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aclon Show HN: ESPectre – Motion detection based on Wi-Fi spectre analysis

In terms of layout of rooms and useful monitoring, you have to be able to configure which node it attaches to, right? Because it's going to monitor the physical space between itself and that node.

So you might have an ESP32 placed across the room from one mesh node to monitor that particular room. But if that ESP32 roams to, say, the mesh node on the floor above it, it's going to monitoring a much less useful space - just the vertical space between itself and the mesh node on the floor above.

Am I envisioning this correctly? I'm thinking its a problem for systems like eero, where you can't lock a device to a particular mesh node.

aclon Show HN: ESPectre – Motion detection based on Wi-Fi spectre analysis

Would this work with a mesh router?

aclon Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

Any guesses as to what this means for Arc?

I absolutely love Arc for Mac. It gets all the little things right -- at least for my workflow and mindset. But "getting all the little things right" in a browser isn't something you can monetize.

aclon Show HN: I made a web game that makes practicing basic arithmetic fun

Neat! I played for a while with my 10yo son. The timer is a bit of a drag. My suggestion is to either implement a lives mechanism like the other poster suggested, or to make the timer reset after each success.

aclon Show HN: We created a hexagonal keyboard made for smartphones

I am giving it a try, and I like the hexagonal keys. But I would need swipe functionality to make it my daily driver.

aclon Most drivers who own cars with built-in GPS systems use phones for directions

I just got the new Highlander, and can only conclude the nav (and most of the rest of the car UX) was designed by a committee of angry monkeys.

aclon Most drivers who own cars with built-in GPS systems use phones for directions

100% built-in nav on the Tesla. Why:

* voice commands for navigation actually work. Recognition is quick and accurate.

* Should you need to type in an address, Tesla treats you like an adult, and lets you do it while the car is moving. All the other recent cars I've driven won't even let the passenger enter an address unless the car is stopped.

* Map display is fluid and uncluttered

aclon Show HN: Real-time server monitoring in your browser

Ha yeah - we opened up a port in iptables for this so we don't have to ssh tunnel in to see stats. Obviously, if you're concerned about exposing numbers, you can view via an ssh tunnel instead of opening a port.

aclon Show HN: Real-time server monitoring in your browser

ah - thanks for the feedback, makes sense.

aclon Show HN: Real-time server monitoring in your browser

Project author here. We don't want to exclude anyone - I updated it to "developers."

aclon Show HN: Real-time server monitoring in your browser

I love htop too, but the great thing about scout_realtime is the couple minutes of context provided the charts.

Sometimes, nothing beats seeing a chart to quickly see what's going on.

aclon Beyond Googling yourself: Greplin (YC W10)

Check out Redwood, http://redwoodapp.com. It runs on your desktop and searches Google Docs, GMail, and Basecamp. Since there's no server intermediary, it doesn't have the same privacy concerns as greplin.

aclon Now is the time for MacRuby desktop applications

That's true. Bundling MacRuby with your application is easy though, and doesn't take up us much space as you might think. My MacRuby app, together with the MacRuby framework and a couple of embedded gems, takes just over 10MB GZip'd for download. Obviously that's heavier than it would be without the embedded framework, but I don't think it will be a deal killer.

Even if Apple does switch MacRuby to a public Framework in Lion, my guess is that MacRuby will evolve quickly, and many developers will choose to embed MacRuby anyway to be assured of the latest version.

aclon Now is the time for MacRuby desktop applications

The project templates aren't there yet, but should be any day now. In the mean time, everything else works -- compilation, Interface Builder, etc. You'll want to grab MacRuby 0.10 from source or nightlies.

aclon Show HN: please review our MacRuby app, "spotlight for web apps"

@shennyg, thanks for letting us know. We don't support accounts with two-factor authentication yet.

aclon What do you think of our new team page? (type "dance" for party mode)

Where did the Jay-Z/Modern English track come from?

aclon MacRuby 0.9 is released

Bundling the framework makes the .app pretty huge. My simple app with embedded MacRuby and a few embedded gems weighs in at 54MB.

It would be awesome to have Macruby already present on users' machines.

aclon Ask HN: anyone using the new MacBook Air as your main development machine?

Just because it's a laptop doesn't mean you have to use it in an non-ergonomic configuration. My current setup is a 15"MBP mounted on a sit/stand desk at home. An external keyboard and monitor keeps both hands and eyes in the right position. I have a similar docking setup at the office. That covers 80% of my time on the machine. The other 20% (mostly at coffee shops) doesn't bother me, and I still get the benefits of mobility and freedom.

aclon "So, what do you do?"

"I co-run a company. We break into banks."

I am so going to start using that.

aclon Time for fast, minimalist web aesthetic?

Reader certainly does strip away most images, that's the point. Folks who like reader are using it precisely because it provides a cleaner view, highlights the content, and minimizes distractions.

aclon If I was CEO of Posterous

It's "If I were the CEO of Posterous."

Sorry to be the grammar pedant, but this one always bugs me.

aclon Ask HN: Mac users, do you get AppleCare for your Macs?

AppleCare is the only kind of extended warranty I have ever bought. I'm glad I did -- my Macbook Pro needed multiple repairs within the last few years, including logic board replacement. I'll buy AppleCare again for my upcoming MBP update.

aclon Ask HN: What are you working on tonight?

Creating fixture data for an old project with no test coverage.

aclon Google changes Buzz to be opt-in and adds easy delete button

That was an impressively quick response for a large company.

aclon Twitter May Be Profitable. No, Seriously

maybe != may be. No, seriously.

aclon The MySQL MyISAM and InnoDB engines and a grocery checkout

I'm curious about this too -- I've used MyISAM for many projects without a problem.

aclon We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here's What We Learned.

did you try implementing nested sets?

The big thing we needed to do was a rolling archive to progressively broader timeframes. As metrics come in, we keep every single datapoint for the first 6 hours. After 6 hours, data gets rolled up into 5-minute archive. Each datapoint in the 5-minute archive then contains avg, min, max, etc for all the points that lived within that 5-minute span.

The archiving carries on through progressively broader windows as time goes on -- a 10-minute archive, 1-hr archive, etc. This progressive aggregation is the only sane approach to storing the massive amount of data we get. And, it reflects the need for higher resolution for recent events -- it's rare you need to see what happened at one exact minute 6 months ago.

It was this progressive archiving that bit us, specifically as DB performance degraded over time with lots of insertions/deletions. Nested set didn't/wouldn't help with aggregation costs and degradation from churn during the archiving process.

Hope this helps -- I'm going to try to do a more technical post on this in the future.

aclon We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here's What We Learned.

Actually we're also able to spend a lot more time now on things that really matter to our customers -- things that customers request, like more graphing options and better support for cloud instances. The cloud functionality is already available, and graphing is coming up fast. It's a real pleasure to finally have time to address these things, in addition to the sales and partnership efforts.

Also, performance is significantly better since we simplified the architecture (http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2009/10/01/simplify-get-an...), which benefits customers old and new!

aclon We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here's What We Learned.

They assumed performance wouldn't be a problem

We did pretty extensive performance tests, but not for long enough. We load tested tested for hours at a time, and the problems started to show up after days of production load and really compounded after that. It's probably a topic for another post, but the performance of database tables with a lot of churn (rows being frequently inserted and deleted) really degrades over time.

aclon The "Cloud": who's really using it?

Just trying to put somewhat of a box around what the "cloud" is. Especially since we're getting (I feel) saturated with the term. I put Linode and Slicehost in a non-cloud category because you pay by the month and the options for programmatic instantiation are limted. But yeah, I acknowledge that the lines get blurry.