Hacker News Reader

spydezon Google wave starts rolling, picks up over 100,000 new riders

I got on Wave and sent out my invites. No need to send me one.

spydezon HN: share your unneeded Google Wave invites

I got on Wave and sent out my invites. No need to send me one.

spydezon Google wave invites going for ~$100 on ebay

I wouldn't mind getting on your wave. It'd be nice to have something to do besides talk at myself... :P

[username]42 at googlewave

spydezon HN: share your unneeded Google Wave invites

[username] @ [username] .com

Don't have an invite yet. I'll help out if I get one.

spydezon Google wave starts rolling, picks up over 100,000 new riders

[username] @ [username] .com

Don't have an invite yet. I'll help out if I get one tomorrow.

spydezon [dead]

General status: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

Gmail status: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en

I got the banner too, but everything in my Gmail (for my domain) works except the Contacts.

spydezon RAID's Days May Be Numbered

In Google's whitepaper on hard drives a while back, they showed that, basically, SMART is useless.

So, take SMART your data with grains of salt and all that.

spydezon Google Chrome 3.0

I use SuperGenPass, which is just a js bookmarklet... It works equally well on Firefox, Safari, Mobile Safari, and Chrome.

http://supergenpass.com/

spydezon First subpixel typeface, ever

It only works on LCD based displays where the subpixel layout is RGB. Some old ones are GBR.

Also won't work if your monitor is flipped sideways.

spydezon Ask HN: Has anyone seen Shark Tank (VCs are sharks)?

It's the American version of Dragon's Den.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Den#United_States

I've seen a few episodes of the UK's Dragon's Den on BBC America and was unimpressed. Anyone have any comparisons between the two (better or worse)?

spydezon Google Chrome 3.0

Chrome for Mac is similar. Firefox is my main browser, but I give Chrome a whirl once a week or so and have yet to notice any deficiencies.

spydezon Loopt to work in the background on iPhone via deal with AT&T

Roadee is $2.

It uses OpenStreetMap instead of the proprietary map databases, but hey, I'll take 90% as good for 2% of the price any day.

spydezon Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

Google Syndrome. "Beta" is meaningless now.

spydezon Google Voice Alternative Line2 Is Now Live On The App Store

What new distinct feature set? All I saw in the article was "Line2/Toktumi is business-class Google Voice minus SMS." The only feature GV doesn't have that was mentioned was the ability to build a phone directory menu - which I would expect from a "business-class Google Voice".

Also, both ATT and Apple swore (cross their heart, hope to die) to the FCC that it was 100% Apple, 0% ATT in the GV decisions.

Oh, and there are other apps in the store that provide free SMS, so it's not like Apple's all gung-ho about blocking the SMS leechers.

spydezon List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions

I knew of one non-profit that lived off interest, basically. For every million dollars they raise, they can afford to hire one more worker or do X more things, based off the interest that money makes sitting in a bank.

It seems like a good way to go, if you can just raise the millions needed. Maybe some billionaire can set Wikipedia up with a trust fund...

spydezon Poll: Caffeine Usage

Twice now, I have deliberately gone cold turkey on caffeine for a few weeks. Both times, the results were the same: 3 days lost to caffeine withdrawal headaches, followed by no noticeable differences in anything.

Also, when I got back on caffeine, I noticed nothing. And I should've been my most caffeine sensitive then. If I did a seriously huge dosage, I'd have shaky hands, but otherwise nothing. I wasn't more alert or awake or hyper or anything.

Caffeine does supposedly have Ritalin-like effects on ADHD kids, so maybe I'm ADD and don't know it.

spydezon [dead]

That's ultimate awkwardness, regardless of the number of men using it.

They're also highly inefficient. I've been to a ball game (not in Wrigley Field, but with similar troughs) where only 2 guys, on extreme ends, were using the trough. A dozen guys were waiting in line for stalls or the trough corners to be vacated.

spydezon Lack of ZFS File System Support in Snow Leopard Due to Licensing Issues?

Apple uses DTrace. DTrace was made by Sun. DTrace is CDDL. ZFS is CDDL. ZFS is made by Sun. I don't think it was just the license.

spydezon Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

Well, to be fair, Backblaze is using consumer-grade hardware here. No redundant PSUs. No mirrored OS drives. Cheaper components. Etc.

They're going Google's route, which is fine, it's just... a whole different direction than a Sun Thumper. I'd be interested to see how their costs per petabyte stack against Google's.

spydezon The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD

Newegg has an autopricing algorithm that ramps the price up into the stratosphere if a lot of people are buying something. It takes a while for the price to settle back down to 'reasonable'.

Either find it elsewhere, or wait it out... Amazon has had good prices on hard drives recently. The magnetic kind; I haven't been paying attention to SSDs.

spydezon Why did Apple drop ZFS?

Essentially all of Apple's products are single disk. There is virtually no win there.

Well, if you're data-paranoid, like me, you can set your ZFS filesystem to keep 2 copies of every file on different parts of the disk. Then if your single disk has a sector or two go kaput, ZFS will notice the bad CRC on read and get the other copy.

I've also heard of other improvements for single-disk, and SSD specifically, but alas, I can't find citations right now.

Time Machine really stole the thunder on this for regular users.

Time Machine's "snapshots" suck. Entirely new file every time a bit changes? Really? My 500 gig external disk just filled up. And it's only backing up a 250 GB drive. And I only started using Time Machine a few months ago. Virtual machines & TrueCrypt volumes that change often are a royal pain with TM. ZFS, on the other hand, can store 4 months worth of backups of a 1TB RAID array on my fileserver in way south of a gig.

Also, ZFS send and ZFS recv are awesome ways to stream a filesystem snapshot over a network to, say, a Time Capsule. If you were so inclined.

spydezon Depression is not a malfunction

What OTC drugs are there for depression?

spydezon Ask HN: Is it possible that gmail is working better on chrome? (intentional?)

I've been consolidating email accounts for the past few months; transferring thousands of emails from one account to another, sorting, labeling, archiving, etc.

I keep one gmail account open in Firefox, and another in Chrome.

There is no difference in speed for me. Chrome stutters plenty.

spydezon The Hacker Survey

What's the difference between a corporation ("the term denotes a body corporate formed to conduct business" - Wikipedia) and a (large or small) business?

spydezon Benefits of Rising Early, and How to Do It

You think you jest...

I have to have 2 alarm clocks on normal ok-if-I'm-late days, and 3 if I absolutely have to wake up by x:00 AM. Each a progressively further zombie walk away from the bedside.

I have 3 for the important days because walking to the kitchen is apparently not enough to wake me.

The problem now is that my third is my cell phone, and if I forget to turn my ringer way up, I can sleep right through that since it's so far away.

I am not a morning person. -_-

spydezon Why AT&T Killed Google Voice

Yes, the difference is that big. Average cable offering is 7 Mbit today where I live. You can upgrade to a whole 15 for an arm and a leg.

A few lucky big cities have Verizon FiOS (fiber to the home), which can go up to 50 Mbit.

US broadband speed is seriously behind Europe and Japan.

spydezon Why is 65% of all music sold in the U.S. via compact disc?

Personally, CDs are infinitely better than iTunes, et al.

I get my music absolutely DRM-free. I can rip a CD to as high a quality mp3 as I want. I can rip to lossless FLAC for backup/future lossy format reencoding. And I get a physical backup.

spydezon Greasemonkey script: sort the Hacker News homepage

Ah. Apparently my HN Toolkit is old...

Thanks for the update.

spydezon Greasemonkey script: sort the Hacker News homepage

Sadly, it nukes the "show 5 new items at bottom of main page" that the HN Toolkit gives me...

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

spydezon Thinkgeek Redesign

The png: http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/refresh/robozombies7.png

Or, one of them, anyways. There's 2 to 6 as well.