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sharmi

1,440 karma · joined November 8, 2011

Connect with at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharm1la/ or https://x.com/sharmi1a
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sharmi··on Ask HN: Best Paid Email Provider?
I use Migadu.

Unlimited domains and email ids. The limit is on the number of emails you send in a day.

sharmi··on Ask HN: Speech to Text Journal App
Not OP. I have tried this before. The quality of speech recognition drops steeply. Especially, if the topic is niche/not mainstream.
sharmi··on Ask HN: Largest speedup you ever achieved by only changing a few lines of code?
import gc gc.disable()

in python. The python script would previously take 4 hours to run. There were lots of small functions and these were called on a loop. I ensured that there were no circular references within any of the functions and then disabled gc (Which is what the gc would look for, variables without circular references would be garbage collected automatically when they go out of scope.)

The script ran in 20 mins.

The hue and cry people raised over the gc.disable though convinced me never to do any unconventional optimizations again.

sharmi··on Ask HN: What's the fastest stack for making web side projects?
Vouching for "whatever you are most familiar with".

Beyond that, there is also the practice. the more time you spend with a stack, the faster you get. The more fluent you are. The better you understand the inner workings, nuances and customizations.

My personal stack is Django but it could be anything. I am working on my 5th or 6th web app and my understanding and confidence is lightyears ahead of where I was during the first app.

sharmi··on Ask HN: Why are monitors matte and laptops glossy and not the other way around?
Count me in. I love 15" Thinkpads. The keyboard with numpad pushes the main letter pad offside. Also the demarcation of the main keyboard and the numpad is non existent making typing a terrible experience. That was a deal breaker for me and now I have to use only 14" laptops.

Otoh, my sis who does subtitling finds the numpad essential to use the laptop. So different strokes for different folks.

sharmi··on Ask HN: How to deal with hundreds of open browser tabs
I feel your pain. I have often reached 600+ tabs. I might have touched thousands. Didn't count.

I tried One Tab. It seems to work for many people here but for me once in a while it lost all the tabs, which is not acceptable. See, the whole point of OneTab is to free my mind of all anxiety that I might lose a resource that I had discovered and at the same time, free the RAM.

So here is what I use now. This might or might not work for you.

* I use Zim Desktop Wiki to keep track of my important links. I use Zim-Clip extension to save links that I might need long term. I can use an hierarchical structure of any depth.

* I use a Session Manager "MySessions" to save work that I can open again when I come back to it. Typically I work on 4 different projects. Then there is mindless, bottomless browsing :) So each is a different session

* Lean Tab Limiter to control how many tabs are open at any one time

* "Open Tab Count Resurrected" to be give count of number of tabs in current window and total number of tabs across windows.

* Pocket to save links to read that I might not come back for reference

This is what I use to tame the multitabbed monster

sharmi··on Ask HN: Coming back to Python after a 5 year hiatus–-what do I need to know?
You will love fastapi. It also works with sqlalchemy.
sharmi··on Ask HN: How Do You Roadmap
Hi, there is a lot of ambiguity in your question. If you can elaborate your usecase, you will get better responses. It would help if you can clarify what dependencies and operations you would like to model.

That said, I assume you are looking for a tool specializing in roadmap. If so, have you tried Prodpad or ProductBoard? ProductBoard is popular among the product manager community.

There is also several roadmap plugins in JIRA.

Here is one that handles dependencies https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1212136/advanced-road...

sharmi··on Ask HN: Easiest way to setup a website for a non-techie
That is something I would go for :)

Yet, this solution is for a doctor who has not used anything beyond a few apps on the phone. So I am looking a very userfriendly solution.

sharmi··on Ask HN: Easiest way to setup a website for a non-techie
Yes, I am leaning towards wordpress.com hosting but I hoped to see if there is anything new in the market that is more usable.
sharmi··on Ask HN: Easiest way to setup a website for a non-techie
Thank you I will check it out.
sharmi··on Ask HN: Easiest way to setup a website for a non-techie
Thank you for the suggestion, That would not work in this situation though as static files implies static generators. (I hope they would be adding more content as time passes). It would be too much for the lay person. I hope to be out of the loop once I get the site going and the basics setup.
sharmi··on Benchmark: Puppeteer vs. Selenium vs. Playwright vs. WebDriverIO
Maybe it didn't have python support? Sorry, I may have misremembered. I do remember something missing that I couldn't use it in my existing dev setup. As solo developer, I prefer to keep my dependencies minimal, mostly python.
sharmi··on Benchmark: Puppeteer vs. Selenium vs. Playwright vs. WebDriverIO
Not OP. For one thing, Selenium was not super reliable, at least for me, especially when trying to run multiple instances. Do note that I used the official docker swarm method.

When I was exploring that option, Playwright was still windows only. Super excited to see it is available on Linux and Mac.

sharmi··on Ask HN: How to data collect to understand product usage
How about Pendo? I have not used it personally, but it might suit your purposes.

https://www.pendo.io/

sharmi··on Ask HN: Favorite Short Fiction?
My vote goes to short stories by Somerset Maugham. The subtle humour in the stories are a delight to read. He also captures the human nature with honesty and sympathy.
sharmi··on Ask HN: What’s Your Fitness Regimen?
I follow workouts from fitnessblender.com in the mornings. Any of their free workouts work well. If it doesn't happen in the morning, it doesn't happen at all :(

The workout programs they offer cost almost nothing and I that takes the decision of choosing what to do next out of equation.

Trying to get the diet to be balanced.

sharmi··on Ask HN: How blogging has helped you?
I post rather sporadically, whenever I have something of use or interesting to add.

I was asked to speak at the local Python meetup because of that. I discovered more friends through that.

sharmi··on How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory
That is an interesting take on Anki.

I always saw Anki as an implementation of spaced repetition. What is your process?

How do you codify connections and associations into spaced repetition?

sharmi··on Hemingway Editor
I am not associated with this app but I think this who it is intended for.

Office email senders

Bloggers

Marketers

Basically anyone whose readers are going to make split second decisions on whether to read writer's text, readers with short attention spans.

sharmi··on Text to Audio Conversion for Blogs
That is a cool idea! Why don't you post it as a Show HN?

That way you will be able to link to your website. That's where people who are interested in giving reviews on new projects would be looking.

It is ok to do a new post as Show HN for the same.

sharmi··on Ask HN: Which Password Manager are you using?
Lastpass
sharmi··on Ask HN: Which database do you use in production today and why?
I am not sure if I am the target audience. I am a solopreneur working on multiple side projects.

1) Postgres. Moved from mysql to Pg and never looked back. All my projects run on pg. One of the advantages is I don't have to context switch my internal model of a database when I navigate from on project to another. Another reason is, I witnessed the rise and fall of NoSQL dbs, as an outsider. I have decided pg can do most things that I need and only reach for any other DB once I reach the limits of PG. Yet to do that.

2) Self-Managed: I run my projects through containers orchestrated by docker-compose. Adding a db to that is trivial. Moreover, the best practices I learnt in one project can be carried over to the next

3) None so far :) One of my side projects is a like a CRUD app. It serves a 1.3 million pageviews a month from a 10$ digitalocean machine.

4) Sticking to PG. I mostly use Django as frontend. Django supports all of the postgres fields including JSONB fields. So that functions is a poor man's Key-Value Database. The one of the responses to CouchDB here sounds interesting. I shall investigate.

5) _

6) Less than $5 (for the database in each project)

sharmi··on Ask HN: Best site hosting and email solution?
Also consider migadu.com

Happy customer for two years.

Unlimited domains and email ids. There is a limit on number of emails for the basic plan though.

sharmi··on Ask HN: What are your favorite articles/blogs explaining product decisions?
Check out segment's blog. They have some interesting articles. The one I enjoyed was them documenting their journey from monolith to microservices and back again. I really appreciate their candid post about this.

https://segment.com/blog/goodbye-microservices/

sharmi··on Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open?
I remember once reaching 600+ tabs at one point. I have reached 1000+ sometimes. I don't always keep count.

Firefox has been good, providing great performance inspite of my shenanigans.

Now I use a tab counting extension and a tab limiter extension to keep myself in check. The limit is 200. I find having too many tabs distracting nowadays.

sharmi··on Ask HN: Why do people still use Google Analytics over open source alternatives?
Apart from the many valid reasons given in the other comments:

GA is free. Hosting an open source alternative would need time, effort (to understand the new environment) and money. There is a reason people outsource tasks that are not core to their skillset. Cause, the expenditure will be significant and result will not be half as good. Same reason we do not host mail servers though much easier self hosting options are now popping up and wonderfully maintained. A good business will always find ways to trim the fat and play to their strengths.

But much much more importantly, GA has billions of pages of free documentation (aka blogposts) for every task a business needs. If you are stuck with a problem, there is a huge community of people to reach out to and the answer is somewhere out there (Or you just learn to live with it, just as everyone else. You are not conceding any advantage to the business competitor). On the other hand, the open source alternatives have not yet benefited from the adoption of such a massive community, yet. It is very important to have some early adopters, who can show exactly how the end user can replicate the workflow they have setup in GA in the open source software.

* Then, for existing businesses, there is also the problem of sunken cost and huge amounts of existing data in GA that they cannot abandon.

* Then there is the thought process that exists in online communities on the value of accumulating data and how it can add value to their business. So, we will need to break them out of the FOMO on GA.

sharmi··on Celery 5.0
I faced some issues a year or two ago. It wasn't then. It was one of the pain points many users faced. One of the issues I faced was scheduled tasks wouldn't show up in Flower. There was no way for me to know if a task was run without monitoring the database. I didn't follow after that as I moved to Dramatiq.

I am so glad to hear that the community has listened and picked it up again. Thank you for pointing it out.

sharmi··on Celery 5.0
Celery was never reliable for me. I used Celery as a part of Django. It kept running into weird issues. Celery-Flower used to monitor the Celery threads is not maintained and that became a huge issue for me as I had no way of tracking any issue.

I have also used Celery parallelize crawling of multiple websites in parallel. Beyond a small number of workers, Celery would go into a frozen state (My data flow was one way. No chance that I know of deadlocking.) The code felt too convoluted to dive in and understand.

I have since shifted to Dramatiq ( https://dramatiq.io/ ). It has all the features I like of Celery (Chaining of async methods with error handling when any one link on the chain fails), with super reliability. It also has Django support.

Having said that, it must be recognized that Dramatiq was built from the success and learnings gained from Celery. Celery is a wonderful piece of work still in active use in almost all Python shops. I am just thankful that we now have so many alternatives.

PS: The Django-Q mentioned in another comment looks very well structured, comprehensive and actively developed. I shall give it a try. For now, so happy with Dramatiq.

sharmi··on Ask HN: What educational YouTube channels do you watch?
PBS Eons (Paleontology) Fall of Civilizations (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT6Y5JJPKe_JDMivpKgVXew) EyeWitness (TV-Series I watched as a kid) (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEBTfxJ13zkpZVbZTF3aukg) Physics Girl (https://www.youtube.com/user/physicswoman) SciShow (https://www.youtube.com/user/scishow) Extra History (https://www.youtube.com/user/ExtraCreditz) The Royal Institution (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution)
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