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Cherian

Re:Mozilla to shut down Pocket on July 8 on Thursday May 22, 2025 @02:54PM (#44065413)
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.
Re:How Kerala got rich on Friday March 28, 2025 @07:05PM (#43510839)
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.

Re:How Kerala got rich on Friday March 28, 2025 @02:27PM (#43508555)
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.

Re:Ngtop – Request analytics from the Nginx access logs on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @11:26PM (#41116162)
Is there something like logwatch that could send me a digest of all 404s, 500s etc.?
Re:Noam Chomsky has passed away on Tuesday June 18, 2024 @03:43PM (#40721421)
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.

Re:macOS Finder is still bad at network file copies on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @09:14PM (#39925453)
Are there good alternatives to Finder like Total Commander for Windows (https://www.ghisler.com/). I still miss it.
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….

Re:Plane Lands/Takes Off in Only 20 Feet (2013) on Sunday March 19, 2023 @03:54PM (#35222889)
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.
Re:Why Can’t We Get a Handle on This Safety Thing? (1998) on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @04:28AM (#34063615)
Gliders have become a lot more safe but logistically much more challenging to transport than PGs.
Re:Why Can’t We Get a Handle on This Safety Thing? (1998) on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:51AM (#34062884)
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

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.

Re:Joining Apple 40 years ago on Monday December 21, 2020 @12:36PM (#25497188)
Would you be open to doing an interview? If yes, how do I reach out?
Re:Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft on Thursday November 12, 2020 @12:19PM (#25072035)
Watching Microsoft from the 90s adapt and to see Satya get to do what he wants is pretty amazing!
Re:Poor man's document camera for videoconference on Monday March 23, 2020 @01:25AM (#22661472)
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.

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/).

Re:Sand Theft on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @09:45PM (#21759105)
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...

I noticed that you rock climb. Lead? Are you in the Bay Area? How do I contact you?
Someone should make a tshirt “Liquidation Pref: the most dangerous word”
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

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.

Re:King Alfred and India on Friday May 03, 2019 @04:37AM (#19816627)
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

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