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leakybucket

408 karma · joined May 10, 2011

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leakybucket··on Waxing lyrical: taking ear wax seriously
What finally worked well for me was an "ear loop" tool, a small, cheap plastic tool with a safety guard, that makes extracting the wax quite easy. They cost less than $10 USD, do not rely on uncomfortable squeezing of water or liquid, nor do they just push the wax farther in (unlike a cotton swab).

It was a big deal for me to discover these existed, and when I did, I was surprised I hadn't heard of them.

leakybucket··on S3 Strong Consistency
The copy object operation has options to control if the copy occurs based on examining source metadata, see "x-amz-copy-source-if-match" at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_CopyObje... .

With the consistency change, those might be useful as the basis for atomic operations.

leakybucket··on S3 Strong Consistency
With this change, is there a way to implement atomic operations like put-if-absent?
leakybucket··on The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate”
I had a 'rattling' issue, but mine correlated with moving my head. If I held very still, the sound was fine. This didn't happen at first, it developed over time. I wondered if the issue was either loose/dirty silcone tips, even though I was wearing the best fitting size (and they passed the ios ear tip test). Cleaning the tips didn't make a difference.

So I bought some new foam tips from www.complyfoam.com , and to my pleasant surprise, the rattling stopped.

Not sure if this is different from the vast number of other reports, but fyi.

leakybucket··on FlexBuffers
We're still early in development, but the ZNG format is one we're working on for schema-less, semi-structured, zero-copy operations:

https://github.com/brimsec/zq/blob/master/zng/docs/spec.md#1...

We currently use this to store security log data, but think it's an interesting midpoint between having no schema at all vs requiring schema registries to do useful work.

leakybucket··on Open-source Chrome extension to save the state of a page for further analysis
Rafael Weinstein's mutation-summary library, from a few years back, includes functionality to transmit & mirror DOM's:

https://github.com/rafaelw/mutation-summary

leakybucket··on Ask HN: What are some cheap idyllic places with lots of nature?
Perhaps Ithaca, New York? It's a smallish college town (Cornell, Ithaca College), but with lots of great scenery nearby, including forest, lakes, and gorges.
leakybucket··on Ask HN: I'm in SF for the weekend. What places can I tour that tout their tech?
I believe you're referring to the Musée Mécanique (http://museemecaniquesf.com). Besides the arcade games, the orchestrons are captivating.
leakybucket··on Static Linux
An advantage of dynamic libraries is that the memory used to hold the library's executable pages can be shared across processes. So using static only binaries will lead to less free memory on the OS.
leakybucket··on Is_computer_on_fire() (2000)
As I recall, we used this for system call testing/timing. (I worked at Be.)
leakybucket··on Linux Poetry Explains the Kernel, Line By Line
My favorite tech poem is Radia Perlman's "Algorhyme". She's the inventor of the spanning tree protocol.

		Algorhyme

        I think that I shall never see
        a graph more lovely than a tree.
        A tree whose crucial property
        is loop-free connectivity.
        A tree that must be sure to span
        so packet can reach every LAN.
        First, the root must be selected.
        By ID, it is elected.
        Least-cost paths from root are traced.
        In the tree, these paths are placed.
        A mesh is made by folks like me,
        then bridges find a spanning tree.

                         Radia Perlman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman
leakybucket··on Storing Bandwidth with Superdense Coding
Though I appreciate the idea of 'storing bandwidth' by just sending lots of qubits ahead of time, that ignores the extra communication overhead needed of tracking them: When Bob receives a qubit from Alice, he needs to know which of his qubits it's paired with. That implies that Alice needs to send not just her qubit, but also some kind of identifier that will allow Bob to match up the received qubit to its proper Bell pair. That identifier, and any protocol overhead needed to keep these identifiers in sync between bob and alice, will consume bandwidth, and reduce the 2x gain.
leakybucket··on Denial of Service Attacks
Perhaps the attackers are drawn to sites they believe will later publicly document the attack, to learn whatever they can on how the operations team responded.
leakybucket··on Big changes to Erlang
I've got a passing interest in Erlang, and also saw the existence of Elixir http://elixir-lang.org/ , which uses the Erlang VM. Could someone from either language's community comment on if they see a strong future for Elixir?
leakybucket··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2013)
Sessionbox - San Francisco, CA (SOMA)

http://www.sessionbox.com/

Because instrumenting the frontend should be easy. (Let's just say that's the visible part of the iceberg). We've opened up the hood in a new way, enabling full x-ray visibility into the frontend (and a lot more that will surface in due time). Ok, we know. That's a little cryptic. We look forward to being able to say more, and in the meantime, if you're really curious, try reverse-engineering what we're doing from our jobs page. You'll see we have some tasty ingredients.

We've just finished seed funding, and are looking for our second and third engineers.

Software Engineer - Javascript Frameworks Expert

Are you tired of sprinkling blobs of Javascript instrumentation code throughout your applications? Have you explained the importance of the waterfall graph in DevTools a zillion times? Do you think that movie theatres should play compilations of Paul Irish videos? If so, this position might be for you.

Qualifications:

Demonstrable expertise with multiple programming languages

Expert understanding of web technologies (Javascript, HTML, CSS).

Expert understanding of at least one frontend Javascript framework (Backbone, Angular, Ember, Knockout, etc).

Substantial experience with Chrome DevTools.

BS/MS in Computer Science or closely related field.

Bonus points:

Experience as a team or project lead.

Experience with d3 or other Javascript data visualization libraries.

Experience creating applications with node.js.

Familiarity with WebKit or Blink internals.

Software Engineer - Core and Backend Lead

You will work on the architecture and implementation of our core service. This includes both the core Sessionbox technology to monitor and analyze our customers' production web applications, as well as the backend infrastructure that will keep our service available and scalable.

Qualifications:

Demonstrable expertise with multiple programming languages

5+ years creating and scaling web application backends (including node.js)

Deep understanding and implementation experience with HTTP proxies.

Expert knowledge of at least one NoSQL database (Mongo, Cassandra, etc).

BS/MS in Computer Science or closely related field.

Bonus points:

Experience as a team or project lead.

Experience with LXC based containers.

Familiarity with WebKit or Blink internals.

leakybucket··on In the Universe of Printers, One Worth Talking About
So I'm not sure why this is HN material, but as I have recently co-founded a company (www.sessionbox.com), and just purchased a new printer because of it, I'll pipe up.

When you start a company, there's a ton of paper involved:

- corporate paperwork, including founding documents, stock agreements, advisor forms, etc.

- business contracts: lawyers (corporate, IP, etc), recruiters, office space, etc.

- and most recently, your first big expense report once the seed money lands and you want to pay yourself back.

My old consumer cheapo printer died just when I was trying to get the offer letter out to our (soon-to-be) first employee. The printer just locked up, with all the led's blinking, and I kept power-cycling, to no avail.

While reviewing printers, I decided that the new one needed a "scan to email" feature. Be warned, however, that some cheap printers have a feature that they call "scan to email", but what they mean is: if you hook up our printer via usb to your pc, we'll open outlook for you and attach your scan to it. frak that, man.

What 'scan to email' should really mean is: I walk to the (wirelessly connected) printer/scanner; I put something in the doc feeder; I then use a little display to either a) punch in someone's email address or b) look up frequent email addresses. And then I hit a button, and it scans them, and the printer mails it to them. (As in, it speaks smtp.)

So I ended up with the HP 8600 Plus. The "plus" is important - the plain 8600 does not have scan to email. It's been fine so far, though my bar is probably low.

leakybucket··on I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane
Yes - I came in just to mention this. A great combination of a glance into the dotcom startup days + a feel of the classic gothic horror novel.
leakybucket··on A list of systems, applications, and libraries that are written in C++
The BeOS userland api had base classes with reserved functions that were there solely to reserve space in the objects vtable becase of the fragile base class problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_binary_interface_proble...

I wonder how modern C++ frameworks are handling this?

leakybucket··on Ask HN: 10k+ node _windows_ cluster in AWS?
My rough estimate was ~$14,000 for 24 hours of 10,000 windows instances: 24 hours of 10,000 non-persistent on-demand Windows micro instances in Amazon West: $7200 Assume 0.5 mbit/sec average to each instance over 24 hours (105TB): $5020 AWS data rate from aws is currently 0.

If I understand their pricing, cyclecomputing adds a 20% upcharge: $1440

leakybucket··on Ask HN: 10k+ node _windows_ cluster in AWS?
Thanks - I saw the ars article about cyclecomputing, and was researching them.
leakybucket··on Ask HN: Asian or African News Sources?
I can't really speak to the 'accurately' part of the request, but 2011 was the year I added aljazeera to my news sources, due to its coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings.
leakybucket··on Linux flavors and derivatives tree
I'd always believed that Slackware was the first Linux distribution - this claims that "MCC Interim" was actually first?
leakybucket··on Low-end Linux
I've been a long time user of Soekris boards & cheap x86 boxes:

http://soekris.com/

They've just come out with their first Atom based system; it's been 486 class (Amd Elan) and 586 class (Amd Geode) processors until now.

leakybucket··on Love in GIT
At my past couple of companies, we've tracked any births to the core eng team in the build system: you can go to the top of the build tree and type "make babies" to see who was born and when.