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husainfazel

30 karma · joined June 29, 2011

I'm the co-founder of Slips, a betting platform that uses game theory and the Ethereum blockchain to allow gaming fans to bet on their favourite Twitch, Youtube and Mixer streams. Check us out at https://slips.io

You can contact me on husain@slips.io or telegram: @husainfazel

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husainfazel··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)
- Location: Thailand

- Remote: Yes

- Willing to relocate: Yes, for the right opportunity

- Technologies: PHP/Laravel, Go, Node.js, TypeScript, React, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Docker/Podman, Linux

- Resume/CV: https://husainfazel.com/husain_fazel_resume.pdf

- Portfolio: https://husainfazel.com

- Email: me@husainfazel.com

====

I'm a self taught software engineer with 10+ years of experience. I joined my previous company as a developer, became Head of Technology/CTO after investment and remained heavily involved in building the product throughout.

You can see some examples of the kind of things I worked on in my dribbble portfolio: https://husainfazel.com/dribbble (note: most of these are pre-AI/LLMs and show that my aesthetic sensibilities aren't limited to prompting ChatGPT!)

I'm genuinely full-stack: backend, frontend and enough design background that I can take something from a vague idea through to a finished product.

The best demonstration of what I can do is probably my portfolio: https://husainfazel.com

I built it rather than another standard developer portfolio because I wanted something that actually demonstrates how I think, design and build.

I'm looking for a senior engineering role where my breadth of experience is useful. The roles I'm usually best matched to are difficult to put in a box, I genuinely enjoy working in startup environments where I can wear multiple hats. I'm also open to contract work.

====

A few things I've built:

- https://uncle-ginger.husainfazel.com — applied AI/RAG for querying health related topics from a Chinese herbology book

- https://ringexecutivepro.com — a Football Manager style game for professional wrestling

- https://husainfazel.com/projects/slips — prediction markets before Polymarket was a thing in 2018 with a fraction of their budget

husainfazel··on Building a deep-space logistics startup
What exactly do you want us to critique? The landing page has no information (status of your rockets, anything about the company or it's technology).
husainfazel··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
what kind of game is it?
husainfazel··on Show HN: An API for CO₂ Removal
I wonder what the carbon cost of generating the certificates and sending/emailing them is?
husainfazel··on Castopod – Open-source podcast hosting platform
The code is horrible:

https://github.com/ad-aures/castopod/blob/develop/app/Views/...

Tight coupling of the HTML/PHP and JS.

If they were going to use PHP, at least they could have used Laravel or Symfony and had standardized libraries for authentication, views etc.

I just checked their Composer.json, looks like it uses CodeIgniter ... so maybe there is a framework in there but still the code quality is atrocious: https://github.com/ad-aures/castopod/blob/develop/composer.j...

husainfazel··on “Fan-baiting” is marketing with the intent of artificial controversy
> A person who will get angry about a fictional fish not being caucasian can not be reliably appeased.

I'm not Caucasian but to distill a growing population of people's irritation with film studios wanting to rewrite all major iconic characters of their childhood as minorities of LGBT as simply them being "irrational" is a very shallow way of looking at it.

Disney has access to more data on sentiment and consumer choice than we do and they would know just as we do there is growing push-back against this sort of thing.

From what I've seen, people would have no issues with a bunch of new characters being introduced that are minority, LGBT or whatever social issue we're servicing this quarter. They might express surprise that big companies are willing to spend so much time and effort on characters that don't represent the majority of the population and they'll probably vote with their wallets by not seeing films that don't represent them or pander to social issues instead of focusing on entertaining. But you wouldn't have this growing vocal annoyance.

You'll need to explain why having access to customer sentiment and demographics... and seeing the reaction to multiple big releases that have been panned / been commercial failures, they want to continue making such choices. At the very least they could vary it up right?

Unless their ESG overlords don't allow them

husainfazel··on Treasury recommends exploring creation of a digital dollar
See SWIFT and various payment clearing systems in Europe. You don't need a CBDC to do this.

But a CBDC is certainly useful when the current fiat system has been blown up through hyper-inflation and there's no alternatives. It will usher in a new era of mass surveillance and control which for some inexplicable reason you seem happy to welcome in.

husainfazel··on Treasury recommends exploring creation of a digital dollar
You make a sarcastic response here but the point the parent is making is that we have these grievous injustices happening within the confines of the current system. If we move to the CBDC era without legislation to protect the privacy and human rights of citizens, our governments will have far greater capabilities to erode those rights.
husainfazel··on Show HN: A Reddit style site to discuss podcast episodes
They're using some kind of API to get the podcasts since a very rare pod that I followed showed up - so maybe that's just due to the listeners that BS and JP have.
husainfazel··on Now Monkeypox
Add gain of function / deliberate bio-terrorism in there as well.

Feb 1992 - a Soviet defector revealed to Western intelligence that he had overseen an extensive, illegal programme to develop smallpox into a highly effective biological weapon:

> Ken Alibek believes that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, unemployed or badly-paid scientists are likely to have sold samples of smallpox clandestinely and gone to work in rogue states engaged in illicit biological weapons development.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/pox_weapon_0...

June 1998 - The WHO recommends that all smallpox samples should be destroyed https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199808203390811

Feb 2002 - WHO says that Russia and US can keep their smallpox samples https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2002/02/wide-ran...

Nov 2002 - CIA claims that Russia, France, Iraq and North Korea have "secret" stashes of small pox (erm you already know Russia has them, that's not a secret) https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2002/11/cia-beli...

Sep 2019 - Explosion and fire break out at Russian lab known for housing deadly smallpox virus https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/17/health/russia-lab-explosion-s... https://www.livescience.com/russia-lab-stores-smallpox-explo...

husainfazel··on The Coming Food Catastrophe
The man at the very top has warned us about food shortages:

https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2022/03/its-going-to-be-...

So why are CF Industries needing to beg the administration to intervene and allow shipments.

https://strangesounds.org/2022/04/fertilizer-giant-cf-indust...

Also ask yourself why Union Pacific is imposing these restrictions?

Maybe it might have something to do with the latest rage in the world financial markets? Blackrock and the WEF set up ESG certifying companies that award ESG ratings and punish those that don't comply. So you have companies forced to push for completely bonkers restrictions and policies because they're mandated to top down:

https://www.up.com/aboutup/esg/index.htm

If sometimes their incompetence lead to a winning situation for us, we could say it's just pure incompetence. But this is anything but incompetence.

husainfazel··on The Coming Food Catastrophe
What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors.

1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy.

2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrible flooding last year and faces record low yields for crops so they are now desperately converting baseball courts and roads because their farmers can't get seeds and fertilizers. Do you know why? Because they're stuck on cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai which has been locked down under the bizarre "Zero Covid" quarantine. This is conveniently being done during planting season when they're already facing a huge shortfall. End result - they are importing more and increasing the global grain/food price further.

3. Whilst China gets hit by flooding, the reverse weather pattern (La Nina) is causing droughts in places like Argentina and Paraguay which produces the majority of the food in South America. So thanks again to our sanctions against Belarus and Russia, we can't get fertilizer to those countries. Similarly 35 African countries get food from Russia/Ukraine and 22 of them get fertilizer from there so the end result is famine in S America and Africa.

4. In Europe, the EU's "Green Agenda" deal means the Italian government can't provide more state aid to the farmers. In Germany, they want to phase out agriculture because of greenhouse gas emissions so they've stopped farmers who want to grow more food. At the same time, the sanctions are making covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse.

So you have well timed global food disasters which are amplified by our sanctions whilst back home:

a) "On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."

Not only are they preventing urea and UAN from getting to farmers during the crucial planting season but they're also stopping DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid). DEF is used to control emissions in diesel trucks, without it engines can't run. So they're ensuring a complete shutdown of the supply chains across the United States at the same time.

b) "EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer"

Before Covid even began, we had the "Renewable Fuel Standards Act" which mandates annually RISING targets for the production of corn for ethanol fuel blends. This add major price inflation for food. Now the EPA is mandating another increase in corn ethanol for fuel at the same time as when we have astronomical fertilizer prices due to sanctions we imposed AND we're blocking domestic fertilizers being shipped by rail... that's going to send corn prices through the roof and the government knows this very well.

and I'm not even going to touch on all the poultry that USDA are ordering to be destroyed because of "Bird Flu".

As I said in my other comment, it's not by accident or pure back luck - it's by design.

husainfazel··on The Coming Food Catastrophe
You would think that with a food catastrophe on the way - the current administration's finest minds wouldn't be encouraging even higher corn prices (already at a 10 year high in April) with this mix of legislative action:

> Washington announced the EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer. On April 12 the Secretary of Agriculture announced a “bold” initiative by the US Administration to increase the use of domestically-grown corn-ethanol biofuels

Or with what I can only call absolutely diabolical sabotage of food production:

CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, the largest US supplier of nitrogen fertilizers as well as a vital diesel engine additive, issued a press release stating that:

"On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately."

"The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."

CF has made urgent appeals to the government for remedy, so far with no positive action

https://news.sky.com/story/cost-of-living-bank-of-england-go...

Remember when the apocalyptic food crisis happens, it wasn't an accident OR bad luck, it was planned.

husainfazel··on Show HN: A tool to seed your dev database with real data

  - Works on large database (> 10GB) (read Design)
Can anyone explain to me how this works in RepliByte? The design document only talked about Postgres.

For example let's say I have a MySQL database, how does RepliByte copy that database into S3?

Does it use mysqldump or are they coping the database index files? We have a script that automatically backs up our production database at intervals to S3 and then a program to download the latest backup and scrub the data.

It takes a heck of a long time to download and impacts the server when it happens... it's been on my todo list to replace with Percona's Xtrabackup [1] but doesn't look that's what these guys are doing?

  - Database Subsetting: Scale down a production database to a more reasonable size
What about this? Does the database need foreign keys to prevent related rows in tables being lost and are they just randomly deleting rows as the config seems to indicate [2]

[1] https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-xtra...

[2] https://github.com/qovery/replibyte#configuration

husainfazel··on Show HN: DontBeEvil.rip: Search, for developers (API, expressions, CLI)
Going to "https://dontbeevil.rip/" results in a JSON error in the browser:

{"message":"Missing Authentication Token"}

husainfazel··on Humble Decomposition
The night shift mode on this blog has got to be the most pointless I've seen. Black text on black background with a reveal effect when you move your mouse!