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Do country/city IP addresses always stay the same?
Yes, they can change—and there isn’t much central control. IANA dish out IP blocks to regional authorities, who hand them on to ISPs,who distribute them to end users... But the ISPs might cover multiple cities or even countries. You can read a bit about this process here: http://www.iana.org/numbers
[... 154 words]How can I install apache solr?
Solr is a powerful full-text search engine wrapped up in a REST-ish web API. It needs to run as part of a web server—but the default download package includes Jetty which is definitely good enough for starting to try out the software (and I’d argue easily good enough to run in production).
[... 128 words]What are some unique and creative gift ideas for a startup team of 20 (ages 25-35, 80% male, mostly developers, under $100)?
Lego. You can get some awesome Lego sets for under $100, and all of the developers I know love getting given Lego (since they’re “too old” to buy it for themselves, even though they actually really want it).
[... 66 words]Events (leisure): I want to find out if there are any Hildegard von Bingen recitations coming up in San Francisco. Which website should I go to?
It sounds like you need Songkick—it lets you “track” your favourite musical artists and will then email you when they’re playing in your town. I believe it has the most comprehensive gigs listing database anywhere. Here’s their page for Hildegard von Bingen (sadly no upcoming gigs listed at the moment): http://www.songkick.com/artists/...
[... 86 words]Is GitHub looking to be acquired?
Raising $100 million at a rumoured valuation of $750 million is not the action of a company that wants to be acquired. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09...
[... 36 words]Why should I care about the Olympics?
The sponsors, money and so on make it easy to forget the key thing: many of the athletes competing are still teenagers who have spent most of their lives preparing for this one event. That’s pretty amazing.
[... 50 words]What’s the best way to handle logins?
First, make sure you’re storing the password as a salted hash, using a deliberately slow hashing algorithm such as bcrypt, scrypt or PBKDF2—here are some recent articles to get you up to speed:
[... 176 words]What is Lanyrd all about?
Lanyrd aims to help people get more out of conferences and professional events—by finding the right events to attend, meeting the right people there and catching up on slides, notes and video afterwards.
[... 216 words]Which is a better site to archive conferences- Conferize or Lanyrd?
We’re very proud of our tools for archiving information from conferences—we support attaching slides, videos, audio clips and other links directly to pages about sessions for conferences. These are then aggregated for the entire conference and are also linked to from our profile pages for individual speakers. If the session has topics attached to it, we also show thumbnails of the coverage elsewhere on the site.
[... 464 words]What is a good cat name that relates to JavaScript?
I have two friends with cats that have names related to JavaScript. One is called “JavaScript” and the other is called “Widget”.
[... 38 words]Y Combinator: Does YC accept applications from founders outside of states? How does it work?
Yes they do. I’m a YC founder from the UK, and there were a number of other international founders in my batch (including from Spain, Switzerland and Norway, off the top of my head).
[... 131 words]Does Amazon have a API for websites to utilize order and delivery fulfillment?
The Amazon Fulfillment Web Service used to handle this http://aws.amazon.com/fws/—but their site now says "Effective June 2012, Amazon Services will no longer support Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS). All functions and services currently supported by Amazon FWS are currently available through Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS)." So I guess you want the Amazon Marketplace Web Service: https://developer.amazonservices...
[... 82 words]What are some good examples of travel startups that use crowdsourcing?
Trip Advisor, Yelp, any of the big review sites.
[... 27 words]While raising money, what tool are you currently using to manage your relationship with investors?
When we raised our seed round we used Highrise from 37signals. It worked out VERY well for us, especially during Y Combinator demo day. I’ll describe how we used it there...
[... 289 words]Do you prefer to attend events in the evening or in the morning?
In the evening. I like to go to work in the morning!
[... 31 words]Is there a place or portal where I can search for hashtags which track possible upcoming events or topics?
Our site http://lanyrd.com/ includes hashtags for thousands of upcoming conferences and professional events.
[... 39 words]Why is learning JavaScript better than just learning jQuery?
jQuery is a JavaScript library. When you write code using jQuery you are programming in JavaScript. This line:
[... 141 words]What are the coolest things to do in Dalston Junction (London, UK)?
That’s about 20 minutes from Broadway Market (at the south end of London Fields) which is very nice at the weekend.
[... 39 words]Ideas on how to secure good clients for web development? Or—How to turn my skills into decent pay?
Don’t get work through elance—get stuff from your personal network instead. If you don’t have a personal network, start building one!
[... 230 words]Should I attend the Build 2012 conference?
It’s got a great reputation from previous years, and the speakers look really good (definitely more of a design focus, but it’s never a bad idea to get some exposure to people from disciplines related to your own). I’m going, so that’s clearly a vote in favour :)
[... 77 words]What is a more equal-opportunity way to distribute access to a free event that is expected to sell out quickly?
A much better method than releasing all of the tickets at once is to release them in batches—say 50 tickets at a time over three different releases. This greatly reduces the “only people online at the time get a chance” factor by giving people three separate chances to grab their ticket. You can vary the time of day for each batch to make it fairer for people who might be at work / in meetings / having dinner with family at certain times of day (or to take timezones in to account if you expect attendees from far away).
[... 225 words]Are there any website thumbnail services that generate images in real-time?
http://url2png.com/ generates images on demand—you pass the URL directly to the service and it replies with a PNG image. The first load can take a few seconds (depending on how long it takes the originating site to serve up the assets etc) but they cache the generated images so future requests for the same URL will be served instantly.
Where is the best place to go for dinner in Brighton?
Terre a Terre is excellent—it’s vegetarian but don’t let that put you off, it just means they go the extra mile to impress. A tad pricey but great for a special occasion.
[... 51 words]What should I do with a week in Brighton, UK?
Make sure you go inside the Pavilion—it’s marvellous. The outside imitates an Indian temple, but the inside (for some reason) is entirely inspired by China. Both aspects were constructed by British workmen who had never been to either, so it’s a fabulous over-the-top representation of 18th century stereotypes of those countries.
[... 83 words]Is there such thing as a specific multi-site search?
Yes—Blekko does exactly this, with its “slashtags” feature: http://help.blekko.com/index.php...
[... 27 words]How do you know the real size of a web page?
The Google Chrome developer tools can do this, on the Network tab. Take a look at the bottom blue bar (which says “5 requests | 29.49KB transferred”)
[... 51 words]For a first-time visitor but longtime Anglophile, what’s essential to see and do in London?
Don’t spend too much time on the tube. It’s fast and convenient (and a marvellous piece of Victorian engineering) but its often better to walk if your journey is less than three stops. London is a delightful city to walk around, and you’re certain to see all sorts of interesting buildings on a 10 minute walk through any area. Get a data SIM for your phone and use your maps app to avoid getting lost and you’ll have the freedom to explore all kinds of interesting streets that most tourists who stick to the tube for everything completely miss.
[... 120 words]Is there a free/open-source software source code search engine?
If you want to search through actual code in open source projects, GitHub search is fantastic https://github.com/search—e.g. here’s a search for all Ruby code that mentions oauth https://github.com/search?q=oaut...
[... 71 words]Is there a single list of all tech conferences around the world?
We’re trying to compile such a list with our startup, Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/
[... 198 words]What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string?
Yes—an index on a varchar column is exactly how you would implement this.
[... 38 words]