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marvinpinto

1,710 karma · joined November 23, 2015

Website: https://disjoint.ca/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/marvinpinto; my proof: https://keybase.io/marvinpinto/sigs/MoNfexCD-_Gl-ahhLO9iLcSdBpgOe4NKbRWcKKT_K-M ]

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marvinpinto··on AWS Secrets Manager – Store, Distribute, and Rotate Credentials Securely
I'm still trying to figure out how different this is from their "parameter store" offering in AWS Systems Manager. The main thing I guess is you get more control over key rotation.
marvinpinto··on Basic Node.js Lambda Function Concepts
I found this pouchdb blog post[1] really helpful when first trying to wrap my head around promise chaining patterns. Highly recommend!

[1]: https://pouchdb.com/2015/05/18/we-have-a-problem-with-promis...

marvinpinto··on Slack IRC and XMPP Gateways Are Closing
This is really unfortunate. I've used the IRC gateway feature over the years to lurk in multiple Slack groups and looks like this will be the end of using (social) Slack groups for me.

Their web interface has just.. not cut it for me. Too resource intensive and not enough control over how/when I am interrupted. This was why I gravitated to the IRC gateway in the first place. Oh well.

marvinpinto··on Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages
The console dump was super useful, thank you for that!

I think it might be because you have third-party cookies disabled [1], and the Google Auth client uses an iframe with cookies to do its thing. I replicated it myself by disabling third-party cookies and the results were similar to what you described.

I'll look into what I can do about this on my end tomorrow. Thank you again for your time!

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42806178/1101070

marvinpinto··on Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages
Heya, I think I got to the root cause of that issue and I deployed an updated version that (hopefully) fixes it.

If you would still like to give it another shot I would appreciate it :)

marvinpinto··on Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages
You are right. Twilio Connect has sadly not been a great user experience and this is something we're reconsidering. We used it initially because it was a low-risk approach to see if people would use a product like this. Thank you for your feedback :)
marvinpinto··on Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages
I wouldn't say we're commercial-grade just yet. We'll get there though :)
marvinpinto··on Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages
Hmm that is odd. Another person reported this as well and I'll take a look at it and get back to you. Sorry about that.
marvinpinto··on Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages
Hey, thank you for your feedback!

Two-way messaging and call proxying is likely the next big features we'll be rolling out.

We went with the Twilio Connect route initially as a low-risk approach to see if there's an appetite for a something like this. Sadly it has not been a great user experience and we're definitely going to reconsider it (Twilio Connect).

As you might have guessed, we haven't actually decided on pricing yet but I wanted to put something on that page so that people can get a feel for how much it would cost them.

And yeah, the system we were using for auth (Cognito) did not at that time have an adequate 2FA solution, which was why we went with Google. Now that they do, we'll likely use that which would allow people to also signup with a username/password (in addition to Google, etc).

marvinpinto··on Command Line, Console and UI Based Open Source Plain Text Accounting
It would theoretically use whatever meachnism you would use to interactively log into your bank. For Canadian banks this is user, password, and security question/answers. The "plugin" system was designed to account for each banking system being unique so how it logs in really depends on the bank.

This runs locally and it has the ability to read gpg-encrypted credentials (using gpg-agent).

This of course gets complicated with TOTP tokens but I'll cross that bridge when needed :)

marvinpinto··on Command Line, Console and UI Based Open Source Plain Text Accounting
Related to this, I wrote a CLI tool called Ledger Reconciler[0] to automate the process of logging into all my financial accounts and inputting those transactions into Ledger. It uses headless Chrome underneath (via the puppeteer API[1]) so it could theoretically work with any system without needing to rely on public/private banking APIs.

I also tried to make the plugin system as friendly as I could so people for people to add their own financial instutions. I'm optimistic someone will contribute a plugin one day :)

[0]: https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler

[1]: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

marvinpinto··on Ask HN: What are best tools for web scraping?
I would recommend using Headless Chrome along with a library like puppeteer[0]. You get the advantage of using a real browser with which you run pages' javascript, load custom extensions, etc.

[0]: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

marvinpinto··on Toronto couple takes up #vanlife as a way around skyrocketing rents
The Youtube video[1] linked from the article is pretty wild - describes how they built the van and what materials they used.

[1]: https://youtu.be/obQt4WxTYV4

marvinpinto··on Show HN: Screen.rip – API for capturing web screenshots
I use this Chrome extension[0] for capturing animated gifs. It's worked pretty well for me so far!

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-capture/gga...

marvinpinto··on Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
I handle transfers between accounts manually - as in when I see duplicates show up, I remove one of them. A neat thing that ledger-reconciler does is to print the balance (as listed on the banking website) for each account. That information combined with Ledger's balance report tells me immediately whether something is off and if investigation is needed.

This in itself has saved me so much time that I can deal with manually editing the occassional duplicate entry (internal account transfers). I also keep all my ledger data in git so it's very easy to see what has changed, etc.

Have you looked at the reckon gem[0] for auto-classification? That is basically what this program uses.

[0]: https://github.com/cantino/reckon

marvinpinto··on Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
ledger-reconciler uses headless chrome underneath to screen-scrape all its information from banking/creditcard websites. That's how all the plugins hook into it.

It does not use any public or private banking APIs.

Hope that helps!

marvinpinto··on Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
If you're up for it, you can add your own bank/creditcard company/whatever as a plugin to it - I think the examples there are decent. I could also help if need be!
marvinpinto··on Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
Thanks! Unfortunately I can only add support for things I have access to (bank accounts and such) and I do plan on adding a few more.

To work around this I tried to make it as developer-friendly as I could so we'll see!

marvinpinto··on Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?
I automated downloading and reconciling my financials from all my bank accounts.

https://disjoint.ca/projects/ledger-reconciler

marvinpinto··on AWS CodeBuild Now Supports Building GitHub Pull Requests
Neat! I ran a regular non-PR build and I was hoping to see it report that status. Good to know!
marvinpinto··on AWS CodeBuild Now Supports Building GitHub Pull Requests
Unfortunately I don't think CodeBuild supports reporting build status through the GitHub Status API just yet. I hope this is something they consider implementing!
marvinpinto··on How to Live Without Google
I think that must be a typo? https://syncthing.net
marvinpinto··on How to Live Without Google
I had never heard of Resilio Sync before today, looks pretty neat. Anyone have experience with it?
marvinpinto··on Show HN: Take control of how people reach you with Switchboard
There is no whitelist option just yet. This product is an MVP at the moment and I intend on implementing more call & message routing features - whitelisting being one of them.
marvinpinto··on Fully automated dockerized Let's Encrypt reverse proxy
I use the lego[1] client for DNS verification and it works pretty well so far (more deets[2]).

[1]: https://github.com/xenolf/lego

[2]: https://disjoint.ca/til/2016/03/26/lets-encrypt-tls-certific...