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mmbon Old payphones get new life, thanks to Vermont engineer

https://futel.net/ operates similar free public telephones in Portland, OR.

mmbon Show HN: Anonymous, ephemeral, distributed forum/message board

The posts are text only so the memory usage doesn't grow very fast. You can post images using Markdown but the images themselves have to be hosted elsewhere. I've created a few million posts on a development laptop and the memory usage was not bad (can't remember the exact number).

Right now there is no memory limit or handling for when memory reaches a certain point. Pruning based on FIFO or fewest replies could work, or OS level techniques to handle memory limitations like swap.

I will add some screenshots to the repo. Thanks for the suggestion.

mmbon Homemade RSS aggregator followup

The bigger problem is that the amount of information you can consume using RSS feeds is declining. Most sites don't publish RSS feeds of their content any more.

Sadly RSS is left over from a time when things were more open. Now everything is an app and everyone wants you to stay in their walled garden.

mmbon What’s the best thumbnail for this page?

I wrote a ruby gem to do this: https://github.com/mmb/plumnailer

The current ranking is simple but I made it pluggable with the idea that it could be improved or there could be multiple implementations.

mmbon Why I use git and puppet to manage my dotfiles

I use Rake to manage the symlink part of this

https://github.com/mmb/config/blob/master/Rakefile

mmbon Want to write some code? Get away from your computer

Having a baby caused me to transition to this style for personal projects. I spend a lot less time in front of the computer now and when I do it's for shorter times.

I've found this approach does give a better result and eliminates false starts. When I'm at the computer now I have already thought through what I'm going to do completely and writing the code is just a minor detail.

mmbon PlayStation 3 Hacker Must Allow Sony to Inspect His Hard Drive

Sounds like a use case for a TrueCrypt hidden volume.

mmbon Three projects to create a government-less Internet, and why it is needed.

Open source router firmwares like DD-WRT or Android handsets would be good platforms for some kind of mesh network.

Having a wireless AP with a webserver and forum software would be a simple option for communicating with your immediate neighbors (who could communicate with theirs).

mmbon Why Minecraft Matters

I like that Minecraft is proof you can write something cool in Java, a language considered by many to be corporate and boring.

All Java haters should watch the video of Notch coding away in Eclipse.

mmbon And suddenly, you're hip

CPAN is large and comprehensive but every time I've had to use it I've had to watch a minimum of 20 minutes of scrolling compilation, installing dependencies and running tests. Ruby and python install what I need in a few seconds so I can get back to work.

Maybe it's a question of perl putting a lot of things in CPAN versus other languages putting more in the standard library?

mmbon Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google

I use the OptimizeGoogle (and previously CustomizeGoogle) Firefox plugin for this:

http://www.optimizegoogle.com/

mmbon Ask HN: What is your workflow for saving bookmarks?

It's regex search the of the url itself and the page title. It doesn't match against the full document if that's what you mean. That's an interesting idea though.

mmbon Ask HN: What is your workflow for saving bookmarks?

I wrote this so I would not have to rely on a third party for bookmarking and so I could have regex search:

https://github.com/mmb/murlsh

mmbon Ask HN: Show me your Half Baked project

http://urls.matthewm.boedicker.org/

code http://github.com/mmb/murlsh

Right now a link blog for those who want to self-host and customize. May build a site that hosts these or add some kind of federation.

mmbon Ask HN: What are you working on right now?

A ruby framework for hosting your own url sharing / archiving site.

http://github.com/mmb/murlsh

mmbon Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language

Some of this contradicts jslint with "The Good Parts" options. It will complain about multiple var statements and missing space after function.

mmbon Ask HN: What website project are you working on?

url sharing and personal archiving framework

http://urls.matthewm.boedicker.org/

mmbon Screenshots of Twitter's internal admin interface

Possible but I'd be surprised if Ashton Kutcher's publicist was using an aol.com email address.

mmbon Screenshots of Twitter's internal admin interface

Can't these by easily unblurred to reveal Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher's email addresses?

mmbon Join us at Hacker News Coffee, Palo Alto, Tuesday at 8:30am

Where in upstate NY? I'm in Syracuse and would go to something like this here.