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vjk2005

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Designer + Web Developer (Node.js + Jquery + MongoDB) www.dffrnt.com

Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

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vjk2005.tumblr.com 12y ago

"Live Reload"-like feature with a single line of javascript

vjk2005
5pts2
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: Best Indian bank?

vjk2005
1pts0
Ask HN: Where do you host your NodeJS applications? 13 years ago

So far I've been using Heroku, but lately as the apps I've been trying to put together have begun to have more interconnected pieces, their service has started to become stifling. For example, getting nginx to proxy to Node requires convoluted setups like "buildpacks" and other Heroku-specific custom configs all of which can be alleviated by switching to a VPS, which is what I'm planning to do in the coming months.

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Ask HN: What's your blog? 13 years ago

I have a thing for insights. Sometimes simply flipping the normal order of things can make one see life in a completely new way[0] and that fascinates me no end. Eventually I started collecting these at my blog, vjk2005.tumblr.com, which has since expanded beyond a collection of insights[1][2] to include design[3][4], my ideas and thoughts[5][6][7], Photography[8][9], Japan[10][11], Travel[12], pithy quotes[13] and tidbits on technology and nature[14][15].

[0] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/31520538726/the-foundation-of...

[1] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/26155332078/the-power-of-char...

[2] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/23733095311/sunnyballiette-ni...

[3] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/31465598591/fractal-kitchenwa...

[4] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/30946005549/how-to-draw-a-3d-...

[5] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/31581467714/the-difference-be...

[6] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/21642976591/does-time-stop-wh...

[7] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4615308706/gyrotasking

[8] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/31453294194/qiu-yang-and-colo...

[9] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/31319652284/breathtaking-orie...

[10] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/26159184468/tokyo-1960s

[11] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/21494313892/digital-fishing

[12] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/23339995775/semporna-malaysia

[13] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/39569214423/genius-is-an-afri...

[14] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/30247705546/vladimir-lukyanov...

[15] http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/36638052985/the-most-beautifu...

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Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2012) 14 years ago

SEEKING WORK - Remote / India

Electrical Engineer-turned-Designer with 6 years experience in Branding & Identity (logos, stationery etc). Have worked with startups in the US, UK and Singapore.

Latest project (Nov 2012): Logo design - https://plus.google.com/103149454458679997203/posts/V4eP2Gao...

Portfolio (Identity): http://dffrnt.com/design Portfolio (Websites): http://dffrnt.com/design/websites

vijay@dffrnt.com (please mention HN in your email)

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Kort - a thumbnail preview concept 14 years ago

Apple's had a less fancier implementation for quite a while now — thumbnail scrubbing in iPhoto and FCP on the desktop. I don't have any iOS devices to see if they have touch versions of their scrubber but I do remember seeing one on an iPad demo video some time back.

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Ask HN: What would you work on, if money was of no concern? 14 years ago

"What would it be? " - Open source Federated P2P socnet.

"Why?" - Software can be as closed as it wants 'cause we can always drop it for another option anytime we want since the data is still under our control, but imprisoning our digital lives into these walled gardens put up by "for-profit, maximize-shareholder-value-at-all-costs, turn-user-into-product, shove-ads-into-the-user's-stream-and-if-possible-download-a-few-into-their-throats-as-well" companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, is a recipe for disaster as our data, our friends, our relationships, our entire digital lives, go out of our control in realtime. The situation is really, really bad and to make things worse, the people currently working on this problem are so geeky, so out of touch with the common man's mentality that their technically smart solutions will never ever go mainstream. I'm very passionate about improving the situation and I desire to make social, at minimum, a federated system like email so migration can get a little bit easier when better alternatives pop up down the line or if the user feels the service provider is starting to get a tad too "evil" for his taste.

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Failed entrepreneur, broke, unemployed, now taking care of aging parents. Help. 15 years ago

Lots of good advice here and hope you can benefit from them. My 2 cents:

Find someone who's in a much worse situation than you are - start talking to them regularly, become friends. Ideally, this 'someone' would be a single woman (it's my understanding that you're single) who's around your age. Start from here, and things will change. Patience is an absolute must (the 'as soon as possible' in the last para tells me this could be hard for you, but there's no way around it).

I'd add one more thing I learnt over the years - the strongest, the most tenacious and steel-willed people are those who have something to protect. I'd suggest you find some time to figure out what exactly you want to protect. It could be a person, it could be values, anything that you love but will not survive without you. Once you have something to protect, you'll be able to work your way out of tough situations on your own.

Wish you the best.

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Goodbye, IBM. Seriously. 15 years ago

I agree with most of your thoughts except the 'fashion company' bit. What fashion companies do is 'frivolous' design, a shirt is a shirt is a shirt. What Apple does is on a totally different level - mouse is not a scroll wheel is not a multi-touch sensor. They are all fundamentally different ways of interaction that change the things you _can_ and _cannot_ do with the device - you can't have the precision of the mouse on the iPhone but you can't do the iPhone's multi-touch gestures with the mouse. The design fashion companies do, doesn't have the same impact. Totally on-board with you on the rest of your thoughts.

As an aside, for people who are interested, at MacWorld 2007, Steve summed up the whole thing in just 1 slide... http://i.imgur.com/gMIjp.jpg

To a lot of people 'design' means white/gray rounded rectangles, but that's really not why Apple is where they are today. As Steve said 8 years ago - “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

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Why so little looting in Japan? It's not just about honesty. 15 years ago

Tigers are not known for functioning as a superorganism, that's why I had to go with ants. See this video to know about the power of ants - Ants: Nature's Secret Power - Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwATgYaEku4

In your mind, perhaps ants are 'little' and 'mere insects' but in my mind I see only those parts of them that apply to the discussion at hand.

Let me elaborate.

I never said they are 'no more than ants'. When I said 'they are ants', I meant it to be an intro to the analogy of how their society's functioning has similarities to the superorganism that is the ant colony, thus showing the same behaviors of stronger community, less in-fighting, rigid society and protective nature, which enables them to efficiently handle disasters that would cripple any other normal society, just like how ants can handle their entire colony being destroyed only to rebuild it anew in 2 days.

I also never said anything about them lacking choice, creativity or spontaneity. You will note my references to concepts they have pioneered - JIT, Kaizen, Katakana. Sony was built amidst the ashes of the war in a dilapidated building. There's so many more I could write a book.

Racism is not about -ignoring- differences. Racism is the opposite - recognizing the differences and still treating people the same -despite- the differences. I treat everyone the same.

Comment is long. It's the result of years of observation that started when I was 23 and first came to know that in Japan, the average delay per train throughout the year is a mere 0.4 minutes, including delays caused by typhoons, earthquakes, snowfall, heavy rain, and other natural disasters. It boggled my mind and I set out to learn more about the people who could make this happen. That comment is not meant for everyone but only for those curious about what makes the Japanese do the things they are renowned for.

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Why so little looting in Japan? It's not just about honesty. 15 years ago

I've been studying them for a few years now and will now offer my observations to those interested. The reason why there's no looting in Japan is a result of their uniquely homogeneous population combined with the unique culture that they have been forced to develop as a result of their perilous location, where there's a quake every 5 minutes on average, where tsunamis are so abundant they came up with the name 'tsunami' in the first place, and where there's no dearth of fires and typhoons.

To deal with this high probability of disaster, they have become ants(updated below). What's that? Ants live in a world where disasters many orders of magnitude more than an individual ant can handle, occur multiple times a day - colonies getting crushed by predators, flooded with water from human habitats, food they chance upon is multiple hundred times an individual ant's weight etc etc. To deal with this, they have evolved into the 'superorganism', which is a fancy word for saying every individual will put the community first and themselves second, which enables the whole colony to move and work as if it has -one and the same- mind. So if a colony gets destroyed, there's no looting or in-fighting in ant-colonies... they all move as if they possess the same mind, with the ants who were in-charge of foraging for food run out as a team to find the next suitable space for the colony while the ants in-charge of the colony' larvae protect it for the moment till the time is right to re-locate and so on.

Becoming a superorganism is the only way for the ants to deal with the catastrophe of the magnitude that they face everyday and still ensure the survival of the majority of the colony successfully - they have to put the colony first and the individual second. Unlike the simple minded ants, humans are far more intelligent, hence independent, than ants, making it harder for human societies to function with the kind of 'one-ness' the ant colonies show. But the Japanese, thanks to their largely homogeneous population, are the closest human equivalent to the superorganism.

Being in a country where they know that a disaster of such magnitude is inevitable, they have evolved into a culture of disaster recovery than disaster prevention -"It's not possible to prevent disasters, too numerous, too powerful. So let's focus on recovering from the disasters with the least cost to time, people and resources." They do this by being fast & efficient(you know where JIT, Kaizen come from) and function as if having the same mind (even their language has evolved to support this way of functioning with the strange third-person like way of speaking which I believe is called 気遣い, kidukai or consideration). By trying to become a superorganism, they achieve the same benefits that the ants do - incredibly fast and efficient disaster recovery, but they also show the same side-effects - no looting or in-fighting, fiercely protective of their homogeneity (again, their language has evolved to support this with something called Katakana where non-native words like 'Advanced Cartridge Slot' are turned into pure Japanese sounds - アドバンスカートリッジスロット which is pronounced as adobansukaatorijjisurotto, all native Japanese sounds), clearly visible patterns in the way they work, highly rigid social pecking order (Senpai+Kouhai, gekokujō), outliers will be punished and so on.

This unique culture is why they survived a 'surprise' nuclear attack (emphasis on surprise as it is many orders of magnitude easier to deal with something you know about than it is to deal with something that is happening for the first time in history) and came back to be who they are today. This is all made possible by their homogeneous population and such strategies will fall flat on its face anywhere outside of Japan.

Just my 2 cents.

update: My comparison with the ant-colonies is not meant to belittle the Japanese but to show how their community has evolved similar to the ant-colony superorganism. If tiger communities behaved like a superorganism I'd have used tigers. The focus of my comment is on the 'nature' of ants and not on their physical properties.

俺の国語より日本語上手いんだぜ。大好きっていうレヴェルで住むことじゃねよ。なんで好きな人たちの悪口言うわけ！

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Things I would love to see in iOS 5 16 years ago

"Dynamic Icons, API to fetch URLs in the background, Better Push Notifications, Wireless Sync" « none of these will happen unless Apple gets their hands on a much longer-lasting yet thinner and cheaper battery. Because unlike Android phones which comes with a removable battery and thus battery drain != a useless brick as long as a replacement battery is at hand, iOS design/feature-set has to be very careful about battery conservation given Apple's hardware design choices.

Having said that I fully expect, Apple, who has been in the business of making software for close to 35 years, which is a full 5 years more than "90% guy" Microsoft, already have these features either on their ToDo list or in prototype form just waiting/working for the battery tech to reach that threshold where they are confident of it holding up when used by the mass market.

In short, I don't expect iOS5 to have most or even all of these features but maybe by the time iOS6 rolls around, battery tech will have reached the point when these features would have become practical. For iOS5, the flagship feature( Steve calls them 'Tent-poles' )will be NFC, and joining this tent-pole on stage will be the usual hardware improvements, Game Center/Ping updates etc, but nothing of the sort that has the potential to 'leech away' the battery.

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USB glory holes: anonymous, offline file-sharing in public space 16 years ago

I don't see why this is USB when the system could work much better with WiFi - multiple users can connect to the same hub without any of them having to physically tether themselves to the spot.

And as for the potential for malware outbreaks, this is basically like a public water tap and just like we filter that water before drinking, scanning the data before using it will solve the malware problem.

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