antipaucity

Yet another link I found off Hacker News, the Backblaze storage pod – 67 Terabytes of storage in a rack-mountable unit for <$8k.

I’d love one or two or 80 of these in my spare bedroom

I recently found out about Hizook – a robotics news aggregator.

I found out from this story that was posted to Hacker News. It seems that Google thought their traffic spike was anomalous, and disabled their Adsense account without warning.

Thankfully it was re-enabled a few days later, but it does undermine some confidence in Google’s claim to “Do no evil”.

Hacker News employs the reddit technology for displaying popular stories/news items. Reddit is one of the companies Paul Graham‘s Y Combinator project helped seed-fund a few years back.

The concept is somewhat similar to Digg, but without needing a ‘DiggIt’ button on a website to add it to the reddit list – you just submit items directly to reddit like sharing a link on Facebook.

It moves in popularity by user votes, somewhat akin to the ‘Like’ button on Facebook – but can be downvoted as well.

I’ve been a user on stackoverflow since shortly after it debuted last year. I’m also becoming active on superuser and serverfault.

Today I have a prime example of why these services are so helpful. I have a small db scripting problem. After googling’ for a while with various combinations of keywords, including attempting to make heads or tails of the MySQL documentation, I asked this question on SO.

Inside of a couple minutes, several folks answered my question, pointing to exactly the part of the manual I couldn’t find on my own.

Volunteer communities are awesome.