karmelapple

Third Iron | Senior Quality Engineer | REMOTE (US)

Do you want to help scientists, doctors, and historians discover breakthroughs? Join our small, fully-distributed software development team to help connect scholars of all disciplines with peer-reviewed journal articles.

Our company has been remote-first since we began in 2011. You’ll join a team with plenty of experience putting into practice what works well remotely, and avoiding what doesn’t.

We've never taken VC money, and we’ve never had layoffs.

Third Iron software is used by researchers at over 2,000 organizations, including universities, hospitals, corporations, and government agencies, located in over 35 countries.

In a refreshing change from advertising-dependent tech companies and those who sell user data, we instead have a straightforward business-to-business model. We sell our subscription-based services to libraries, and anyone affiliated with one of these libraries can use our software. We do not sell user data. Our focus is on building the best software to enable research that changes the world.

### Senior Quality Engineer ###

We’re looking for a Senior Quality Engineer who wants to help us define and continually refine the quality aspects of our software lifecycle, create automated tests, and monitor our quality metrics to ensure we're providing researchers and librarians with a great experience.

Ideally you have many years of quality experience in an agile environment, either as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), Release Engineer, or Quality Assurance (QA) role involving web technologies. We care more about the quality of your work than the numbers of years

Playwright and/or Cypress experience is a big positive. We primarily create web apps, and we also have a popular browser extension, along with all the backend APIs and systems that support our many customer use cases.

Interest in working with our top-notch customer support team, release management, accessibility testing, or load testing are all nice extras, too.

If you’re interested in this fully remote position, we're interested to chat with you! Please apply at https://thirdiron.applytojob.com/apply/GRI2SRUc23/Senior-Qua...

Farm the sun

Fantastic messaging! I could see this being a great way to market this, especially with something mentioned in the article:

Farm the sun to make 3X more money

Great proof of concept!

At the top it says:

2,100+ CEO, CFO, Board, and other executive changes tracked in the past 30 days

Could you add a little metric there such as how many companies are being tracked, and perhaps how that compares to the previous 30 days, or 6 months ago, or 12 months ago?

Maybe a graph showing how many changes happen each month, so we can see when things are more volatile or not.

Is it encumbering? It seems like it's not at all.

I was only talking about infants, and I thought Massachusetts's legal requirement of 3:1 was pretty common everywhere in the US, since one adult taking care of 3 infants seems so difficult... but a quick search shows me it's not! 4:1 is pretty common as a minimum nationally, though.

And even high quality daycares might not help children potty train

Definitely. I think that's pretty rare.

It talks about a study from 1944 in the US, specifically in Minnesota. How many of those parents were full-time stay-at-home parents, probably typically mothers, who were monitoring the child and helping with potty training?

How many kids nowadays are in daycare?

When there is a 3-to-1 adult-to-child ratio, doing something like this is much more challenging when there's just one adult and one infant.

A service that comes to pick up dirty cloth diapers and drops off clean cloth diapers.

Example: https://www.diaperstork.com

I used to use DuckDuckGo, until I realized I was using "!g" far too often.

Then I tried Kagi, and I find that works the majority of the time, including their AI. Someone else in the comments here said Kagi's AI models are bad, but I don't think they are for answering the fairly basic questions that I typically search. I'm not going to have Kagi's AI model refactor code or something though.

And how many companies want to also be able to build out their own CDN?

Not every company can be an expert at everything.

But perhaps many of us could buy a different CDN than the major players if we want to reduce the likelihood of mass outages like this though.

To install a 3rd party window manager you need to disable some security setting

Depends what you mean by window manager, but an app like Magnet does not require disabling security settings.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

Just like the ideal political candidate to vote for generally does not exist for anyone, the ideal company with perfect stances and behavior on everything generally does not exist.

So yes, scale back your purchasing, but as you said: the options are limited, just like political candidates. Choose who matches up best with you, support them, but unlike your relationship to Apple, political participation has a VERY different piece.

You can't just show up and start influencing policy at Apple headquarters.

But you CAN just show up to some local organizing meetings of local grassroots organizations and political parties and influence things. You can have a direct impact, and these groups are usually small enough with few enough participants in your town that you WILL have a decent impact.

Third Iron | Senior Full-Stack Software Developer | REMOTE (US)

Do you want to develop software that helps scientists, doctors, and historians discover breakthroughs? Join our small, fully-distributed software development team to help connect scholars of all disciplines with peer-reviewed journal articles.

Our company has been remote-first since we began in 2011. You’ll join a team with plenty of experience putting into practice what works well remotely, and avoiding what doesn’t. Third Iron has never taken VC money, and we’ve never had layoffs. Our approach to hiring and selling our products helps us feel confident that this pattern will continue far into the future.

Third Iron software is used by researchers at over 1,500 libraries, including universities, hospitals, corporations, and government agencies located in over 35 countries.

In a refreshing change from advertising-dependent tech companies and those who sell user data, we instead have a business-to-business model. We sell our subscription-based services to libraries, and anyone affiliated with one of these libraries can use our software. We do not sell user data. Our focus is on building the best software to enable research that changes the world.

We’re looking for a developer interested in full-stack work, since we have a variety of upcoming initiatives, some being mostly front-end, some being mostly back-end, and some a balance of the two.

The front-end of our stack primarily consists of JavaScript, using EmberJS for two major projects, and React for two others. Our backend is written in NodeJS, and features data storage using PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and CouchDB, and hosting primarily on AWS and HEroku.

If you’re interested in this fully remote position, we're interested to chat with you! Please email careers@thirdiron.com or apply at https://thirdiron.applytojob.com/apply/McK2VdxTuX/Senior-Ful...

Personally, I consider this horrendous advice.

If you're not in step with where you're at, and you can find other employment where you'll be happier, why not change?

You could apply your same logic to, "If you're in a relationship with a significant other, don't break up with them... get them to break up with you! You will absolve yourself of any regrets of dumping them." Yes, and you will have wasted both your time, and their time.

And the same goes for working at a company that you feel isn't good for you.

They do :)

And if the companies who produce these chips continue to make a healthy profit, why would they stop?

This is the answer, and correct in many ways.

If the chips are cheap and easily available, and you know their failure modes, and they've been field tested for decades, why change?

It's very different from many software development attitudes, but remember that airframe manufacturers and avionics companies employ many people just to calculate risk and failure rates. The failure rates of these things are critical to the safety of your airframe.

This could be the biggest bipartisan rallying cry around which politicians and elected officials could cheer on improvements.

But I suspect that won't happen.

Funny enough, different airlines play by different rules [1]

1. https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/airline-cancellat...

I am scared that special grants to research rare diseases will go away, too.

If we're trying to figure out what the most benefit for each taxpayer dollar is, then a rare disease won't win out over, say, cancer research.

Someone may consider researching a rare disease as "waste," even though to everyone including the previous poster who is a widow because of HD, it is far from a waste.

When there is not much of a profit motive to do something - whether going to the moon or fighting a rare disease - public money is the best way to do it. And even throwing a fairly small percentage at it can create big achievements.

And that's one reason I'd like to see how much money and time went into this. We might be surprised that it's fairly small in the grand scheme of biomedical research costs!

What part of this discovery was made thanks to NIH and/or NSF funding from the USA, or the NIHR in the UK?

I don't ask to strictly bring up politics, but instead to try and address the broad lack of understanding of how medical breakthroughs like this are made.

It's not done just by drug companies. The article says:

UniQure says it will apply for a licence in the US in the first quarter of 2026 with the aim of launching the drug later that year.

That's true, but that doesn't talk about the tens to hundreds of research papers that have been published over likely decades to make this discovery a reality. And it doesn't talk about how much public money went into this discovery.

Many people reading this article probably have a vague idea that more than just this company was involved, but I feel it is not at all clear to the vast majority of people, since the vast majority of people are not involved in biomedical research.

I wish there was an easy way to figure out how many dollars, how many grants, how many researchers, went into achieving this breakthrough. And that the media would put that into news articles like this. Trace all the citations back a few orders, and I bet you'll find a massive number of NIH and NIHR grants.

There is unfortunately not more massive, bipartisan public outcry in the US over defunding the essential basic research the NIH does... and it's not new to the current administration, since it was attempted to be done back in 2017, too [1].

Scientists need better messaging or else we're going to stop having breakthroughs like this... and the breakthroughs are already going to slow down thanks to things like the $783 million in cuts to NIH grants that the US SCOTUS authorized in August [2].

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5468112/

2. https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/08/supreme-court-allows-trum...

Totally agreed - Things for Mac/iOS/iPad/Watch is a great ecosystem and Just Works™.

I started by reading the GTD book, and then tried lots of different apps, but Things for Mac by Cultured Code requires the least work and conforms roughly to the GTD approach. I don't use the strict GTD approach, but its approach to quickly writing down ideas and thoughts has shaped a lot of how I operate at work and even in my personal life.

I subscribed a few weeks ago, and this has solidified it for at least another year.

I have subscribed to them for other reasons recently, and this only solidifies my subscription to remain for another year.

I sure don't work for anything close to Wired or their parent organization, but if you want good journalism, support it with your dollars. A year's subscription is less than a nice dinner out (or even a not-so-nice dinner out!).

What will be even more effective? Talk to that person, face-to-face if possible, who you are friends with, who is empathetic to you and your views.

As this article points out, online public posting is performative.

Like the management guidance that is unfortunately not at all practiced enough, "praise publicly, criticize privately."

If you're going to get into a situation where criticism is unavoidable, do it when the person's "punishment" of the criticism won't be public to be read forever and ever.

Plus, it's a lot harder to have zero empathy with someone whose eyes you are looking into, whose presence is right next to you. But an anonymous internet poster, or even identified internet poster who you won't see for months or years? A lot of people don't care about that person's feelings at all, and don't have the leaps of imagination that what they type might actually cause that person pain / tears / sadness / etc.

I like the art style a lot and was so excited to play it.

After a two hour session on my TV, I had to stop due to motion sickness, and I haven’t picked it back up since. Was really fun though.

I've used it so many times doing that, and also handling UIWebView events where I didn't know what all might happen. Really helpful.

And one more update: we switched in production, and the first 24 hours have been smooth.

Update to this: we've switched over our staging database, and the call to do that couldn't have been. more productive or more pleasant.

I got to talk to someone who was intelligent about Postgres, who answered various questions I had, who offered a few pieces of insight that I wouldn't have thought, etc.

Compared to every single support interaction I've ever had with Heroku for 10 years, and this was light years more friendly, informative, and productive.

I am so happy we're switching. Way to go Crunchy!

They just shipped it, but it's still beta. So... I wouldn't consider that shipped yet.

We do, although we're in the middle of moving our entire Heroku Postgres spend over to Crunchy Data [1].

We were getting close to one of the big jumps on the standard pricing of Heroku Postgres, and we would have had to basically double our monthly cost to lift the max data we could store from 1.5TB to 2.0TB. On Crunchy Data, that additional disk space will be like 1% more rather than 100% more.

While investigating Crunchy, I ran some benchmarks, and I found Crunchy Bridge Postgres to be running 3X faster than Heroku Postgres.

Heroku seems to be working on some interesting new things, but I feel burned by the subpar performance and lack of basically any new features over many years. I don't know if the new Aurora-based database will be faster than Crunchy, but the benchmarks they're talking about sound like they're finally about to catch them. But we also have better features on Crunchy, too, such as logical replication. Logical replication is still not available on Heroku.

The experience for deploying apps and having add-ons is still pretty easy, but we'll see how that improves. HTTP2 support is still in beta.

1. https://www.crunchydata.com

There was a market for ... extensions, I think they were called?

XCMDs and XFCNs - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Extending_HyperTalk