HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Cherian

1,210 karma · joined August 3, 2009

Vice President, International Business at Byjus Co-founder of Cucumbertown – a simple recipe blogging platform.

Ex-Zynga.

I am a cook too.

https://twitter.com/cherianthomas https://github.com/cherian http://www.linkedin.com/in/cherianthomas http://stackoverflow.com/users/22039/cherian

cherian@byjus.com, Loc: Palo Alto, CA

submissionscomments
Cherian··on Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8
Can someone suggest a good bookmarking app that can be used offline, as well as great typography and neat bookmarking of social media videos? Absolutely. At least embed and show it correctly.
Cherian··on How Kerala got rich
Agree. The Christians that came with the Apostles mainly were Syrians who were traders and kept to themselves for 13-14 centuries.

The British Christians were engaged in evangelism and, consequently, set up colleges, schools, hospitals, and other such institutions. They were also involved in conversions that led to the penetration of Christianity from a minor fraction (during the time from the early AD till 18th century) to double digits. This was obviously instrumental for English language inculcation.

Cherian··on How Kerala got rich
I was born in the second southernmost district of Kerala, Quilon (now Kollam). I am now a U.S. citizen in the Bay Area. Growing up in Quilon, I attended an Anglo-Indian boy's school called Infant Jesus - in a small strip of land called Thangassery, people predominantly spoke English. I was taught British dialects emphasizing pronunciations that mimicked the world stage. I didn't really understand it until much later in life.

In my 20s, the contrast hit when I traveled across other parts of India.

Kerala has a mix of Western population that decided to stay back after the Indian Independence that brought with them Christianity, education, hospitals, and the Catholic culture. Kerala is also one of the few places in India where you can eat beef without inhibitions.

The writer hasn't emphasized this enough, but when oil struck the Middle East in the 1960s, the massive influx of blue and white-collar labor (who had the English language and engineering skills) that helped set up what's now Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Oman, and many other countries was built by Malayalees. My father-in-law was one of the earlier engineers at Aramco in Saudi. The Middle Eastern money has flown back to Kerala thanks to high bank interest rates (nearly 10%) and landlocked real estate that helped raise the state's GDP.

Cherian··on Ngtop – Request analytics from the Nginx access logs
Is there something like logwatch that could send me a digest of all 404s, 500s etc.?
Cherian··on Noam Chomsky has passed away
It was the 90s. I was probably in the ninth grade in a small, sleepy little town in the southernmost part of India called Quilon when Noam Chomsky and his wife showed up on a stage and talked about how life has to change culturally to be a developed nation and how linguistic skills should be at the forefront to succeed.

I was probably just 12 years old, but it profoundly impacted this little kid and was etched for the rest of my life.

Rest in peace, Mr. Chomsky. You've impacted more people than you can ever imagine.

Cherian··on macOS Finder is still bad at network file copies
Are there good alternatives to Finder like Total Commander for Windows (https://www.ghisler.com/). I still miss it.
Cherian··on As I am currently in a war zone, I don't have many options for cabling
My life was built on people who helped me out like this.

Tangentially, the real MVP is the home depot guy who helps you find the one right-sized screw that costs $0.5….

Cherian··on Plane Lands/Takes Off in Only 20 Feet (2013)
Everything to do with headwinds. If you think only aircrafts can do this, watch this hang glider land: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uQimddEKrFw Fort Funston, California.
Cherian··on Why can’t we get a handle on this safety thing? (1998)
Gliders have become a lot more safe but logistically much more challenging to transport than PGs.
Cherian··on Why can’t we get a handle on this safety thing? (1998)
I am a hang glider pilot in the US.

As the saying goes, “There are no bold and old pilots.” If flying and hang gliding teaches you anything, it is to take the right decisions within the framework of safety you have experience with. It’s a bit like knowing how to ride a bicycle, but you want to do a wheelie when it rains – not the right decision.

Circa 2022, the safety and community policing is strong enough to weed out non-safe pilots. I know pilots are as old as 80 years old and have been flying for 40+ years without incidents.

More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pir3FAB4e3Q

Cherian··on Teach kids to read with ASR and computer vision. Reading Adventure from Osmo
Osmo is a favorite with Hacker News parents. Two years back, we started this labor of love to help them in this difficult journey of learning how to read.

Critique us. We’d love to hear from you.

Cherian··on Joining Apple 40 years ago
Would you be open to doing an interview? If yes, how do I reach out?
Cherian··on Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft
Watching Microsoft from the 90s adapt and to see Satya get to do what he wants is pretty amazing!
Cherian··on Poor man's document camera for videoconference
I don’t want to look like promotional, but recently a professor used an Osmo reflector (https://twitter.com/romps/status/1237617042338897921?s=12) to project class notes and it caught on with teachers.

A team worked through the weekend and released a free app to make this super easy (https://twitter.com/PlayOsmo/status/1241152565083090947).

While the base + reflector is not free, if you already have an Osmo game at home, you can reuse that.

Cherian··on Anki, Jibo, and Kuri: What We Can Learn from Social Robots That Didn't Make It
The article does not capture the complexity of running a hardware business.

Anki’s landed cost was nearly 65% of the MSRP. Retailers take 30-35% margins. This leads to paper-thin margins for marketing, low working capital for production and other opex. You will not survive in a market like that.

I work with ex-employees from Anki. It was a well-loved product/company. If it had survived another 3-4 years, they would have seen light.

Source: I work with retail teams with products in similar categories (https://www.playosmo.com/).

Cherian··on Sand Theft
My home state Kerala in India is subject to rampant sand mining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b20dlI0_ZtU Ironically, we fuel this via demand for coarse sand in construction.

The impact is immediate. Rivers are drying up and water beds are going deeper down: https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/sand...

Cherian··on India's Meghalaya 'living root bridges' get stronger as the trees grow
I noticed that you rock climb. Lead? Are you in the Bay Area? How do I contact you?
Cherian··on My company sold for $100M and I got zilch – how can that be?
Someone should make a tshirt “Liquidation Pref: the most dangerous word”
Cherian··on Cloudflare CTO: “If we did [take on GitHub] what features would you like?”
A configuration language for cache management (think Varnish VCL). If you can give us cache management for page sections, that'd be wonderful.

LB issues – ticket 1612791

Cherian··on Cloudflare CTO: “If we did [take on GitHub] what features would you like?”
Cloudflare folks. Please don’t do this. I don’t know if Mr.Cumming is serious.

As a user of CF, I hope you folks go a lot deeper than broader. Example: Better cache management – compete with Fastly, my tickets on load balancer bugs were open for almost 6 months, etc.

Cherian··on King Alfred and India
I come from Kerala, the southernmost state in India referenced in the article. My last name is Thomas and every now and then people in the US look at me bewildered when I tell them my name – “But you don’t look Spanish”. I take it as an opportunity to give them a bit of a history lesson – “Do you know Christianity came to India 14 centuries before the US? And Columbus was looking for these Indians selling black pepper?”

Surprises people so much to know that Christianity exists in India, let alone that St. Thomas died in India [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Apostle

Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
Thank you. Re-uploading.
Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
Was. Sold it [1].

[1]: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/japan...

Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
Here’s Neil Patel doing for a different vertical [1]. That article and the commenters from there can take you a long way. FWIW, don’t jump on to these things without following the links and spending a month or more researching. Writing is hard. And you have to produce around 4-10 pieces of audience intended content every month.

When we started, we didn’t care about the traffic. We did it because we loved it.

Content updating happens every year or during vacations when we get bored or when we learn a new technique. For example, when we learned that good photographs increase the CTR by 10x, my wife started learning photography. When we learned that Pinterest optimized vertical images get 5x+ CTR [2], we implemented that a year back. There are many Facebook groups for these discussions.

[1] https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/05/11/how-im-going-to-achie... [2] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/527554543833038696/

Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
You are right. We have around $3000 worth of lighting equipment, lens, etc. But we acquired them along the way.

Sponsored content is a good chunk of money (close to 30% every mom) but its nonscalable.

Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
Keep on writing content where you can be good (it all starts with the passion). Healthy Desserts, Everyday 30-minute cooking, Asian cooking for Americans, etc. Learn from Google what the audience intent is, improve your content. Do this for four years; you’ll get 300K/month. Then there’s SEO, Pinterest optimization [1], better photography, Lightroom skills, video shooting & editing, etc. You’ll learn this along the way. After that, there’s a good chance traffic will compound.

But you have to show up at 5 AM every day (I can’t find that Kobe Bryant quote)

[1]: https://in.pinterest.com/janerosep/a-little-bit-of-spice-fro...

Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
If only people would work hard as my wife, be relentlessly passionate and marginally improve routinely...
Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
We are switching ad publishers.
Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
There are a lot of companies that help you do this. Examples: http://www.adthrive.com/, https://www.mediavine.com/

Edit: The money takes more than 6 years of hard work and a lot of content, social media management, brand building, sponsored writing, quality photography, now byte-size videos etc.

Cherian··on Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?
I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1]

A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4]

Caveat: Things take off once you cross around 700—800K US traffic. Until then it can be frustrating.

[1]: https://alittlebitofspice.com/

[2]: http://d.pr/i/bIBobD

[3]: http://d.pr/i/Qvk1M

[4]: http://d.pr/i/dEqpvA

Page 1 of 6Next →