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xeno42

175 karma · joined July 17, 2008

Co-Founder at Atolio

Previously: Director of Engineering, Cloud Services at Anki Software Engineer at Splunk Software Engineer at VA Software (Sourceforge, etc)

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xeno42··on 'It's completely invasive': New app lets you spy on SF bars
n/m not sure how i missed it in tfa.. i do remember trying it at the time and it had a similar mixed response from people, but mostly negative.
xeno42··on 'It's completely invasive': New app lets you spy on SF bars
Isn't this a dupe of SceneTap from a decade+ ago?
xeno42··on Show HN: Multi-display screen sharing with CoScreen
Congrats on 5.0 - CoScreen has been an integral part of our team's daily workflow for the last couple of years, and it's been wonderful to to be able to share feedback and see the product evolve into a better and better tool.

Having to share screens occasionally via Zoom feels so slow and clunky by comparison to the single-click ability for multiple people to share and interact with windows concurrently as the conversation flows. Can't imagine going back!

xeno42··on After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
I've been hosting my email on my own server since the 90s, but got tired of dealing with keeping up with spam filters. Updated the MX to deliver inbound to mailroute.net and have them do the filtering before forwarding to my server and that's been working great for years. Not free, but not expensive and still gives me 99% of the control i want with very good spam filtering too.

Outbound mail is relayed via mailroute too, which solves the tainted IP delivery problem.

xeno42··on Show HN: Pop.com – pair programming with low-latency, Screenhero-style sharing
My team has been using CoScreen (https://www.coscreen.co/) for collaborative meetings and development for much of the last year and it's been really transformational.

The ease at which anyone can share any window and everyone can instantly interact with it is quite game changing for distributed teams IMO.

xeno42··on Ask HN: Are you still using Keybase?
Every day, and it's still very reliable and works very well for me; i hope it continues to run, though it would be nice for Zoom to make a strong statement around it.

I note the Keybase github repos continue to receive updates too, so it's not like it's dead.

xeno42··on CoScreen: Screen Sharing for Engineers
CoScreen has been great for our engineering standups, truly collaborative development and debugging etc; it's just removes so much friction for distributed teams
xeno42··on CoScreen exits stealth with $4.6M, multi-user screen sharing for macOS/Windows
This has been a really great addition to our workflow for many months now as it's gone through beta - It's become the default place to have standups etc as it just makes working together so much easier than individually sharing windows via Zoom.
xeno42··on Zulip Cloud Security Incident
While unfortunate, this is a really great, transparent summary posted in a very timely manner. A bonus that I learned something about the sharp edges of Cloudfront in the process which may serve me well later.
xeno42··on Show HN: CoScreen 1.0 – radically different pair/team programming
I've been using the beta version for the past few months, and it's really been great to see the progress made - Adding thumbnailed webcam feeds of participants was a nice addition and means it can replace Zoom for many of our engineering meetings - Everyone can interact with whatever application(s) are being shared, reducing the "it's your turn to share the screen" or "can you click that button on the top right" friction - Anyone can interact with anything being shared.

Definitely recommend checking it out if you're working on a distributed team.

(no connection to the company, other than being an enthusiastic beta tester :-) )

xeno42··on Show HN: WebCatalog – turn websites into desktop apps
Seems similar to Fluid (https://fluidapp.com/) which i found useful many years ago, albeit Mac only and likely much lighter/simpler
xeno42··on How Google Meet's noise cancellation works
I've been using https://krisp.ai/ to great effect with Zoom while sitting outside on the laptop with road traffic, birds, etc nearby - My team really had a "wow" moment when i turned it on the first time
xeno42··on Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?
I had a Dell 38" ultrawide that I loved, but it did not survive a cross-country move so I just replaced it with a Philips 499P9H 49" ultrawide - 5120x1440 - Really the same dimensions as two 27" monitors side by side, but without a center seam

So far, I really like it - But getting it to work at full resolution with my 2013 Mac Pro has been frustrating - It essentially cannot be done at full resolution with a single cable, unless you boot into Windows (also true for Mac Minis, but apparently newer Macbook Pros can drive it) - Despite what you may read, hacks such as SwitchResX will not help here; it's a limitation of the Mac's video card drivers that Apple seem uninterested in addressing.

The "solution", for me, has to drive it using two identical Mini Displayport->HDMI cables as if it were two screens and then have MacOS treat it as a single space. Using identical ports/cables has meant the color temperature on both halves is identical and i cannot tell it is not being driven as a single display, other than the fact the menu bar is only on one half of the screen.

Aside from that, it would be nice it were higher resolution, but the older I get, the less my eyes notice and the extra width is more useful than the DPI.

xeno42··on Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?
If you've used Cmd-C to copy something to the clipboard, pbpaste is really useful to pipe the clipboard contents into a pipe or to a file (pbcopy being the inverse)
xeno42··on Ask HN: The most useful Mac keyboard shortcuts?
Ctrl-Cmd-Space in most text edit fields to open the character viewer to enter emoji and other common unicode characters
xeno42··on Show HN: Product Graveyard – Commemorating the most memorable dead products
I don't read 1000/day, but I do step through 1,000 - I scan a headline/summary, hit "j" and move on for the vast majority of them. Some i'll star and come back to later, for others the first sentence of the summary is really enough to learn something about what's going on.. eg "vulnerability found in XYZ" is useful to tuck away in the back of my mind, but that's all i need.

Others are the same story reported by multiple sources; obvious from the headline.

I leave it open in a pinned tab and when i want to kill a minute or two, i'll scan through a few more posts and open a few to actually read.

The reason i like Bazqux is that it can keep up no matter how fast i hit "j". It's no prettier than Google Reader does, has few more bells/whistles, but if you really want to speed through items, save and search, it's great.

In reality, I would like something that combined Bazqux with some ML to recognize that an item is a dupe, or something i'm really not likely to be interested in and filter those thousand items down to a few hundred, but i've yet to see anything really achieve that.

xeno42··on Show HN: Product Graveyard – Commemorating the most memorable dead products
https://bazqux.com/ was the closest i found in terms of UI and performance with the amount of feeds/items i go through (~1000 items/day) - Been pretty happy with it since Google Reader shutdown
xeno42··on Charles – Web Debugging Proxy Application
I've had a license for Charles Proxy for the last 9 years and it's been a seriously useful tool, not just for introspecting http/https traffic (and recording those sessions to attach to tickets), but for dynamically modifying requests and responses.

couple of examples that come to mind:

* Want to test your production/deployed app against a dev/local api server? Have it redirect traffic to a different host and rewrite any headers required (production vs dev api keys for example) - That includes DNS spoofing and re-mapping host names as required.

* Found a bug on a web site and want to test a fix to the javascript without setting up a whole environment? Copy the javascript file in question to your hdd, modify it as desired and have Charles serve that file up when the browser/app requests the original

I don't have any connection to the author; just been well worth its price for me.

xeno42··on Google Fiber agrees to acquire Webpass
Interesting.. I've been very happy with Webpass for the past 8 or 9 years (though my building's crappy wiring can "only" support 100Mbit).

A Webpass engineer I spoke to last week mentioned they're rolling out fiber to the building to provide redundancy for the wireless mesh. Surprised me as I could count on my fingers the number of outages webpass has had since I started using them. Perhaps it'll replace the wireless portion in the longer term.

xeno42··on Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
I wrote a fax->email gateway in 2002 that's still in very active use.. wouldn't be that remarkable, except most of the servers are still running original equipment with original hard drives!

Anyone have servers running 24x7 with hard drives older that that?

xeno42··on Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
fwiw i switched from Google Reader to https://bazqux.com/ - The UX is very similar, has no problem dealing with a lot of feeds and is fast enough to keep up with my ~1000 item/day habit.
xeno42··on The New M4 Instance Type
The page linked in the post confirms your assertion: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSOptim...
xeno42··on Google I/O Registration now open
Did you get a pre-registration offer this year? I've been every year too, but it seems like they've given up completely with their I/ON program now :-(
xeno42··on Go concurrency isn't parallelism: Real world lessons with Monte Carlo sims
Additionally - Pushing the seed operation out of the loop decreased the run time for 1,000,000 samples from ~10 seconds to ~50ms on my machine.
xeno42··on Poll: RIP Google Reader. Which RSS solution do you use nowadays?
I tried a lot of different readers prior to and after the reader shutdown, and Bazqux was the only one I found I could live with.

Very fast, has search, is consistently up, keeps the familiar UI and has no problem with my 1,000 item/day habit.

Worth the small expense.

xeno42··on Oracle's Virtualbox.org down.
I'm using 4.2.2 on ML with Vagrant; been stable so far for me.

Latest version available for download here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/...

xeno42··on Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?
I've been pretty happy with Crashplan ( http://crashplan.com/ )so far. The free version will allow you to backup to one or more remote machines which you can seed via a hard drive if you want to avoid uploading hundreds of Gb for the initial backup. They have options to backup to their data center too for a competitive rate (unlimited storage).

Transfers are encrypted, de-duplicated and compressed, supports file versioning and it all works very well.

The only downside I've had is that their Java client uses a lot of memory both on my OS X and Linux boxes (haven't tried Windows) - It's using nearly 600Mb of resident memory right now.

xeno42··on IOS 4.1 with HDR built-in comes as a shock to HDR app developers
HDR app developers should be happy they have the opportunity to sell an app that improves or extends upon the native iPhone HDR features to an audience that had probably never even heard of HDR up until now. It's free marketing.
xeno42··on How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faster with one line of code
This has been around for years - Load up mail-archive.com in Firefox 2 (for example) and browse threads via Charles proxy or Fiddler so you can see what it's requesting and you'll see it pre-fetching the next message in the thread thanks to rel="next".

Does make it feel super-snappy though

xeno42··on JQuery Sparklines
I did and thanks for the comment - It's really great to hear people's success stories :-)
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