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Can you use dropbox to host a wordpress site?
No. Running WordPress requires a web host that supports PHP. Dropbox only supports static content.
[... 30 words]Why weren’t the features of Sass originally built into CSS?
This is not a straight-forward issue: CSS has a very long, complicated history. A good starting point for understanding the reluctance of the CSS working group to add variables/constants etc to CSS is this essay by Bert Bos of the W3C (entitled Why “variables” in CSS are harmful) http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/CSS...
[... 66 words]How can a web developer keep up with new technology?
Keep an eye on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/
[... 111 words]What is the Freedcamp business model?
I imagine they’re planning a freemium model with paid upgrades, but for the moment they’re focusing on getting the product right and building up a decent sized userbase.
[... 40 words]What are the few must-do things in London before one leaves this place for good?
In terms of museums, it really is worth checking out the big four: the British Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the V&A. They’re all exceptional (and free to enter). Here are some highlights...
[... 673 words]What are the best tech networking events / meetups / conferences in London?
Our startup Lanyrd helps people discover professional events, and we have a very healthy userbase in London. If you sign in to http://lanyrd.com/ with your Twitter account we’ll show you events the people you follow are tracking or plan to attend—knowing that someone you respect plans to spend the time to go to an event is a very strong form of recommendation. You can also browse our full list of events in London here: http://lanyrd.com/places/london/
[... 134 words]Which tools exist for learning about the people attending a particular meetup / conference, in advance?
This is one of the most popular aspects of our service, Lanyrd—we offer an attendee directory for each event showing everyone we know who is speaking or has told us that they plan to attend the event. Here are a few examples:
[... 136 words]I’m a young contract/indie iOS Dev being pitched full time positions, what should I watch out for?
A great rule of thumb for deciding where to work is that you should aim to maximise the amount you are learning. If you’re the smartest person in the room, find another room. It sounds like you’re making decent money, but it might be that you’re hitting the limits of what you can teach yourself working on client projects. If that’s the case, find a company with people so smart it makes you feel like in idiot and try to get a job there.
[... 107 words]Why do tech companies provide MacBooks for software development?
Smart tech companies give their engineers the laptops that they ask for. Engineers are EXPENSIVE, and anything you can do to increase their productivity is worth the money. If they prefer to work on a Mac, buy them a Mac.
[... 55 words]How does Twitter select trending topics?
They use stream processing algorithms—they mention trending topics calculation in their technical blog entry about Storm, their open source stream processing software: http://engineering.twitter.com/2...
[... 38 words]What is the best way for a startup to attract talented back-end and front-end team members?
First, pay them properly. It’s a lot easier for a talented developer to chose a startup over an established company if they aren’t going to have to take a massive pay cut in exchange for equity (most developers are smart enough to know that most startups fail... especially developers who have been in the industry for a while). If you raise money from investors, this is what you should be raising it for.
[... 230 words]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.
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