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mmesh

13 karma · joined January 21, 2013

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mmesh··on Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
Find a local nonprofit or other organization you like and ask them what tech help they need. Many small nonprofits are starving for IT resources, either for financial or cultural reasons.

It's not glamorous, but if you're willing to volunteer your time helping with an org's Wordpress site or making sure everyone is educated about phishing and 2FA, you can make a meaningful impact in your community.

mmesh··on Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
What are you doing to market your courses? Given Udemy's generous split when you drive outside traffic to your courses, it seems like that's super important to make money on the platform.
mmesh··on American Gut Project – Open-source human microbiome analysis
From http://americangut.org/our-results-so-far/ - "The American Gut project has many more samples representing more groups of people than other studies, such as the Human Microbiome Project, Global Gut, or Personal Genome Project."

No hard numbers on their site, but there's over 7500 contributors on their sample collection kit fundraising page.

mmesh··on Teletext in Europe
The use of teletext news, even among younger people, was a surprising discovery from my time living in Sweden a few years ago. I wrote some observations about it at the time: http://blog.meshul.am/2013/03/05/let-them-read-text/
mmesh··on Ask HN: How do you transfer money internationally?
I've used TransferWise (https://transferwise.com) several times to move money from SEK to USD, but it seems they don't support CAD yet.

Super easy to get started, and very low fees.

mmesh··on Poll: Where do you host your production environments?
Never used them, but CloudControl basically markets themselves as the European Heroku: https://www.cloudcontrol.com/
mmesh··on Procrastination should be solved by lighting fires, not filling buckets
I recently built an Android app [1] that implements this idea in pretty much the most basic way possible. It just fires a notification at a specified time every day. The notification can link to a URL, which I point to a Google Form for responding to the notification (e.g. "How many pushups have you done today?"). I've been meaning to allow push frequencies other than once-daily, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

[1]: https://github.com/meshulam/PushQ