falafelite

Location: NYC

Remote: OK, prefer hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python (Pandas, Dagster, SQLAlchemy, Flask, FastAPI, SKLearn, etc.), SQL (big Postgres fan), Svelte, GitHub Actions, Terraform/Pulumi, Kubernetes/Helm

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raaid-arshad/

Email: raaid@protonmail.com

Hey I'm Raaid. I'm a software engineer who is particularly experienced with data engineering + the backend but full-stack capable. I'm interested in making something that works, works well, is well documented, and helps the world. I'm not interested in pointlessly moving fast to try to make a quick buck. Super interested in anything that aims to address climate or socioeconomic issues.

Location: NYC

Remote: OK, prefer hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python (Pandas, Dagster, SQLAlchemy, Flask, FastAPI, SKLearn, etc.), SQL (big Postgres fan), Svelte, GitHub Actions, Terraform/Pulumi, Kubernetes/Helm

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raaid-arshad/

Email: raaid@protonmail.com

Hey I'm Raaid. I'm a software engineer who is particularly experienced with data engineering + the backend but full-stack capable. I'm interested in making something that works, works well, is well documented, and helps the world. I'm not interested in pointlessly moving fast to try to make a quick buck. Super interested in anything that aims to address climate or socioeconomic issues.

Interesting okay. Is a combo of paper and automated counting not ideal then? To my mind automatic counting is probably great for the speed you mentioned, and I'm sure those who have to perform the counting/run the election like it, but then keeping paper to hand-count as a backup or to verify seems sensible too. Or is the very possibility of a compromise too bad to entertain?

Why are they always a bad idea in your view? I'd imagine that they're quite nice from the point of view of those who run elections and actually have to count them. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Is a paper-vote a reference to literally marking a piece of paper, or a human counting said piece of paper? Sorry if that's a dumb question, just want to make sure I follow. It seems like this tech works with marking a piece of paper that is then read by a machine. I suppose if the paper is kept, perhaps it's nice from the point of view of the election-handling-folks to automate the counting process, but be able to audit the paper ballots?

A lot of skepticism and negativity here, with a focus on "open source means something to me, not the layman" as well as mentions of is that really helpful, is it auditable, etc. Valid concerns, but I guess my reaction is hopeful because hey there's at least one group of people who are trying to build something that is more transparent.

Maybe it's not perfect, but (at least to me) seems like a step in a good direction. Also for what it's worth the company making the tech has a product for auditing as well. Idk guess I'm feeling more optimistic this morning.

Yeah as some of the responses to your reply said, agreed, and I've always found value in unit tests, and the "too many deployments and not enough development" comment from jsight rings loud in my head. Deploying to a real non-prod environment as a "test" can be fine for a team, but to do so while not testing for how you expect the code to behave... maybe that works for some folks and if you're moving super fast, but I wouldn't be super comfortable with it myself.

Big +1 to “ Never give up on local testing”. The current code base I’m dealing with has many tests that require interaction with a dev environment on the cloud, and occasionally these tests fail due to a timeout or some other thing not related to actually testing the code (and instead reveals that I forgot to refresh my MFA).

Additionally the dependency thing can be huge; we ran into a weird bug for installing a particular dependency on our CI system so our test there keeps failing, but being able to run it locally let’s us know that the changes did not break our actual code tests.

Hah tried to post this and it didn't work, glad for the confirmation. Not sure if its the right place to look, but https://stackstatus.net/ is also not working for me.

I found the author to have cherry-picked and poorly-cited information earlier on in the book when talking about antidepressants, and then a complete lack of rigor when discussing the various lost connections. I think he has a point, but I just didn't find it very well done, and as another comment here has quoted: > Other clinicians say, however, that the notion of depression being because of a simple chemical imbalance is outmoded anyway, and that antidepressants remain a useful option for patients alongside other approaches including talking therapies.

It is also notable that the author has had plagiarism issues and other questionable behaviors in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari#Plagiarism_and_fab...

This happening for other folks? Happened to me briefly yesterday too.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I think this is really really cool. Would certainly become a better and better experience (I think?) as more people leave comments on episodes.

I’m not sure, I don’t publish one for Safari! Good question, I’m sure someone else here with more experience would know.

I’m also late 20s, have enjoyed some startup chaos, and have come to similar points regarding contentment derived from relationships and coming to terms with my limits and finitude. I’ve thought “Am I giving up? Am I just doing the easy thing so I can live comfortably? At the cost of my dreams/ambitions/yearning?” Which seems like what your mentor has named “boring”. But I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

There is nothing wrong with finding a state of being that is comfortable for you right now. Maybe this is what you need, right now. There is nothing that says this is how it will be from now on. You might quit and start something in 5 years, you might not. You might enjoy side projects or other creative endeavors alongside your job.

What you probably don’t want to lose is that creativity, that excitement. Again, that doesn’t need to look like a successful startup. It could look like a fun side project, a community effort you’re involved in, whatever. The point is, and I think this is a big realization for me from the past year (but what do I know I’m not even 30) is that you don’t need to put all your eggs in the job basket. It doesn’t need to be your primary creative outlet. I’m fact, it might be better if it isn’t tied to your livelihood.

Sorry if I’m way off the mark from where your head is at, but I hope thoughts like this are what you’re looking for. If not, my b!

I’m in the same boat and feel the same. It’s just not a great state of things for extension development, and yeah the separate Firefox and Chrome code in my codebase truly irks me.

Thanks for sharing f5bot, that is a wonderful service to learn about. Exactly what I was looking for!

Just filed mine yesterday with FreeTaxUSA, would recommend their services. Found it to be straightforward, explained stuff I didn’t understand, and as far as I could tell, they didn’t try to trick me into paying for extra stuff. They presented a deluxe option for sure, but didn’t implement some dark pattern that made it impossible to go the free route for federal (state costs money, mine cost $15).

https://www.nabu.news/latest has the top news of the day with absolutely no personalized results, if you're looking for alternatives!

What did you like about the "old Google News"? A good number of comments here seem to have a similar sentiment, so I'm genuinely curious. Was it simply the aggregation without personalization?

I agree that diversity of opinion is important! I made https://www.nabu.news for that exact reason. If I'm reading a NYTimes article and curious about what other sources might say, I just click on the Nabu browser extension to see what, for example, Fox News is saying about the same thing. Find it helpful for getting out of my echo chamber.

I also got frustrated with overly personalized results in Google News. I tried following a variety of sources on Twitter but that didn't work as well as I'd like either. I made my own topic-aligned news feed, and made a browser extension too (if you're reading an article online, it shows similar articles from other websites). Primarily a passion project, but I find it useful! Located here: https://www.nabu.news

Just started my 2 week trial of GraphJSON a few days ago! I like it so far, kudos. Unrelated question: do you have some kind of notification setup for HN? I feel like I’ve seen you comment on many logging-related posts, so figured I’d ask =)

Wondered if this is happening/to what scale in the U.S. as well, found this (answer seems like a “yes but not as much” but obviously it varies by location): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/hou...

Hi Simeon, I appreciate your engagement on this. I suppose I am being dramatic in wording it as a "separate codebase", and yes, one can generate two separate manifest.json files. My end-result has been to have separate code for Chrome and Firefox, though, because the polyfill doesn't work as advertised and as you've noted, there are certain things that are not compatible across different browsers.

It isn't a horrible workaround, but I will need to update code in two places every time I want to make a change, and that is bad developer experience, bad for timely updates, bad for being able to support a user regardless of the browser they use. I don't care what they use, I just want them to be able to use my tool. But as far as I can tell, the whole ecosystem for developing and publishing browser extensions is quite behind, at least as compared to the rest of the things I work on.

I appreciate your general guidance, and accept that this simply isn't the best state of things to work with.

Interesting! I’ve got something like that (doesn’t work properly for Chrome yet) going; if it is open source on git somewhere, I’d love to see it. If not, no worries!

Yeah that’s the polyfill extension I use! Thanks for the validation, I am finding that I have to make manual changes anyway as well. Thanks for sharing the DefinePlugin, it looks like it could be quite useful

Ah interesting! I’ve written mine in Svelte (as far as the popup part goes) but this is a good resource if anyone sees this thread and uses Vue, thanks for sharing

Ah okay thanks for sharing the Mozilla update. And I suppose I am less optimistic than you, since they have so much browser market share I’d guess they’re happy to let devs figure out how to make our stuff work if we want access to their users. It’s also notable that so far v3 is only mandated for new extensions, though I’m not sure if that applies to updates of existing extensions.

Yeah there has been a recent change: “As of January 17, 2022 Chrome Web Store has stopped accepting new Manifest V2 extensions. We strongly recommend that new extensions target Manifest V3.”[0]

I guess I made the mistake of developing for Firefox first with their documentation/guides. I am using rollup and the polyfill plugin per some suggestions, but it certainly isn’t generating anything compatible for v3, and I believe it breaks on the background script vs. worker thing.

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv2/

If book suggestions are helpful, I found “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to provide a helpful framework on how to think/act/prototype your way to what works for ya. Not sure if it’s everyone’s cup of tea but I found it useful.