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mrduncanon The First YC Conference

It sounds like it's only open to YC founders (and invited guests) based on the following: The speakers were completely open, because they knew they didn't have to worry about someone cherry picking quotes in a blog post to make them look bad.

mrduncanon Simplicity is hard. Let’s go shopping

I've always found moving to be the best time to get rid of things. If it hasn't been used since the last time I moved or I don't feel like packing it, it's gone.

mrduncanon Garbage Collection and the Ruby Heap

Seriously excellent slides.

Any chance of a video of this talk being released? I'd love some commentary from you guys.

mrduncanon Yahoo Traffic Server: 700k lines of code, 9 months

This blog post has some higher-level information about TS - http://ostatic.com/blog/guest-post-yahoos-cloud-team-open-so...

mrduncanon TSA apologizes for forcing 4-year-old to remove leg braces at airport screening

Fair enough. I suppose, being already inside of the US, that I don't really have a choice in the matter if I need to go somewhere. I certainly haven't thought twice about flying instead of driving, in fact I'd definitely prefer to fly if it's more than a couple hours drive. Being a fairly frequent flyer, I guess I've just gotten used to their "process".

I'm reminded of a post from a little while ago about Israeli airport security. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it before - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850

mrduncanon TSA apologizes for forcing 4-year-old to remove leg braces at airport screening

What evidence do you have of that? (I'm genuinely curious)

Anecdotally, while agree that they are a complete joke, I certainly haven't flown any less recently.

mrduncanon Ask HN: How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest?

I'm curious if a lot of other users do the same. I rarely (if ever) look at my saved list and probably therefore end up upvoting a lot more than you (or others) do.

mrduncanon Ask HN: How many of you look at http://news.ycombinator.com/newest?

I completely agree. I've actually started browsing "newest" much more lately (almost exclusively on some days). My solution is to pick out quality submissions and try to give them the bumps that they need to make it to the front page for other users to see.

mrduncanon Ask HN: How to beat the chicken egg situation with user-content driven website?

It might not be helpful advice in your specific case (or that of craigslist type sites), but make it useful even if there aren't any other users. If I remember correctly this is the advice I've always seen from the Reddits on how to solve the problem.

mrduncanon All the wrong reasons for Stack Overflow's VC chase

37signals has taken an investment from Bezos Expeditions. As Jason Fried explains in the blog post, it was certainly not the standard VC deal though - http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...

mrduncanon Streetview takes my picture

If you're really that curious: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/44/137275735_6ba4ac4e5a.jpg

mrduncanon Flying Cheap

Statistically, flying is far safer than driving (apologies for not having boating data). The numbers are a few years old, but a quick search dug up the following:

http://www.crashstuff.com/driving-or-flying-plane-vs-car-acc...

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/the-miracle...

http://www.meretrix.com/~harry/flying/notes/safetyvsdriving....

mrduncanon Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun free to download

I suspect that it's mostly an issue of money. Releasing a game, even for free download, costs money in the form of staff, servers, bandwidth, etc.

mrduncanon Ask YC/HN Archive

On a related note, http://searchyc.com/ also has a lot of good info.

mrduncanon PopJam.com: A Facebook Connect-powered Chatroulette clone

Interesting idea. Since this is a bit less anonymous than Chatroulette, I'd imagine that there'll be less nudity and other shock imagery. Although, I'm sure there will definitely still be some.

I'm curious if any dating sites have tried (or succeeded) doing something like this. Seems like it might work - kind of an "online" bar atmosphere where you're free to wander around meeting new people face to face.

mrduncanon Crime in America keeps going down, yet the American public refuses to believe it

As the saying goes - When someone you know loses their job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

Any recommendations for open-source webmail?

mrduncanon Adobe blocking publication of latest HTML5 draft?

I agree that allowing users to post to the lists might be harmful in some cases, but I can't think of a good reason why these lists aren't readable by the public.

mrduncanon Bell Labs, building 2, 5th floor: main occupants for each office over the years.

According to a Reddit comment, the name in red is the person who occupied the office the longest.

Here is a (incomplete) list of background info:

Jon Bentley - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley

Brian Kernighan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan

Rob Pike - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

Dennis Ritchie - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

Lorinda Cherry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorinda_Cherry

Stuart Feldman - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Feldman

Alfred Aho - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Aho

Dave Ditzel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta

Dave Presotto - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vismon

John Reppy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_(programming_language) (Unsure if this is the same person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Reppy)

Andrew Koenig - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Koenig

Bjarne Stroustrup - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup

Ken Thompson - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson

Gerald Holzmann - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_J._Holzmann

Tom Cargill - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

Bart Locanthi - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_N._Locanthi

Robert Morris - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer) (rtm's father)

mrduncanon The secrets of Malcolm Gladwell

Here is his TED talk from a few years ago: http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

mrduncanon Paul Graham on Mixergy, today 2pm EST/11am PST

Apply to YC.

mrduncanon Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API

An example from the API page for the curious:

Sending an SMS from 415-555-1212 to 555-867-5309 asking Jenny if she wants to get dinner:

  POST /2008-08-01/Accounts/AC309475e5fede1b49e100272a8640f438/SMS/Messages HTTP/1.1
  From=415-555-1212&To=555-867-5309&Body=Hi+Jenny%21+want+to+grab+dinner%3F

http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2008-08-01/rest/sending-sms

mrduncanon The iPhone obsession

For instance, SMS only really took off with the Obama campaign, while the rest of the world became addicted to it years ago.

Anyone happen to have stats to support that, I find it very hard to believe based on (admittedly anecdotal) evidence.

mrduncanon Ask HN: Who's Hiring? Internship Edition

Maybe it's just me, but these "Who's hiring" threads seem to be getting a little out of hand. This is the 3rd internship thread in the past 5 days now.

This one was posted 5 days ago and spent a good amount of time on the front page (take a look at this one, it's got plenty of comments and hopefully something you're looking for) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089829

This one was posted 4 hours ago and has enough upvotes that it probably spent at least a little time on the front page (no comments though) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1104493

mrduncanon Ask HN: Do you need angel funding?

Jason, I know you don't post here all that often but please don't sign your comments. The guidelines ask users not to, and more importantly it takes emphasis away from your (very useful) comment and places it on your signature instead.

From the guidelines - Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

mrduncanon LLVM's Clang Successfully Self-Hosts

Probably my favorite paper of all time, such a small paper yet so mind-blowing when you first discover it.

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

mrduncanon Ask HN: Who's Hiring?

Account creation dates are just that, when the account was created. Personally, I was reading the site for a while before I ever created an account.

mrduncanon Ask HN: improving your design skills?

Ryan Singer of 37signals gave a great talk at Windy City Rails last year about this very topic.

http://windycityrails.org/videos#4

mrduncanon How to Replace IMAP

Yea, I'd say long polling is probably a better solution in this case than web hooks since clients (likely) could be behind firewalls, NAT, and be going on and off line relatively often. Sorry, the title and description on that one just threw me off a bit - I think you chose the best option though.

mrduncanon How to Replace IMAP

The description for #8 sounds more like long polling to me. For push email, I'd envision something like registering a location to send notifications to (web hooks).