SingAlong

I have learnt to combine pomodoro with GTD to create routines.

My routine is simple and takes a total of 4hrs. I leave the rest of time to other unplanned things that come up.

Been attempting to follow the routine for a couple weeks. As a result I have noticed these changes:

* Consistent reading habit.

* Haven’t even thought about watching TV for more than a week.

* Had lunches and dinners on time.

* Slept by 10:30pm

* Have not refreshed HN frontpage every hour (I have forgotten about HN for an entire day sometimes).

If anyone is interested, I have details about my routine and the reason behind my simple routine - http://hashnuke.com/gtd-workflow-2.html

RazorPay is India-focused and started a few years ago. Until they came around, there were few (zero?) payment gateways that fulfilled all the following criteria:

* Clean API

* Support India-focused payment options (netbanking is huge here. And Razorpay also supports digital-wallets)

* Easy to get started fast with less paperwork

For every other payment gateway, you had to go through a papertrail before you could even tryout the sandbox API.

I remember Razorpay (initially atleast) required only PAN and allowed individuals to start accepting payments. This IMHO is huge indie-friendly. And back then, for every payment gateway you had to be a registered company. Not sure if that relaxed rule translated to an uptick in growth.

In Rails, for concurrent index creation, the add_index method supports the "algorithm" option.

    add_index(table, fields_to_index, algorithm: :concurrently)

I have an install.sh in my dot-files repo - https://github.com/HashNuke/dot-files/blob/master/install.sh (no secrets in this repo). Works for both my macbook and online workstation.

Recently heard someone else's smarter idea. Put the dotfiles into a Dropbox dir and use symlinks. So updates auto-sync across computers.

[EDIT: I think it was Kenneth Reitz that tweeted about his Dropbox setup]

Google uses a postal-card OTP for Google MyBusiness service, to verify address for business listings. That is how you create Google Maps and Google Plus pages https://business.google.com). They again re-verification if the business address changes.

I think it is a very smart & less cumbersome way to verify physical address.

At work, we went from Asana to JIRA to Trello.

We stick to Trello because everyone in the company outside of Engineering team can also use it (nice & simple interface).

But I prefer to cut down the amount of human action any process. So I miss the JIRA-GitHub integration when using Trello. I could just mention the JIRA ticket ID in a PR and the ticket gets closed when the PR is merged. Such sweet integration.

I was looking forward to GitHub Projects when I heard about it since everyone in the company has a GitHub account. When I tried GitHub Projects, it felt so inverse to what I expected. I expected a GitHub Project to have many repositories instead of the current way (each project has many repositories). I'm hoping they change it.

My coworkers recently setup an internal API using a Flask app for US address parsing. They used libpostal after comparing it with usaddress and address (both are Python libraries).

libpostal had the best results and good abbreviation parsing ("St" for street, "blvd" for Boulevard, etc). We use this to check if two address strings are equal, so you can imagine how much abbreviations are important to us. The US postal department website has a list of postal abbreviations but writing our own address parser with this is not a simple task.

libpostal is a few gigs of download and will take about 2gb ram to setup. But worth it.

In comparison, I took the pic at 4pm :( Not dusk yet.

In my poor design vocabulary, I pointed out at the Sun, and joked to my designer friends that one of them put a vector mask on the Sun.

I couldn't go around much after the friend's wedding. I wanted to do a 6am jog at Rajpath and India Gate. But a friend joked that it was pointless to look at "India Gate as a silhouette". At about 1pm when going to Humayun's tomb, I passed by Rajpath and realized it wasn't a joke. I was scared to venture out anymore after a day of roaming. I hope to visit again sometime.

I've never been to the US. Wow, that is 2 decades ago. Does LA still have such issues? If not, how did they improve the air quality?

I just got back from Delhi. I started coughing as soon as I landed in the airport 4 days ago. The air is almost unbreatheable.

However, the working-class people I've come across don't seem to be worried about it from a health perspective (or they don't show it off). Infact my friend's wedding had a lot of crackers. Life as usual for them.

For a comparison, here's what Red Fort looks like at 4pm, 05-NOV-2016 (my pic is about 30hrs older than this comment): https://twitter.com/HashNuke/status/795380966109810688

And this is what it is supposed to look like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wheresmichi/433396865/

I love some of those logos. I find that once I love the style of a few of someone's work, I tend to like their future work too. I'm not a designer, so I'm not sure if there's a vocabulary to describe the "style" I'm attempting to refer to.

Is there a way I can contact you when I (or someone I know), need some art work in the future? Your email or website is not listed on your profile.

If you try to register and get this error about invalid username and password, then try disabling your ad blocker (it worked for me that way).

AFAIK maintaining a lock file is left to the tool that fetches and maintains dependencies.

For Elixir, mix maintains the mix.lock file. Hex integrates with mix.

For Erlang, rebar3 maintains a rebar.lock file. There's a rebar3_hex plugin for Hex integration with rebar3.

>> Let them upload their resume, then force them to fill out an unbearably redundant form containing identical information.

That sounds like JobVite.

During my recent job hunt: for a few places I applied to, I tried to find company's CTO/engg-head on Twitter, asked them for their email & mailed them a link to my pull-request to one of their opensource projects or stuff they use. Best response rate I've had.

Sadly, when the process was passed on to the HRs. They delayed continuing the process by weeks and I had already picked up a job at a place liked.

When being interviewed, I learnt a lot about what not to do as an interviewer. When I've been interviewing people recently:

* looked at their previous work before the interview (GitHub/Behance/Dribbble usually shows their code & quality of work)

* had casual chats about their hobbies and projects

Infact, my co-workers may laugh this off. But a casual chat with people about their work/hobbies/life, can tell a lot (interests, opinions, what-does-he/she-want-out-of-the-job?, looks for problems?, self-learner?, can-debug?, interesting hacks, etc). After all, we are going to spend a lot of time together. So I try to become their new friend.

Ofcourse the above process is broken too. But atleast it is open-ended to allow them to express what they know or are good at, instead of judging them by what I know.

P.S: Never judge people by their past workplaces.

At work, we invoke an async Lambda function to make a lot of concurrent requests to different APIs for one input. In short: a batch.

Lambda passes the data to another component on AWS to be processed.

The input sources for data range from APIs calls on Lambda, data from partners, data from legacy components, etc. So we split our data sourcing/fetching and data processing. They all flow into the same funnel (component) to be processed.

IRC can be over SSL. A lot of servers have support for this.

Was recently looking for information on building desktop apps with Electron or NW.js. Found a few useful links regarding source code protection. In short: Documented method is v8 snapshots. They are compiled code, run slower and are not cross platform.

* Using v8 snapshots - https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/Protect-JavaScript-source...

* Electron thread about source code protection - https://github.com/atom/electron/issues/3041

The second link has a lot of comments with useful information. One of them mentions that v8 snapshot format is documented and also that the actual code is shipped with the snapshot for future optimizations. nw.js just removes the sourcecode from the snapshot.

I'm curious if there is any reliable means of source code protection for Electron or NW.js apps.

I was just thinking the same. Uninstalled it after reading the news.

The "free up phone space" feature was too good on my phone (old and limited space)

And by co-incidence, I was ranting about the same thing on Twitter https://twitter.com/HashNuke/status/670118075841187841

0.1% is hardly anything to make it worth a pay cut to take risks.

Thanks for tipping me off about PulleyApp ~! Didn't know that they were that bad at support :(

I did checkout SendOwl after reading posts on this thread. They look like the best alternative if switching was required. Their video show a very slick & kickass experience for buyers (I tried the demo too).

B/w it looks like Gumroad is sticking around. Going by Sahil's tweets. They do understand very well that a lot of people love Gumroad a LOT and depend on it.

I was part of GumRoad's recent 10-day challenge called Small Product Lab. I had this feeling that they were getting very good at their business. I'm about to finish up work on my ebook. I was to go with GumRoad. As per my research, they were THE best in terms of design, seller pricing and payment experience for end-users.

The next best would be PulleyApp.com by BigCartel. Costs $6/month. Nowhere near Gumroad's percent-per-sale pricing. But BigCartel.com has been around for a long time (I remember they focussed on helping people sell tshirts online). PulleyApp is just their digital variant.

The main downside of most GumRoad-alternatives is that if the product's sales go down or just die out. Unless seller has made huge amounts of profits (say $10k), then paying $6/month to keep it alive for previous customers might slowly leak out profits previously made.

If anyone is to buy Gumroad, it should be Twitter (or Facebook?). They have the buy button and GumRoad would be a nice fit for small sellers.

Article titled "Facebook meets skepticism..." is actually about Reliance's network issues not helping Internet.org. SaveTheInternet is portrayed as a hurdle for everyone getting free internet access.

Facebook's meets "skepticism" because it is offering walled internet in South East Asian countries like India, Indonesia, etc. Facebook + a few services that people didn't ask for. Clicking external links on Facebook will lead to a page warning that you will be charged if you visit a service that's not part of internet.org. Google has also been offering such a service called "Google Free Zone" in certain countries.

If Facebook or Google feel so charitable, why not help telecom providers write-off data costs and offer say 250mb/month free per person?

Found this in the README: "... pick them at random when checking out ..."

Isn't a Round-Robin-based checkout better than randomly picking pools to checkout from?

Source about McAfee software quality going down is John McAfee himself. He made & starred in a video to explain uninstalling McAfee.

[NSFW] https://youtube.com/watch?v=YpRvaQsGIY8

I liked the font in the screenshot. Found out from author's dot files that the font is "Envy Code R" (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Envy-Code-R)

Direct font download: https://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-co...

If anyone else is wondering where the toolbelt is, once you enable toolbelt with "Toolbelt" -> "Show toolbelt", you'll have to resize the iterm window.

I feel an emotional attachment towards Gittip. Here's my story:

This is my GitHub profile https://github.com/HashNuke and this is my Gittip profile https://www.gittip.com/HashNuke/

I've been writing opensource software full-time for the past few months. A few weeks ago, I checked my Gittip profile out of curiosity. I found out someone was anonymously giving me $0.5/wk, for the last 4 weeks. I had $2 as my balance. I was in tears when I saw that. I felt that mattered. Someone cared about my work.

I'm excited that in a few weeks it can pay for the domain name for my next opensource project.

Thanks to Chad, the Gittip team and the community. I hope Gittip works out well for them financially to sustain themselves and do more.

The email-to-SMS trick makes me feel very nostalgic. I still think that was the most brilliant idea for mobile notifications in those days.

Sometime in 2007, I setup a forwarding rule in my GMail account for my long-distance friend's address. When she mailed, I would get it as an SMS on phone and run back home to chat if I was out.

It stopped working after sometime. I'm not sure what happened. I remember reading it was made an enterprise-only service by some telecom operators. If they the service back up and running, I'm sure there are many ideas waiting to be built on top of it.

Anywhere, Full-time (remote or willing to relocate)

* Stack: Ruby on Rails, Elixir, Erlang, CoffeeScript, Ember.js, Angular.js

* GitHub: http://github.com/HashNuke

* Resume: http://akash.im/resume.pdf

* About me in detail: https://gist.github.com/HashNuke/f007015429275df5d7d9

* What I'm looking for: Interesting stuff to work on and a nice team to work with.

akash [at] akash.im

If you are deploying Elixir apps to Heroku, checkout the Heroku buildpack for Elixir - https://github.com/hashnuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir

Easy to configure and the deploys are pretty fast.

Disclaimer: I wrote it