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jjoeon Ask HN: Could a religion be started today?

You only need three ingredients: miracles, prophecies, and a timeframe.

You need a couple of miracles to get people to listen. And you need true prophecies (accurate predictions of the future) to have long term following.

Good luck

jjoeon Test your “free will” at the Aaronson Oracle

If you're left handed, use your right hand. And vice versa. I scored around <= 0.3 consistently.

jjoeon Ask HN: Do you (developers) manage your own servers?

I think I can answer this question partially from a slightly different stand point.

We host (the fully managed kind) several clients' projects (small and medium). It isn't atypical to have some clients hire us for server "management" as insurance. Meaning we only dive in when something awry happens to their stack and they need that jack-of-all-trade tech who can pinpoint the culprit quickly. ~$30/mo as insurance is peanuts compared to potential revenue gaps.

Others want a turnkey solution where we document the details of their stack and we manage the ops part in coordination with the dev. I think this is where the most value is captured by our clients.

There are other interesting outlier cases but it's likely OT :)

jjoeon Ask HN: Privacy focused CDN

Have you looked at building your own CDN? I've built several for clients over the years. It's not difficult and it's definitely a good investment in your case.

jjoeon Scaling to 100M: MySQL Is a Better NoSQL

Scalability is like an abstract painting. It's unique to one's infrastructure. Its writing or sometimes postmortem makes good brain fertilizer. Not so much more. Beyond that I wouldn't rush to implement scalability du jour.

A setup that works for a certain service won't necessarily work for another unless yours is a very close replica. Based on my experience in this area, and I'm a performance seeking nut, each platform, and even each traffic pattern, needs its own thinking hat.

That's what makes it so fun!

jjoeon Ask HN: Passive Income Suggestions 2016

Passive and managed hosting is an oxymoron in my book. I know because I've been doing that for the last 15 years :)

jjoeon Ask HN: Best alternative for image hosting/scaling for high traffic site?

Are you resizing images to reduce transfer size or because your app needs to present images in different sizes? Why aren't you scaling app-side rather than server-side?

We manage servers for client with a similar requirement but it rarely exceeds $250/mo for several TBs plus the cost of a consumer CDN.

jjoeon How Fastly coded their own routing layer for scaling CDN

Interesting approach. So Fastly is offloading the full routing table to their carriers' router(s). That's because routers that can hold full BGP tables are expensive to purchase and maintain. But to retain some form of control, they're terminating eBGP at the switch and using iBGP to disseminate (inject) the providers' route (next hop).

I feel (I don't have direct experience with this setup) like they're just offloading some compute power (therefore cost) to the hosts. So the cost is automatically spread out across their relatively massive edge nodes. A line showing a router plus support costing $100,000 looks bad in expenditures vs showing a server plus integrated routing showing $2500.

I'm curious about how this impacts Varnish considering how table look ups can be bus-expensive during odd route changes/flaps (storms). %sys must go through the roof as a result.

jjoeon Ask HN: How to develop an entrepreneurial insight?

A potential vector is work experience in a specific industry. With enough exposure you build a flair for "undiscovered" pain points.

jjoeon Ask HN: Brief “Meet the founder” copy: what should it convey?

In my personal experience, writing the copy myself was overly self conscious and produced poor results.

Yes I can see how goofy mine would read. It's one of those things I'd be embarrassed of about a week or two later. But writing one's own copy is much more personal especially when it's a story.

jjoeon Show HN: Hyper_ – Simple and Secure Container Cloud

I understand boot up completes in under a second but if one needs to setup an environment to do something useful, it can take several seconds. I guess what I'm getting at is why would the fast boot matter when one still needs to setup a basic environment to complete a task?

This is analogous to achieving an artificially low TTFB but actual rendering doesn't start until several seconds later.

Am I missing something?

Thanks

jjoeon Work for only 3 hours a day, but everyday

It reads like someone who isn't doing much of realtime support. This works great for projects that haven't been unveiled or even ones that require little ongoing maintenance like a game. But if I worked 3 hours a day, my clients would crucify me.

Sadly, it isn't always possible.

jjoeon Ask HN: I'm taking 2 weeks off work to build a prototype. Any advice?

Build a prototype and then take 2 weeks off. You need those 2 weeks to talk to prospects, see people, and launch.

jjoeon Paywalls coming to medium.com: “We're building monetisation”

The HN title is sensationalist considering the length of the article and other points of discussion. The full quote is:

"I also think there's a lot of potential for premium or subscription or even user-paid content. Some sort of paywall or membership."

It's unfair IMO.

jjoeon Ask HN: Should each of your products register as their own business?

Regarding this:

Most small software companies have a single entity and only choose to spin out when a new product becomes a truly independent operational unit, when it receives investment, or (for branding purposes) if it ends up eating the business that spawned it.

Is there any legal ramification to "converting" product X, originally under the umbrella of Y LLC, to its own new X LLC?

Thanks

jjoeon Stripe Atlas

The only way I can think of is Western Union. But the fees are ridiculously high. Even then, the sender is the receiver. I'm not sure how that would work.

jjoeon Stripe Atlas

The $500 is above market rate for an LLC + US bank account. Do you think this cost will be revised down sometime in the future? Another challenge is that some folks can get in serious trouble (ie. imprisonment) with their local government for even having a foreign bank account. This is because local governments see it as a drain of foreign currency reserves like the USD/EUR, which are much needed by the country in question for imports. So this info needs to be kept top secret. What measures does Stripe take to prevent this kind of info from leaking?

jjoeon HTTP GZIP Compression remote date and time leak

This is where this date&time retrieval mechanism sort of breaks:

1) Timezone of server is set to one other than the geographical location's

2) Gzip-compressed page or asset is cached. Therefore the embedded date/time is from an unknown past.

So this reduces the good guesses a bit.

jjoeon Linode Security Advisory

Frankly, I don't see any harm in this. Actually, it's quite positive to see a CEO mingle with her user base. That's how you make sure you're in touch with your users to know what they need.

jjoeon Linode Security Advisory

DO has raised enough cash to be able to do this to keep clients (good for LTV).

jjoeon Progressively loading CSS – changes coming to Chrome

With progressive jpegs, I end up missing out on the content of images because they're still blurry by the time I'm done skimming text.

But now I'm going to miss out on text because I'm done skimming and it hasn't appeared yet.

jjoeon Tidalscale, a hypervisor that allows a single OS to run across multiple servers

Is this NUMA orchestration?

jjoeon Show HN: Grid – Multiplayer Creative Workspace

It's polished but this is an app looking for a problem to solve. Unfortunately by the time the problem space is discovered and understood, someone else will have developed something slightly better and more focused.

It looks like you're making its application so broad that you're hurting your chances. Unless you pick one problem, that exists right now, to solve I'm suspecting this isn't going to be a hit.

jjoeon Show HN: Zappa – Serverless Python/Django on AWS Lambda

From my understanding of the pricing (I could be wrong), even if the call is 100ms, because the timeout is set to 300s so the app stays in cache, you'll be charged for 300s (app is "running" for that long).

jjoeon Show HN: Zappa – Serverless Python/Django on AWS Lambda

I combined seconds into 3M, which is roughly 8640 (number of calls a month to keep it in cache) * 300s (timeout set so it stays in memory). My understanding of AWS lambda is that if you keep it up for 300 seconds, you get charged for that much. Because it's #reqs * #secs. Here's the example from the pricing page (with my comment at the end of the Total compute line):

The monthly compute price is $0.00001667 per GB-s and the free tier provides 400,000 GB-s.

Total compute (seconds) = 3M (1s) = 3,000,000 seconds # ( roughly equals to 8640 * 300 ~ 2.6M seconds in the case of this app)

Total compute (GB-s) = 3,000,000 * 512MB/1024 = 1,500,000 GB-s

Total compute – Free tier compute = Monthly billable compute GB- s

1,500,000 GB-s – 400,000 free tier GB-s = 1,100,000 GB-s

Monthly compute charges = 1,100,000 * $0.00001667 = $18.34

jjoe on If we are in a tech bubble, how can I protect myself?

The listing is not what one should stock up on in their underground bunker. But rather things you can build a business around so you're OK no matter what the economy's doing.

jjoe on How we got our first 100 paying customers

I'm glad you found a strategy that got you your first 100 paying clients. But now you're unable to determine your CAC or CLV and have no idea how to scale acquisition. Or at the very least, your CAC is through the roof because your employees are the ones hustling (social, support, visibility, etc). That's difficult to scale and/or measure properly.
Have you completely abandoned the traditional methods?

jjoe on Show HN: ChatPage.io – Private chat for sales and client communication

Something about chatting with clients or prospects on someone else's page/domain bothers me. I think your pro plan should have an option to brand the chat page with your client's own sub/domain.

jjoe on Show HN: Zappa – Serverless Python/Django on AWS Lambda

This is cool. On this:
To ensure that your servers are kept in a cached state, you can manually configure a scheduled task for your Zappa function that'll keep the server cached by calling it every 5 minutes.
The cost of running the warmer (300s * ~3M * 512MB) comes out to about $18 and that's not counting the number of actual requests from end users. It's interesting but costly as a substitute.

jjoe on If we are in a tech bubble, how can I protect myself?

It's almost always too late to protect yourself when the bubble has popped. So prepare for the next pop. The only way to protect yourself is to build your own business. But not just any kind of business; a business that can absorb the chocks of cyclical troughs in an economy.
What do people always need?
* Drinking water
* Food
* Health
* Shelter
Pick one or two.