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Are you less likely to be accepted to Y Combinator if you don’t know how to make money yet?
If you apply and say “we have no idea how we will make money” you are much less likely to be accepted than if you say “we’re not 100% sure how we will make money, but our initial thoughts are to try X”.
[... 156 words]What are the pro and cons of outsourcing the coding of an SaaS tool?
Pros: if you can afford it and are completely incapable of hiring an in-house development team, it will get a version of your software built.
[... 153 words]Y Combinator: I’m interested in how what the YC$ were spent on was impacted by whether you were from outside the Valley when you went thro the program or were local?
If you’re from outside the area you’ll spend a chunk of the money on rent (and maybe car rental). If you already live in or near Mountain View you won’t need to do that.
[... 71 words]What are those most annoying problems you experience while working on presentations?
Keynote crashing and losing all of my work.
[... 43 words]What systems/software are absolutely worth purchasing for a solidly funded e-commerce startup?
I’d use a small fraction of that budget for relevant SaaS subscriptions—things like www.kissmetrics.com or www.mixpanel.com for user analytics, www.moz.com or www.ginzametrics.com for SEO reporting, or www.geckoboard.com for building a custom dashboard.
[... 93 words]What is the best service for web hosting and buying a domain? Is it better to have both under one provider?
No, it’s not better to have both under the same provider. Good web hosts do not necessarily make good DNS hosts and vice versa.
[... 51 words]What is the real risk of pirating Microsoft software as a startup business vs an individual user?
I agree with David S. Rose—integrity matters. Look in to BizSpark.
[... 108 words]I have an idea for a conference. What do I need to do to make it happen?
Read http://www.quirksmode.org/coh/
[... 26 words]Should you start with planning the view, the model or the controller?
My preference is to start by designing the URLs, then roughing out the first version of the database models. Everything else tends to evolve from there.
[... 44 words]How does a career progresses for a web developer?
A web developer is a software developer, so you should look in to how software development careers work.
[... 207 words]Other than CL, Yelp and Eventbrite, what are some good online event calendars to post to?
Make sure you are listed on http://lanyrd.com/—and don’t forget to add you event’s speakers and tag it with the relevant topics (e.g. http://lanyrd.com/topics/social-... )
[... 50 words]Event Planning: What are some useful books and resources on professional events and conference planning?
http://www.quirksmode.org/coh/ is fantastic. It focuses on running small tech conferences, but there’s plenty of advice in there that applies to all sizes of event.
What can startups do on big data day one?
Log everything, and then forget about it. That way you’ll have data you can analyse later on, but aside from setting up logging and log storage you won’t waste any time messing around with Big Data when you haven’t yet found product-market fit.
[... 58 words]What are some good open source projects that VMware is directly part of?
To my knowledge they fund almost all of the development work on RabbitMQ, Redis and the Spring Java framework.
[... 38 words]What are some techniques, workflows, thought-processes etc. you would do as an experienced web-developer (front-end/back-end) that a new web developer might benefit from?
Learn the Chrome Developer Tools inside out, and live in them—especially the interactive JavaScript console, which can be a huge boon to your productivity.
[... 56 words]How come Quora hasn’t contributed any significant open source tools?
Releasing open source software is a lot of work. You need to extract it from your own proprietary systems, clean it up, document it, release it and them deal with support queries, incoming bug fixes, suggestions and feature requests.
[... 192 words]Event Planning: What can I do to protect myself from a keynote speaker not showing up?
My hunch is that if a keynote speaker doesn’t show up it won’t be for financial reasons—and they wouldn’t expect their fee to be paid. Much more likely it would be a family emergency or unexpected travel problem.
[... 67 words]How do I become a global nomad as a software engineer?
Go freelance, start working on projects and build up a reputation as an excellent engineer who gets high quality work done on time. Build up a large roster of satisfied clients who wish to work with you in the future, and know how to successfully work with you via email and video conferencing. Now pack your laptop and head off around the world.
[... 126 words]How can I sell an idea to investors?
At minimum: build a prototype. If you really want then to take seriously, launch a first version and demonstrate traction.
[... 34 words]What are key considerations when building behind the firewall web apps?
CSRF and XSS are still important: don’t leave any security vulnerabilities which might allow an evil website out on the internet to run JavaScript that steals data from your behind-the-firewall web application.
[... 49 words]I would like to attend a Big Data conference but I am short of funds. Is there any big data conference that helps students attend those conference through scholarship?
The traditional route for students who can’t afford to attend a conference is for them to volunteer. Contact event organisers of Big Data conferences that look relevant and ask if they are looking for volunteers.
[... 70 words]Does Paul Graham steal business models from teams not accepted into Y Combinator and feed them to accepted teams as pivot ideas?
No. If he did, word would quickly get around and strong teams would stop applying to YC.
[... 45 words]Getting the most out of technical conference as a services provider?
Leaving flyers out if you are not a sponsor will annoy both the event organiser and the other sponsors, and may give a bad impression to other attendees as well.
[... 78 words]Great Britain: As a Briton, do you feel any pride for being so?
The only two things that make me feel patriotic are the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and the Great British Bake Off.
[... 40 words]How should two equal startup founder formalize a cliff?
A company is a legal entity. The person who leaves the company is the person who resigns from that legal entity.
[... 36 words]Should a beginner to web development start out with Node.Js?
Maybe. One of the things I like about Node.js is that the raw abstraction it provides over HTTP is much closer to how the actual protocol works than the abstractions provided many of the more widely used frameworks such as PHP, Django or Rails. That might actually make it an effective learning tool—I’d be interested in hearing from some web developers who learnt Node.js as their first server-side technology.
[... 87 words]Which tools top technology companies use to create complex web pages e.g Amazon Home Page, Facebook etc? Do they create it manually or use some tool like Dreamweaver ?
The code (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) will be written by hand, usually by a large team of people who have evolved it over several years. They’ll be working with some kind of server-side technology as well, usually involving a templating language.
[... 110 words]What are some resources to read when designing a new client-server application layer protocol?
I suggest avoiding designing a custom protocol and using Protocol Buffers, Apache Thrift or Cap’n Proto instead.
[... 40 words]What is the best way to choose between two equally feasible start-up ideas?
Which one is most likely to still be exciting to you in five years time?
[... 121 words]Should I store markdown instead of HTML into database fields?
You should store the exact format that was entered by the user.
[... 95 words]