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jjoeon Pierre Cardin has died

Fashion design appeared (and maybe still appears) to be one those areas where one could easily gain transcending fame and notoriety; catering to elites.

Contrasting it to software or an app (design), the thing could be used by millions and barely anyone knows who you are.

Maybe because fashion designers themselves get to appear on stage and cement their face in everyone's consciousness? Imagine if your software or app would display you, the designer, each time someone starts it up...

Hmmm Mark Zuckerberg comes to mind. The default "friend" for each new facebook account...

I guess I answered my own question?

jjoeon SpaceX Starship Users' Guide [pdf]

I got really excited that the PDF download seemed substantial as it took relatively longer to complete. Only to be mildly disappointed that it's only 5 pages long...

Amazing how this is all quickly coming to fruition that there isn't enough time to fully assimilate.

jjoeon Isaac Newton’s attempts to unlock secret code of pyramids

It's interesting that 400 years later, especially in this day and age of freedoms and lesser stigmatization, we still have this dissonance. People are unwilling to listen to their inner instincts that maybe not everything we believe in must be a published paper in a reputable journal.

jjoeon Cell Signaling Technologies – Detailed 3D model of human cells

It's not possible to overstate the importance of this fact - all these structures and processes evolved - weren't designed - but evolved !

Why not: designed to evolve

jjoeon Ask HN: How did you choose an idea to work on?

Select the top 3 ideas. Put out landing pages for each with mock demos. Don't write code yet. Gently engage people online (ex: twitter) to gauge for concrete interest. You'll naturally start focusing on the idea with the most excitement and engagement.

Bonus point if you get people to commit to the idea with money.

jjoeon The End of the Redis Adventure

I've made a little bit of money thanks to Redis [0]. All I did was build integration for Redis on cPanel. So that speaks to the great quality brand of Redis.

Thank you and Godspeed!

[0] https://www.unixy.net/redis

jjoeon Ask HN: Do you think that people at work like you and enjoy your presence?

The fact that people are openly praising you for acts that perhaps seem futile or downright insulting to you is a good sign. It means that you're approachable and able to handle a joke or two with no hard feelings. It can be an advantage if you learn how to leverage it.

jjoeon There is no reason to cross the U.S. by train, but I did it anyway

> But get a sleeper compartment, don't sit with the cattle.

Cattle?

jjoeon Ask HN: What's the longest you spent on a personal project that you gave up on?

I don't agree. The right person most likely had spent 5 months prior to get to the point of being able to do it in a day.

This 5 months of trial and error is called learning.

jjoeon Ask HN: What is your 2019 book reading list?

I'm not reading any book in 2019. I usually find a moment of quiet during lunch and I would read then. But it developed into an eating habit and, as a side effect, a weight gain. I want to focus on building practical things this year instead.

jjoeon Au Revoir

Lots of good common sense advice and practical experience there. I've had my fair share as a devops/sysadmin working on crazy systems (more worse than better haha). So it's unsurprising how common sense isn't always put into practice.

I do believe caching to be the proverbial Swiss Army Knife of performance. Some of its tools can be used properly and others as band-aid / stop gap. Even band-aids serve a useful purpose. But I can definitely see how a system can accrue technical debt when over leveraging caching.

But to believe in prevalent, perfectly built systems is to deny the status quo of the landscape. When you democratize development like WordPress has done with its plugins and Node has done with npm, as popular examples, you definitely have it coming.

jjoeon Au Revoir

Edited to mention Varnish.

Also, adding caches is still resource scaling.

This is a semantically correct. Caching can indeed cut down on resource usage. It isn't always a scale-up operation.

jjoeon Au Revoir

I'm not sure resource scaling is what's needed here. Just good ol' caching. Shameless plug: I built Cachoid[0] for caching as a service (leveraging Varnish mainly) to help with situations like this.

[0] https://www.cachoid.com/

jjoeon Ask HN: What is the biggest challenge you face as a developer?

FOMO on the latest and greatest framework and the feeling of being left out. But deep down I know it's a distracrion; albeit a mentally taxing one.

jjoeon A picture got my PostgreSQL database to start mining Monero

Do you see the binary code? It’s right below her left elbow!

It takes someone with astute observation skills to see this.

jjoeon UX review of your SaaS landingpage

Got some speedy feedback from Karim. Definitely some great advice! Thanks

jjoeon From idea to revenue in 5 working days, thanks to HN

I had tentatively been planning on a freemium model, and I could not have been more wrong. Users were unanimously and strongly against it, so I had to find another way

This took me by surprise. Why is HN against freemiums? I'm debating whether to introduce a freemium plan into my project [0] and would appreciate some insight on this.

[0] https://www.cachoid.com

jjoeon Ask HN: Did your website get the HN/Reddit hug? What did you do?

I've had exposure to these hugs for a variety of websites. I'm not sure how it started but people I had helped with traffic isues started referring others to me.

Anyway I got a glimpse of a pattern in a lot of these sites. So decided to build a tool that would help in these situations with a few tweaks depending on the stack.

That's when I came up with Cachoid[0] as a way to get some provisioning automation.

[0] https://www.cachoid.com

jjoeon Modern Linux in an ancient PC

Do you often find yourself having to adjust capacity when under traffic spikes? Would be happy to help smooth out the traffic using off server caching ( see https://www.cachoid.com ). Fremium plan would work well. Feel free to email me joe@

jjoeon Ask HN: Your predictions for 2018?

Right now high fees are halting usability. But LN should ease that and encourage wallet owner to transact more.

jjoeon High doses of vitamin D rapidly reduce arterial stiffness

Vitamin D is a steroid hormone. Its potential impact on the body is substantial.

jjoeon Ask HN: Your predictions for 2018?

> Right now Bitcoin value is purely based on speculation

That isn't factual. Analysts have found an almost perfect correlation between new wallets growth and btc's price. Transaction clearing delays will be fixed. Give it time.

jjoeon Ask HN: Your predictions for 2018?

> We will have a big Bitcoin crash, there will be a drastic correction on the price of crypto, specially when you look at what might be driving the current raise in value for Bitcoin.

What do you think is driving the uptrend?

jjoeon Call options used to bet that Bitcoin will go over $50K next year

I'm curious about how people's arguing about Bitcoin's prospects correlates with their cryptocurrency holdings.

jjoeon Ask HN: What are some common traps that smart people fall into?

To consider oneself smart.

jjoeon Like Ant Cant Perceive Human, Are Human Incapable of Perceiving Superior Beings?

We have such a hard time understanding and sensing our fellow human beings. So much that, and as a result, we start disputes and wage wars. Considering our intelligence spread is negligible, what makes one think we could perceive and much less communicate with a superbeing whose intelligence is magnitudes superior to ours?

Are we able to perceive whomever created the universe, life, and the likeliness of them upkeeping it?

jjoeon Ask HN: How technically hard was it for Twitter to move to 280 chars?

I'm certain some obscure optimizations were done from top to bottom for 140 chars. 280 chars will also require a different mindset and optimizations.

jjoeon ThyssenKrupp Multi – world’s first rope-free elevator [video]

This might read a bit odd and tangential but I cringe every time I get into a ThyssenKrupp elevator. Thyssen and Krupp were huge fans of Hitler and the Nazis. The two families donated large sums of money to their cause. They both benefited from Hitler's support and promoted the use of forced labor. ThyssenKrupp is largely seen as a Hitler firm in many circles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThyssenKrupp

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

[2] http://spartacus-educational.com/GERthyssen.htm

jjoeon How do you test a new server provider?

Answers will vary. But there exist one true test of the provider's ability to stick with you through thick and thin: it's the Turing test!

See, providers have regressed (economy of scale and all) to the degree where their responses to inquiries/emails/requests are indiscernible from early wannabe AI chatbot implementations.

Take the time to email/call your potential provider and ask questions regarding the service. Do the responses pass the smell test? Is sales completely clueless and unable to answer questions about simple technical matters (red flag)? Can support carry out requests that aren't scripted?

Trust your instinct and common sense.

jjoeon Ask HN: How would you handle a large traffic spike (eg. being frontpage on HN)?

> Putting varnish in front of any web server will help more.

This has been my goto implementation because it can be rapidly deployed. Shameful plug: I've built Cachoid [0] for this very reason. It's a Varnish as a service platform and you can get up and running within 10 seconds.

[0] https://www.cachoid.com