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What are the main things a non-technical co-founder of a tech company should focus on while the site is still being developed?
Building the right product.
[... 32 words]Is it a good idea to allocate URLs such as quora.com/username to users?
There’s an interesting discussion about this issue on this question: How do sites prevent vanity URLs from colliding with future features ?
[... 42 words]What are good games to get someone who likes Settlers of Catan?
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ is THE place to go for information on good board games. I’d suggest taking a look at Ticket to Ride.
What are some popular movies that are no longer plausible due to the ubiquity of cell phones & the internet?
“No Signal”
[... 36 words]What is the best license for a web framework (ex: Cake, Rails, Django): GPL, BSD, MIT, other? Why?
Not the GPL. The share-alike viral clause will prevent anyone from creating closed source proprietary projects on top of the framework.
[... 45 words]What are the best alternatives to JavaScript when writing web applications?
CoffeeScript is rather nice—it compiles to non-obfuscated JavaScript.
[... 27 words]JustinTV+> Fenerbahçe Antalyaspor Maçını Canlı izle
I believe they use a lot of Twisted Python
[... 21 words]If I’m bootstrapping a company and expect to get funding within months, what structure of company do VC’s look for? C Corp, S Corp, LLC?
Apparently a Delaware C Corp makes everything a whole lot easier once VCs are involved.
[... 46 words]Simon Willison: Would you consider Django for a crowd ’funding; website?
I don’t understand the question.
[... 22 words]How long would it take an average programmer to do a Ruby on Rails Reddit clone prototype?
Just FYI, Reddit is an open source Python project: http://code.reddit.com/
[... 34 words]What are some of the best quotations on programming/programming languages?
“There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”—Phil Karlton
[... 33 words]How should you set up a staging server?
Start by reading this: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/12...
[... 20 words]What are the best NoSQL databases for a web application?
It depends entirely on what you are building. You may well be better off with SQL.
[... 32 words]What are the underlying, unspoken values of TED?
Not unspoken, but the ten commandments they send out to their speakers are pretty interesting: http://www.ted.com/pages/360
[... 31 words]Why do browsers allow cross-domain JavaScript to execute but not XMLHttpRequests?
It’s called the Same Origin Policy, and it’s principally about intranets. Imagine you have a URL http://intranet.corp/top-secret-...—and you then visit http://evil.example.com/ . If cross domain XHR was allowed the evil site could suck that secret document off your intranet without you realising.
[... 105 words]What are some scalable OAuth and OpenID server implementations?
Any OAuth library should scale horizontally—I can’t see how any one library would be a better choice than another.
[... 36 words]How do you correctly send the oauth_verifier parameter using python-oauth2 and the Twitter API?
This seems relevant: http://groups.google.com/group/t...
[... 87 words]What are some ways I can get the word out about my startup/entrepreneur focused conference?
Add it to lanyrd.com and make sure you list all of the speakers. Then anyone who signs in to Lanyrd and is following at least one of your speakers on Twitter will be told about your event.
[... 59 words]Are there any well-known websites that use Facebook connect or Twitter OAuth as the only sign-in solution without its own sign-in password?
Our site http://lanyrd.com/ only accepts Twitter OAuth logins (at least for the moment).
[... 42 words]What are the most recommended upcoming mobile tech conferences in North America?
Our site, Lanyrd.com, is relatively new but already has a pretty good list of mobile conferences in the USA. Try this page: http://lanyrd.com/topics/mobile/...
[... 43 words]What are the advantages and disadvantages of using MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Cassandra vs Redis?
I see Redis as a different category from the other three—kind of like you wouldn’t say “what are the advantages of MySQL v.s. Memcached”. Redis makes an excellent complement to pretty much any other persistent storage mechanism. I expanded on this here: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Oc...
[... 67 words]What are the tradeoffs (e.g. development speed, performance, scalability) between using various php frameworks, ruby/rails, or python/django? Is there any reason to choose one overwhelmingly over another?
At this point, I’d argue that the decision between them comes down to programming language rather than framework—the frameworks have mostly converged on a very similar set of features.
[... 145 words]What are some things that most hackers used to do themselves but now use other people’s software to do?
Renting co-located servers. These days, most people just use virtual machines for their own personal projects.
[... 41 words]What is the best software for conference participants?
Our site http://lanyrd.com/ helps you find the Twitter names of speakers and fellow conference attendees, which should make it easier to connect with them.
[... 39 words]Why is Diaspora built on Ruby on Rails instead of Node.js?
Because Node.js had almost no visibility at all six months ago when Diaspora started. Also, Node.js has only very recently stopped breaking API backwards compatibility on a regular basis. Plus the Ruby library ecosystem is much, much larger than the Node.js ecosystem.
[... 81 words]How do you successfully outsource a web application project that is a copy of another website?
You may find that the quality of developers you can hire depends on the quality of the project. Copying another website doesn’t sound like a very interesting project.
[... 50 words]Who are the top Python programmers on Twitter?
Our site Lanyrd catalogs conference speakers by their Twitter ID, so you could use it to find people who speak at Python conferences—for example:
[... 52 words]Is it possible to link to a Twitter user’s page with their user_id instead of their screen name?
You could always build your own URL to do this as part of your own application—something like http://your-twitter-app.example.... which does a Twitter API lookup for that user and then redirects to http://twitter.com/their-twitter.... You can cache the ID-to-screen-name lookups that you’ve made in the past (not forever though, remember people occasionally change their screen names).
[... 98 words]