Hacker News Reader

mrduncanon Bill Nye collapses during speech at USC

This is actually a well known phenomenon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect). It's why, in a crisis, you should always single people out to do tasks instead of saying "someone do this". Otherwise everyone will just assume that someone else will do it.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Has HN been slow/spotty loading for you?

As of 2 years ago, it was hosted on a "3.0 GHz Core whatever, 12 GB RAM, 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1" - it's certainly not a shared machine. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516122)

rtm is the sysadmin for HN (yes, that rtm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris).

mrduncanon Kayak Files for $50 million IPO

Kayak has an api (limited to 1000 searches / day): http://www.kayak.com/labs/api/search/

I believe that Orbitz will require you talk to someone in order to get access to their api.

mrduncanon Y Combinator announces two new partners, Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar

I assume this was a serious comment - HN is merely a small part of YCombinator.

See: http://ycombinator.com/

mrduncanon Ask HN: When is the best time to talk to investors?

If possible, launch first, then start looking for investors. It'll be much easier to get noticed by investors when you have actual users.

mrduncanon Y Combinator announces two new partners, Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar

Congrats all around!

mrduncanon Google offers engineer $3.5M to not leave for Facebook

I'm sure that person (again, assuming that there was only one) wasn't the only one to know about the money.

It's probably more likely that a manager, someone in HR, etc leaked the info.

mrduncanon An Open Letter to Wired Magazine: We're breaking up

Wired's cover browser goes back to 1993: http://www.wired.com/wired/coverbrowser/

mrduncanon An Open Letter to Wired Magazine: We're breaking up

Things were looking up a couple months ago when you published that great article on Caterina Fake of Flickr and Hunch fame. That could have been a cover… Instead you went with Will Ferrell…

Like it or not, a magazine with Caterina Fake on the cover just isn't going to sell as well on news stands as one with Will Ferrell on the cover.

mrduncanon Backbone.js adds Controllers and History

I don't think so, "example.com/#search/lemons/p7" would route to search("lemons", "7").

mrduncanon I taught myself Ruby on Rails--what should be my next app?

taking away my ability to edit and delete my own post

Posts are locked from editing/deletion after a certain amount of time - I doubt any admins manually locked it.

Censoring my title (which previously mentioned being a girl)?

I don't see how being a girl is relevant at all to your post. Check out the guidelines for a much more detailed list of what's expected: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mrduncanon 37signals' Chalk Dissected

Like I said, I just threw it together this morning - patches accepted :)

mrduncanon 37signals' Chalk Dissected

Enjoy: http://mrduncan.github.com/marker/

mrduncanon 37signals' Chalk Dissected

I'm curious what the rationale is for drawing from a queue instead of directly in the move event.

Shameless plug: I threw together an open-source version for browsers (or mice, more specifically) this morning - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873371

https://github.com/mrduncan/marker

mrduncanon Tell HN: I made a chalk inspired app that works in browsers

I decided to throw something together this morning since so many people were complaining that chalk.37signals.com didn't work anywhere except on iPads.

Source is available here, do whatever you want with it: https://github.com/mrduncan/marker

Also, I only tested it in Safari 5 on OS X so no guarantees that it'll work anywhere else. Patches accepted :)

mrduncanon Ask HN: Friends and Family offering large amounts of money, what do i do?

I think there are a couple of things you should ask yourself:

1. Do I need that much money? Maybe you do, but I'd guess that you probably don't need that much yet. Why not accept a smaller amount (for a smaller slice of the company)? In the future, if things work out you could give them an option of investing further.

2. Are you comfortable taking the money and possibly losing it? Odds are that you'll likely fail (sorry, not sure how else to word this) - will it ruin relationships? This isn't an easy question to answer.

If I were in your shoes, I'd probably try to take a small investment from each which will give you the capital to run for 3-6 months. After that, if things are going well (and hopefully they will be) - think bigger.

Disclaimer: I've never taken any investment so feel free to ignore my advice completely.

mrduncanon Groceries: which lane is the fastest?

The age of the cashier can be just as important, since they're usually doing most of the work.

mrduncanon GitHub moves to SSL, but remains Firesheepable

They need users to be confident in their ability to run a secure service, especially when company secrets (source code, in this case) are on the line.

Also, their audience is much more likely to pay attention to things like FireSheep. I can just about guarantee that 9/10 Facebook users have never heard of FireSheep and wouldn't even notice if Facebook went 100% SSL tomorrow.

Edit: That said, I totally agree with your comment.

mrduncanon [dead]

The easiest way to do something about it is to vote up quality articles on http://news.ycombinator.com/newest. If you think something is spam or a dupe, flag it. Posting that quality is suffering does very little to improve quality (in fact, I'd argue that it only adds to the noise).

mrduncanon From the guy who makes SMBC to the guy who keeps hacking SMBC

http://www.smbc-comics.com/ for those unfamiliar with SMBC.

mrduncanon Ask HN: What do you need help with?

How do I take my web app from running locally to being able to serve data to users? Basically the server admin type stuff to serve my Rails/Django/Sintra app.

For a Rails app, check out Heroku, they make admin stuff insanely simple (although they cost a little more, it's well worth the benefits). I'll let others chime in on Sinatra and Django.

How do things like memcached and Varnish fit into the picture and when is it an appropriate time to start worrying about it?

I'll take the easy part of this one (when to start worrying about it): In most cases, don't worry about it yet. You can get by just fine without either of them (especially Varnish) until you get a decent amount of users. Once you start seeing slowdowns, then start looking at how Memcached can help you cache data so you're not hitting your DB (or disk) as often.

mrduncanon Ask HN: What do you need help with?

Cool site! Here are a few little things that I noticed:

- I think the auto-complete is tough to read due to a combination of the opacity (too opaque) and the center alignment. My suggestion (I'm not a designer so use your own judgement obviously): make the text on the auto-complete a little bigger, left align it, and make the background less opaque.

- The search options seem a little confusing to me. When searching by title, do I still enter ingredients? Why not just have a single search box with no options, just like Google?

- The default image (the refrigerator) looks ugly to me, when I first saw it I assumed that was an uploaded image for the dish. Sorry I don't really have any suggestions for this though other than a different default image.

mrduncanon Ask HN: What do you need help with?

Care to post your project?

mrduncanon Walgreen’s now selling $99 Android tablet

Does anyone know if that picture is just an iPad with the screen photoshopped to Android or is that what it actually looks like?

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

Lately I've been spending as much time as I can working on http://milechaser.com - lots of really interesting problems to solve.

mrduncanon Lessons from PostgreSQL's Git transition

You're correct:

http://github.com/blog/626-announcing-svn-support

http://github.com/blog/644-subversion-write-support

mrduncanon Indian OS

And of course their own compiler.

Based on what I've read (which admittedly isn't a whole lot), it sounds like they need to take a few minutes to read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"[1].

[1]: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

mrduncanon Twitter Co-Founders Offer Tips for Entrepreneurs

I think what he's saying makes sense to an extent. I'd argue that nearly all of the large (based on valuation anyway) startups recently have made "something for everyone".

Just to name a few: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Skype