived civilizations. Indeed, holding constant whatever level of adaptability we actually have, it is reasonable to assume that we are among the luckier of the civilizations at that level.

So no, we can't just assume that we're going to leap over any hurdle that comes our way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always find it troubling when someone with a computer science background assumes that their knowledge naturally transfers to something like climate science. Climate science is about probability and huge multi-factor models - and most importantly - models that change as new knowledge and data appear. It's just my opinion, but that seems to me to be the opposite of what most computer scientists are taught. Obviously computer scientists incorporate new data and new thinking - but I don't think it's quite the same as constructing a statistical model of how climate works. And obviously there are exceptions - but in general, I think it's just a different mindset.

<comment><USER7> I agree that knowledge of computer science doesn't transfer directly to climate science. However, there's a lot about computer science that may help understand how climate models yield probabilistic outcomes (Monte Carlo, anyone?).

On the subject, be a little careful equating probabilistic models and statistical models. At least in my experience, "statistical models" generally describes statistical fits to past data. Think of a polynomial whose parameters are chosen by least-squares fit to previous observations. These fits can be used to interpolate or extrapolate (to the future, or to different combinations of inputs). However, they don't encode any domain knowledge, and they can be extremely brittle when pushed outside the regimes from which they were derived.

Most climate models, on the other hand, are deterministic, physics-based models. Some of the sub-models may have statistical fits in them, but the modeling is largely driven by some conceptual framework of how the physics drive the dynamic system (e.g., expressing conservation of mass and energy, and how spatial differences drive transport).

Those deterministic climate models can be driven probabilistically-- meaning the uncertain inputs and parameters can be sampled from distributions of likely values. Aggregating all the results gives a probabilistic prediction. A lot of climate reports take this one step further, and aggregate results across multiple models. Most computer scientists will immediately "get" this part, even if they don't understand all the physics represented in the individual packages.

<comment><USER6> Excellent points - and important not to generalize about model construction.

I have a degree in computer science, and most of my training consisted of solving problems where there was a single outcome - e.g. "does the compiler work?" When I moved into financial modeling, I really had to shift from the idea of one answer to the idea that the real world is exceptionally complex and difficult to model. I had to get comfortable with the idea that I might have an idea of the outcome based on a model, but, as you point out, this is probabilistic outcome.

I found this article to have all the marking of someone with a similar background trying out a different profession without understanding probabilistic modeling, and, as you rightly point out, not understanding the deterministic portion of the models - the domain knowledge.

Moreover, I think he expresses doubt in any model that doesn't turn out the right answer 100% of the time - to me, not understanding the complexity of the systems that are being modeled and definitely not understanding that it is, as the name "climate science" implies, science - you experiment, you gain new knowledge from new data, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Global warming is one of those topics I've always withheld judgement on because it's such a huge topic that, even ignoring politics, it seems very hard to get a solid understanding of the science.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, by deciding to be "neutral" on the issue, you're exactly where the climate change deniers want you to be.

The deniers don't have to be proven correct to prevent action on climate change, they just have to put out enough FUD to create doubt.

<comment><USER10> Most of the real changes would require many people to die.

Going back, worldwide, to a pre-industrial civilisation would be a possibility. However, We're looking at 90% fatality rates to get to that point due to lack of food production. Probably would be even less than that. No chance in happening, unless forced by catastrophic event.

Another possibility is tremendous rationing. We see what having even simple healthcare is in this country. Instead, we would look at rationing everything in the world, including determining who lives and dies by how much resources they use (carbon debt). With 2 high input/output countries, good luck on this happening either.

And we have to look at all the smaller ways to handle global warming. One proposal is to dump megatonnes of lime in the ocean?! Or perhaps this carbon credits scam: it makes the rich richer (Well, where DOES the money go?). At least sources of energy like solar or wind make sense... Until you realise the amount of energy to make a solar panel is greater than the total energy you will get out of it. Bummer.

And underlying is this assumption that global warming == CO2 peak.. I've heard of this law called thermodynamics. CO2 may trap heat, but heat generated anywhere is still heat. We generate heat via our vehicles, electric grid, generators, burn piles, and other human sources of heat. Is this not a direct consideration as well?

<comment><USER11> A study about a year ago claimed that we could get to half the reductions required to keep us under +2C just by halting all fossil fuel subsidies worldwide (not that that's feasible).

A little googling on solar panel energy cost found, for example, these links:

<http://solarbus.org/documents/pvpayback.pdf>

<http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3910>

which claim that energy payback of solar panels takes about three years.

For various reasons I think we'd do better with advanced nuclear, such as integral fast reactors or molten salt reactors. Either would be safer than what we have now, proliferation-resistant, and produce a lot less nuclear waste with a much shorter lifetime. We could have a very energy-rich future without carbon emissions.

As for carbon credits, a lot of economists advocate a "fee-and-dividend" scheme. Instead of trading credits, major source emitters simply pay a flat fee per ton of carbon, passing on the cost to the rest of us. The money is divided among all citizens, equal amount per person. Most people come out ahead (since the median emissions are less than the average), but since the dividend is constant and the new cost variable, everyone has more incentive to conserve.

I've seen calculations for the contribution of waste heat and it's very minor compared to greenhouse gases. However, if our energy usage continues to grow exponentially on this planet it'll be a real problem in a couple hundred years: [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic- scale-e...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale- energy/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Looking for talented developer to be a true partner in two startups - <AUTHOR>

We are a two-member team at the very beginning of two online startup ideas.  Looking for a talented developer to become our third partner (we want you to be a true partner).  We have worked with a variety of technical folks on three different startups and know how valuable the technical team member's input and perspective are.  We will value and listen to your input.
We've also already raised significant pledged capital for another entrepreneurial endeavor and we bring significant marketing and business development experience to the table.  Those are just a few examples of the value we will bring.
Please write me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you are interested and would like to discuss.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Perhaps you can be more specific as to what your startup is and what qualities you are looking for?</comment>


Ask HN: Why kill duplicate discussions? - <AUTHOR>

I think it may be more common than it used to be that the following situation occurs:
1.  Some article/topic gets posted
2.  There is a non-trivial discussion on the topic
3.  Someone posts a link to an earlier HN post discussing the same article/topic x days ago
4.  Article goes dead, discussion is killed
This model works well if the user-base is so small that everyone reads every article/discussion.  But HN has grown.  Why should it be killed simply because a different group already touched upon it?
What if the new discussion takes a different route?  If it is truly the same article/discussion, shouldn't these be merged? <comment><USER2> The front page is more useful and interesting to me if it doesn't feature the same links over and over again.

There should be a statue of limitations, and it seems that in practice duplicates that are months or years old are less likely to be flagged and killed than duplicates that are days or weeks old.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems silly to suppose that the rationale is to protect against all links being the same?

Shouldn't the same discussion be merged?

(BTW, if you post an exact duplicate link, you will be forwarded to the original rather than actually posting.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree that there certainly can be new discussion on the same link, but I appreciate seeing links to previous submissions so that I can see the discussion that already occurred there, too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Merged - yes. That makes sense. Is that not what is being done already?</comment>