Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Saturday, 19th October 2013

Why do programmers tend to fall in love with non-mainstream languages?

Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right for every person, every problem or every situation. If no one ever explored non-mainstream options, better solutions would never be discovered.

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Using userstream to listen to events for each user doesn’t seem practicable for an application with thousands of users.

Sounds like you need Site streams: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/str...

[... 55 words]

Which free encyclopedias offer free APIs?

Wikipedia runs using Mediawiki, and Mediawiki has an API: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

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How did the big players on the web promote themselves in the early days?

Good old fashioned PR. I first learnt about Yahoo! and Google in newspaper articles about the internet.

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What should be my minimum requirements for a cutting edge SaaS business product?

That depends on your customers. If you’re building software for banks or hospitals you probably need to support older versions of IE. If it’s for software companies or web freelancers, requiring a modern browser version is fine.

[... 56 words]

What prevents founders from taking blown up salaries?

When the money runs out, the startup dies. If a founder takes a high salary they are reducing the runway of the company, and dramatically increasing its chance of failure. Good founders will take the lowest salary they can make work for them.

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Is it possible to build an application that can consolidate tweets from multiple Twitter accounts into a single stream?

Yes, the Twitter API can be used to build this. You’ll need a competent programmer though.

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Which is the most complete and up to date API for restaurants/nightlife?

The foursquare API is pretty great for restaurants and nightlife these days. No chance if revenue share though—how would you envisage revenue share working?

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