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mrduncanon Ask HN: 280north breaks the mold?

2 founders. 1 is too little, 3 is a bit too much and 4 is out of the question (except for Reddit?).

I don't remember PG ever saying that. In fact, if I remember correctly, Flightcaster has something like 5 or 6 founders.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Where do you buy your non-DRM ebooks from?

A lot of publishers offer DRM-free ebooks if you purchase directly from them.

For example:

http://oreilly.com/ebooks/

http://pragprog.com/frequently-asked-questions/ebooks

mrduncanon YC S10: The Definitive Demo Day Debrief

The single page version will save you from hitting next a few times:

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/08/25/the-definiti...

mrduncanon News.YC: open links in new tab

Alternatively, nearly all browsers support middle clicking on links to open them in a new window.

mrduncanon Common Mistakes Made by API Providers

It should be noted that in general APIs are a modern form of slavery!

I think that's a little over the top, nobody is forcing anyone to use their API. If you rely on an API, you should accept that it can (and likely will) change in the future.

Twitter has been pretty up front about the fact that HTTP Basic would be shut off since they first released OAuth. I think they've done just about as much as they can to help people move away from HTTP Basic.

I wish more services would implement open protocols, agreed upon standards than just proprietary APIs.

I'm not sure what you mean by open protocols and agreed upon standards. HTTP Basic and OAuth are both open and agreed upon.

mrduncanon 2010 Startup School: October 16 at Stanford

That list probably isn't complete yet either, those are just the current confirmed speakers.

If I remember correctly, last year the list wasn't final until right around the time that acceptances were sent out.

mrduncanon IPad Gripe Session

Does RAM actually take that much power? I'm curious because when battery life for mobile devices is discussed, usually back-lighting and CPU are the only thing anyone talks about.

mrduncanon Reddit CoFounder Dips Back Into YC With Travel Startup Hipmunk (YC S10)

The logo was designed by (Reddit cofounder) Alexis Ohanian.

http://twitter.com/kn0thing/status/21425755974

mrduncanon Ask HN: Solo Entrepreneur, what are my chances and have you done it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Patzer for those who aren't familiar with him.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

I'd suggest something like the way that http://bit.ly handles their urls. Auto-generate a short string or let users (maybe after a registration or something) enter their own.

It'd be nice to be able to say "Keep track of my progress at http://mobileply.com/matt or something similar. Heck, I could see myself even paying a couple bucks for a nice url like that.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Review my weekend project - MobilePly

Please don't use sequential IDs for this.

I went to the "Track Me" link and got a tracking id of 54. I was then able to look through plenty of other peoples locations for IDs less than 54. I'd suggest switching to something that's much harder to guess.

With that harshness out of the way (sorry :)), it does seem like a pretty cool little app. I could see myself using it for a long road-trip or something so that others could track my progress.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Suggestions for Starting with Ruby on Rails?

Forgot to mention that railscasts.com has awesome screencasts on all kinds of topics. - Also, if you prefer to read them instead of watching, most are available on http://asciicasts.com/.

Also, a word of caution - http://guides.rubyonrails.org is currently based on rails 2.3. http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/ is probably the best place to look for the moment if you want to start with 3.0.

The edge guides actually follow the current master branch while the regular guides follow the current stable branch. Since 3.0 is kind of in limbo between the two (as an RC, it has it's own stable branch, but it hasn't been released yet), it's pretty much completely in sync with edge. Once it's released, everything should switch over to guides having info for 3.0 (the index page should list what version it's currently for).

...That was probably more than you ever wanted to know about Rails guides.

mrduncanon Posterous is being DDoS'd

Our datacenter is experiencing heavy packet loss. We're on the line with Rackspace now.

I don't see where they stated it was a DDOS attack. Packet loss can occur due to a large number of different issues.

EDIT: They just clarified with the following: The DDoS attackers have returned and evolved their attack around our countermeasures. We expect to be back online ASAP w/ @gigenet antiddos

mrduncanon Skydiver Felix Baumgartner seeks to break sound barrier

He's being sponsored by Red Bull (http://www.redbullstratos.com/). Their marketing video is actually really cool, it includes plenty of footage of Kittinger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyGmTV0q2kY (make sure you switch to HD)

mrduncanon How to use Resque Scheduler

Don't forget:

  - Installing the OS
  - Securing the server
  - Setting up backups
  - Monitoring

None of these are particularly hard, it just depends on how much you value your time to set them up.

mrduncanon Ask YC Archive

Here's the official formatting info - http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

The indented quote blocks you've seen are simply code blocks - just indent with 2 spaces.

mrduncanon Ask YC Archive

http://ask.searchyc.com/ is also a good resource - posts are displayed with font sizes relative to their points.

mrduncanon Cache on Delivery (Mining random people's memcached)

disable password logins

I can't emphasize this one enough. Unless you need to login from a lot of different machines, there really isn't any excuse not to do this. It also has the bonus of making logins really easy since you don't have to type a password.

mrduncanon Goldman's traders use a proprietary programming language called "Slang"

Mike Rowe's TED talk from 2008 hits on some of the same points, as well as how much he thinks we under-value hard work. Agree with him or not, it's definitely worth taking a look at.

http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

mrduncanon Stop thinking about how to scale. Startups die from not having customers.

The best advice I've ever heard regarding scaling is to only worry about one level of magnitude. If you have 20 users, make sure you can scale to 200 - any farther than that and you're likely wasting your time.

mrduncanon Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images

The same is not true of a series of images on a screen in an isolated room. Images on screens are not people. There is no social conditioning that normal human beings have that will cause people to automatically respect images on a screen.

I'd argue that has pretty much been proven by the Milgram experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

mrduncanon Tell HN: Github has dozens of public s3 passwords

http://support.github.com/discussion/new

Don't forget to make it a private discussion.

mrduncanon DHH: Appstore is a warehouse of shit

A score of -4 is actually -5 karma points (since everything starts at 1 point).

Here's a tip though - you can't cash it in for prizes, don't worry about it.

mrduncanon Keep calm & carry on: What you didn't know about the reddit story

fleaficker was a typo for fleaflicker.

mrduncanon Richard Branson: In it for fun not just money

Branson has actually owned this island for decades: http://www.neckerisland.virgin.com/

mrduncanon Tales of the F-14

As a fighter, definitely.

When you compare it to other larger military aircraft, it doesn't seem very long at all. The B52 has been in active service since 1955. The A-10 was introduced in 1977 and isn't expected to be replaced until nearly 2030.

mrduncanon Ask HN: What annoys you?

Some interesting conversions to put it into perspective:

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 0.18 U.S. cents / byte

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 1,872 U.S. dollars / megabyte

mrduncanon Ask HN: What annoys you?

Managing email programatically in particular for me is a nightmare, sendgrid is an awesome service, but processing incoming email should be much easier. (I have yet to try lampson)

Is there an available solution for the reverse of SendGrid? Basically a service which would receive your emails and then post to a url on your application.

mrduncanon Ask HN: What annoys you?

Email - Not a lot has changed in the past 20 years, I think we can do better.

Yes, Gmail was pretty innovative but I still think there are plenty of things to improve.

mrduncanon Ask HN: What annoys you?

Airlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with an airline?