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Greg from Twilio here. Congrats on your immigration! Glad we could play a small part in that journey, but credit goes to you for your courage and creativity. Would love to hear more of your story. Would you mind dropping me a note at gb@twilio.com?

Sounds like an amazing case study. Just looked/stalked your profile and ended up watching your talk on "Developers, entrepreneurs and depression"[1]. Really inspiring and awesome!

[1] https://vimeo.com/78419167

Welcome to Canada! Also: it's not all like Saskatchewan, most of it is really nice. ;)

That's along the lines of what I do when I am waiting for a dedicated machine from OVH, since they list all of their clearance machines on a special page and you have to keep checking them. So I just used my script with Twilio to send me SMS when it's available to buy. Done that all three times I needed a box. I would not call it "hacking" though.

I think hacking in a sense of having a problem and piecing together a solution is the context they were going for (much like hackernews) vs traditional escalation type hacking.

Sure, but the term for this is "problem solving" and calling it "hacking" is disingenuous. I am not a big fan of the crowds that co-opt terminology for sort of superficial (e.g. marketing) reasons. I'm a bit hypocritical about it, because I think rms has historically done extremely well with this tactic, pushing ideals that I agree with. But there are other groups which do this that grinds on my soul.

Warning you now - that strategy on Kimsufi boxes at least is extremely popular. If you're willing to pay a little more check out their "SoYouStart" line - they seemed more readily available.

I did something similar for a job offer on LinkedIn. I had to go out with friends so I polled the site every minute (not as gentlemanly as you) looking for the apply button. I was going to use Twilio for I had just signed up for a trial, but the internet was unreliable and I ended up using Gammu with a 3G dongle and a local SIM card to send an SMS.

I was surprised to see the number of applicants increase without the button having ever become available (no SMS received and I had logging to confirm). It was fun, nonetheless.

It's made me want to make something like this to diff arbitrary things and send notifications to people who're watching them, but I didn't sit down to do it, and sitting down to do it is all that matters.

I got tickets to a certain-to-sell-out concert doing the same thing. My friends were shocked I got them A-class seats. I'm teaching their kids to know that they will have more control over their world than they might imagine.

This works until the technique gets popularized, then it won't anymore.

Did you manage to keep your compensation around the same? Or did you have to give up on it somewhat?

Canada does seem more attractive than US. However, there are definitely a lot more jobs in technology, and a lot more software engineers here in the US.

The distill browser add-on will work for this too, except for the phone call. SMS is a paid feature but email and popup notifications are free.

And maybe also the fact that the computer and browser has to be open all the time, right?

I believe OP did this by running a cron or so on an always-on server.

Nice story, and great that Twilio worked out for you - but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for.

I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup - and twilio is an interesting hack around that.

But there really should be an easy way to make just as much ruckus from a simple email, based on topic/sender filtering... (hm, maybe there's a nice side project for an app in there...).

Yeah, this isn't really a major Twilio win or a hack - it's a basic scraping technique.

I found a house for myself and a friend in a similar way, reverse engineer mobile app from MLS, scrape all listings once a day to get new stuff as it hits the market and you can now be far more selective than the crappy search on the MLS site allows.

Yeah you can sends texts to your phone just like sending an email.

How to do that?

You can check Twilio's website for information.

Put the phone number in front of a domain for each carrier, a list is here.

https://github.com/WilliamFCipriano/FreeSMS/blob/master/data...

Thanks, this hack (if it's a hack) looks interesting.

It works, but know that it is nowhere as reliable as an SMS sent through a carrier's gateway.

There are several international lists too, here's a couple:

https://martinfitzpatrick.name/list-of-email-to-sms-gateways...

https://www.opentextingonline.com/emailtotext.aspx

Do they work? For Portugal it still lists Telecel - which hasn't existed since '99.

My list is accurate as of a year or so ago, or at least they don't bounce back when you send an email to them.

I am using Telegram for such notifications. I made a simple Telegram bot, it does not do anything itself, I just use it as a sender of my messages to my phone. And I have a particular web address, which collects requests from any of my scripts and it just resends it (it is a simple python script) through the bot to me.

Which MLS mobile app are you referring to?

I tried web alerts, but the emails were not instant, plus no phonecalls. Most the services I found didn't look reliable enough as I had no window for mistakes for my immigration. So I rolled my own.

> I would argue that the fact that you find SMS/phone calls a more urgent alert is a fault with your phone/communication setup

Doesn't the asynchronous nature of an IM make it less urgent than a synchronous phone call?

The industry I'm in is all SMEs - they regularly complain about people messaging them [ie SMS, aka "text"] out of work hours. Like "a customer texted me at 9pm about something how inconsiderate". They don't seem to understand it's absolutely considerate and that the idea is they respond when they next want to make themselves available. Mind you some people will get annoyed if they're not texted back straight away; why they don't then phone I'm not sure.

Yeah I've heard the same sentiment. I think people feel rude phoning because they feel rude ignoring calls, so if they call they're making the other party feel responsible for answering. This is silly of course.

The post you replied to barely even mentioned Twilio. It made no comparison to email or IM. It never said those wouldn't have worked. You seem to imply that choosing to use Twilio at all indicates a fault in one's communication setup...because they should use email instead?

The funny thing is, you go on to acknowledge that a phone call is psychologically more urgent than an email, and ponder how email might be extended to cover that use case...or maybe, the person was not at fault and was actually using the right tool for the job!

If you treat emails with the same urgency you give phone calls, I would argue there's a fault in your phone/communication set up. For most people I know, email can wait an hour or two, or even overnight. Phone calls require you to choose to ignore them.

Maybe in your world that works.

Until the FCC develops redevelops any sort of interest in dealing with scammers, my phone is basically useless for most of the world to speak to me.

If you're trying to reach me and are not on my list of approved callers, you can email me, or decide you didn't actually want to talk to me. (No, I don't use FB Messenger or related spyware, either.)

On the other hand, I apparently pay much more attention to email than you - I generally respond within about five minutes, assuming there's some reason.

One of the points of email is that it is asynchronous communication. You can even respond in batches like RMS does. While everyone's email workflow is different, it would be a mistake to assume that email was ever designed to be used as an instant-messaging-style communication tool.

IRC exists for a reason.

Receiving phone calls is free, a data plan isn't :)

> but this really is the sort of thing that email alerts (or IM alerts, or IRC alerts) should also work fine for.

Except when you are asleep.

And when it comes to immigration, you are happy to be woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call when it means the difference between failure and success.

I use Pushover for (personal) things like this.

SMTP is not an instantaneous protocol. Email prioritizes reliability over speed when it comes to delivery. An email alert could very well be delayed to the point that it becomes useless for something which is time sensitive.

Given the synchronous nature of a phone call, it seems like the perfect medium for this kind of alert. Similarly, SMS piggybacks off of the same network and therefore inherits some of the same properties.

May I ask what PR stream you applied under that "opens randomly"?

After years of hard work I successfully got in via Provincial Nomination.

We're always glad to have more hackers in Canada, welcome! (If you've got your PR this was probably a while ago, but still)

Thank you. I got my PR some months back. My spouse can work now. We are very happy than being in the US where she was not authorized to work. We enjoy the real freedom here.