karambir's comments

karambir | 1 year ago | on: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

I had same feeling. I have been using AI summarizers more and more for these type of articles/posts. Though I haven't checked the summary quality, here is what I got from Kagi Summarizer:

The passage discusses the author's experience with the growing sense of competition and obligation around reading and book consumption. It criticizes the way platforms like Goodreads have turned reading into a quantifiable task, with people feeling pressure to read a certain number of books per year. The author argues that reading should be about the experience and personal enjoyment, not about keeping up with others or hitting reading goals. The passage encourages readers to step away from the social media side of reading and not worry about the "right" way to read. It emphasizes that the value of reading is not quantifiable and that people should read at their own pace without external pressure.

karambir | 4 years ago | on: JsonLogic

We used this at an early version of ad-network where Advertisers would write JsonLogic against a set of user properties with all the operators. And this was checked at runtime when ad was to be shown. At the time, I thought this was a neat and quick way to give advertisers some form of targeting. We had ~500 active ad campaigns at any given time(not much growth beyond that) and this worked really great.

But I always thought there should be better way for this kind of application. I see a lot of comments about Lisp. My question is: Is Lisp better for above scenario or there is even better way?

karambir | 5 years ago | on: I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

The exact same thing is for India. Individuals can't get non-profit status. So you have to sell something. A software dev friend tried donate button with cta "Get exclusive support" for few months. But international audience didn't quite get it.

I have seen some gamers in India asking for donations and giving direct account details(UPI[1] details), but I am very cautious against this. I am just waiting(selfishly) for Income Tax dept to serve notice to someone and get this clarified via court case.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

karambir | 5 years ago | on: Speed.cloudflare.com

I think it will be similar to netflix fast.com but it selected Mumbai servers when I am in Delhi(CF has servers in Delhi). Maybe this is intentional?

Kept getting the test paused automatically on Firefox Dev Edition. Looking at the console:

    Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=2826350041244361&bytes=1000: TypeError: can't access property "transferSize", i is undefined

karambir | 5 years ago | on: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

Mobile broadband is witnessing intense competition in grabbing customers as millions of rural Indians are coming online. This started with a Petro-chemical billionaire starting Jio Network and giving free unlimited 4G data for a year(his company has 300million subscribers now).

Already 4 networks have exited the market and 3rd & 4th largest networks(Vodafone and Idea) have combined due to cash crunch. Airtel(earlier largest) has been raising outside money in hopes that it can survive the low prices. So there are only 4 networks remaining. Only recently they started increasing prices.

That billionaire is also going into Fibre(purchased his bankrupt bother company's infrastructure), maybe we'll see that competition extend to DC and interconnects.

karambir | 5 years ago | on: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

Mostly because it was released very early. And for a country like India, it may prove advantageous in coming months. We do not have any vaccine for Covid19 and can't be in lock-down forever. We have to learn to live with the virus for few months at least. Apps like these can help in contact tracing while allowing many to live normally.

Also I personally think the permissions(location and bluetooth) are fine for an app like this to really function. I have read someone mentioned on HN that these platforms prove their worth when >60% people are using them(I maybe remembering wrong though).

karambir | 5 years ago | on: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

We can and for most apps I do this too. But some apps, like this one, require the location or they won't even start. Also at least on android(which also has fine-grained permissions now), this app specifically requires on-going(background?) location access.

Recently this has also been made mandatory for employees, public and private. So organizations have to ensure all employees have this app on their smartphones. We will see how much this is enforced.

karambir | 5 years ago | on: Apple, Google ban location tracking in apps using their contact-tracing system

Will be interesting to see if they can ban Indian govt. app[1] which needs full location access(clarified)[3]. A lot of people like this app(including me) but also know government does not have good track record in securing private data.

Previously Apple were made to bend their rules when India threatened to ban Apple devices if they don't allow TRAI Do Not Disturb app in 2018.[2]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nic.goi.aarogy...

[2] https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/30/apple-approves-india-dnd-app/

[3] https://paste.gg/p/anonymous/b7c95d3967514e78a652840b5b666d5...

karambir | 5 years ago | on: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

Please consider an Asia/Pacific data center. I am from India and my company was not able to use B2 due to high response times even from European DC. Even a DC in Singapore will be helpful for us.

- Thankful Personal Backup Customer

karambir | 5 years ago | on: PWA Store

Awesome collection! One thing I am always curious about, the right click and open in new tab does not work on the list items. I have seen this on many recent JS heavy web applications. Is this normal for PWAs to not support traditional browser interaction points?

I can understand PWA wants to be more than just a web page and have their own UX. I have more experience in Backend software development and right now leading a small web/mobile/devops team, and always stress to not override browser controls unless absolutely necessary. Somewhat similar thing happens with scrolling. I feel most of the JS overridden scrolling is not needed.

karambir | 6 years ago | on: India announces nationwide lockdown to stop spread of coronavirus

They are doing something of this sort. But it's not the employer but employee themselves that have to go to local police station and get the PASS made. Though this was the provision set by Delhi and not sure how this lockdown(nationwide) changes that.

Also I am worried about support services to essential workers as well. Like just today, my sister(see GP) called a medical equipment company to come and fix an issue with their device that her team is not able to fix. The company refused and just said to talk over video call.

karambir | 6 years ago | on: India announces nationwide lockdown to stop spread of coronavirus

Few things I have seen in past couple days here in Delhi(which was locked down earlier):

- Many people are making excuses of getting groceries/milk/medicine to roam.

- Some people are just treating it as picnic and roaming streets to see what a lock-down looks like. Local police was perplexed with this thought.

- People who are in essential services are having hard time to get to their workplaces. For example: my sister is a Bio-medical engineer in local hospital and she is not able to book a cab or take local public transport. Today I went to drop her off and police stopped me twice to ask why I am out. We need to somehow make this easier. So essential services and their support can function.

karambir | 6 years ago | on: Guide to running Elasticsearch in production

We were hit by this on Kibana 6.x as I didn't read the x-pack trial properly. I thought at least login would be there. My bad. We added Nginx auth after that.

But x-pack security is actually free from some point release in version 7. Though x-pack is not open source, just free to use. So our nginx Kibana auth is still there.

karambir | 6 years ago | on: India is the next internet frontier (2018)

A positive thing for International companies is that India has a very large section of English speakers and that is only growing. So they did enter and expanded in the market easily.

But in the last few years due to Jio revolution, people from tier 3 cities and villages and getting connected to the internet for the first time. So companies wanting to capture these markets have to put extra effort into their products. Aside from language preferences, this section sees products in a different manner. Like Tiktok and Youtube have very different "popular" videos here.

karambir | 6 years ago | on: Scaling to 100k Users

Yeah, for normal web app, we can easily have 100x users for each step mentioned in article.

For our company, we had more than 500k users with 1 small nginx + 1 medium appServer(with autoscaling, though never needed it) + 1 small cache server and RDS till now. We just added a aws managed load balancer into the setup and think it might be overkill.

For a client with NewsFeed needs, I used a dedicated server(64GB, 2TB space) to run nginx, app, cache, huge elasticsearch and postgres. It was great(and cheap) option for an MVP and let them validate the product for few months with >10k users.

It was awesome to learn a few years ago, how much compute power we don't use.

karambir | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you process payments?

Our company is based out of India selling online courses for Data Science community and we use two payment providers: Instamojo and Paypal. Instamojo is for Indian cards and Paypal is for international payments. We could have used Instamojo for all payments but many customers like using Paypal as they don't have to worry about saving credit card information with some random payment provider.

Stripe just came out of private beta in India but their processing fees are pretty high. We are looking at two providers as they are promising better fees. Razorpay and Payu:

- Razorpay is pretty much Stripe of India with the documentation and UI similar to Stripe.

- Payu is an old dog in Indian Payment Industry with good sales team but bad integration and overall product.

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