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What is the best advice your father ever gave you?
It’s a small thing, but the piece of advice I turn to most often is “When travelling, the only things you really need are money, your passport and the address of where you’re going”. Makes travelling a lot less stressful, since I can just think “got those three” and know that anything else I’ve forgotten doesn’t really matter that much.
[... 76 words]Which sites do a good job of guiding first time users?
The Twitter sign up process is fascinating, and constantly evolves. I create a new Twitter account every six months or so just to see what their latest iteration looks like.
[... 157 words]What activities, games or examples have you used to persuade developers that they are different from ’real’ users?
I doubt there’s anything as effective as getting them to watch a well-run usability test—either a video, a fancy one-way glass setup or just having them quietly observe a zero-budget testing session in a coffee shop.
[... 62 words]Why does Facebook Comments Box only support two levels of hierarchy?
I’ve heard in the past that regular (i.e. non-geek) users often have enormous trouble understanding hierarchical comments—they don’t understand tree based file systems either.
[... 65 words]Will I be able to make a decent eCommerce website just by learning coding from Codecademy?
I have more than ten years experience building dynamic sites, and I’d still personally much rather use a hosted service like http://www.shopify.com/ than build an eCommerce system myself.
[... 51 words]What are the best resources for learning regular expressions?
The O’Reilly book on Regular Expressions is absolutely superb. It will help you build a much deeper understanding if how they actually work than any online tutorial I’ve seen.
[... 62 words]Why does Twitter use a hashbang instead of using the History API?
I asked a friend who is an engineer there about this a while ago. When they shipped the first version of Twitter that used fully Ajax driven pages there was a critical bug with pushState in a widely deployed version of Safari, which made it impractical to commit to.
[... 67 words]What web programming framework best supports ’drag and drop’ actions? Please give examples of sites and/or plug-ins that support the interaction.
Drag and drop is a client-side thing—it has nothing to do with the server-side technology being used.
[... 72 words]Why did Twitter have so many problems if it is made with Ruby?
The technical problem Twitter solves (distributing millions of short messages per minute to an enormous graph of follow relationships) is extremely hard in any language.
[... 44 words]Is it reasonably safe to visit Ethiopia and then to fly from Ethiopia back home via Cairo?
If you’re specifically interested in the Cairo leg then yes, it’s safe. Cairo is a modern city if over 20 million people. Tourism is Egypt’s most important industry and they are very, very good at protecting that cash cow even during times of political turmoil. If you pay attention to the news and don’t go actively looking for street riots to get involved with you’ll be fine.
[... 90 words]What is the best way to allow users to add videos on a website ?
Encourage them to host their videos on YouTube, Vimeo etc and give you the URL, then generate an embed code on your site (using your own code or with the http://embed.ly/ API).
[... 71 words]System Administration: What service/product do you recommend for central logging of events and errors from multiple servers? Why?
We rolled our own solution to this using MongoDB, due to its super-fast writes and ability to store, index and search JSON. We were also attracted by its capped collections, which make it easy to e.g. only log the last 100,000 items.
[... 113 words]What are some good startup events/meetups in LA during February and March 2012?
The next LA Hacker News Meetup is on the 25th of Feb in Santa Monica: http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angele...
[... 70 words]What are the best sites to find events by location?
It depends on what kind of event you are looking for.
[... 86 words]How can a new developer get involved in open-source projects?
I was going to say the same thing. Find a useful project in GitHub (preferably one that clearly has an active maintainer), fork it, fix a bug (look at the project’s issue tracker) then make a pull request.
[... 80 words]Why are front end developers so high in demand at startups if front end development is relatively easier than other fields of engineering?
You’re starting with an invalid assumption. Front end development is absolutely not “easier” than other forms of engineering.
[... 333 words]Which core programming principles apply to all languages?
YAGNI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You...
[... 17 words]Wouldn’t an ASCII cellular automaton in javascript be the simplest starting point to teach/learn programming?
Absolutely not. The first step in learning to program is understanding that a computer can be quickly made to do something useful by executing lines of code. Personally I’m a big fan of firing up something with an interactive prompt (like Python, or even Firebug or the Google Chrome JS console) and demonstrating that typing a line of code hitting return will get a useful response.
[... 87 words]How can I see what questions I am following on Quora?
Click on your name in the grey bar at the top of the screen to get to your profile page. Then click on “Topics” in the lighter grey bar next to your photo (the same bar that has the Followers and Following items in it).
[... 62 words]Python Django load MySQL database from csv files performance issue?
Don’t use the Django ORM for bulk imports—the performance overhead is pretty small for regular web page stuff, but it adds up if you are running millions of inserts.
[... 63 words]How can you build a search engine for a website built in PHP/MySQL?
There are a bunch of options.
[... 310 words]Can Scala gain wider usage than Java any time soon?
No, because Scala is harder to master than Java.
[... 54 words]If you missed out on joining to work at Google and Facebook, what should you do?
Remind yourself that there will always be more opportunities, and obsessing over what might have been is a huge waste of your time.
[... 45 words]What is the best NoSQL database to store unstructured data?
Any of the document stores are worth a look—I’d suggest investigating MongoDB, Riak and CouchDB.
[... 33 words]What is an intuitive explanation of Unicode and why a programmer needs to know it?
Check out “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
[... 55 words]How do you change page content and URL without reloading the whole page?
This can only be done using JavaScript. You use XMLHttpRequest to pull in new information from the server (also known as Ajax—most people use a JavaScript library such as jQuery to handle this) and then use the HTML5 history API, in particular the pushState method, to update the URL.
[... 133 words]Should I take the time to learn programming, or take my idea and run with it?
Stop reading, start building. You’ll progress a LOT faster if you’re solving actual problems and writing real code, rather than spending 5-8 hours a day reading but not practicing.
[... 156 words]Tech Startups: What skills/technologies would the ideal technical co-founder possess?
The most important indicator is: can they ship? Can they prove that they know how to take a project from idea to running code deployed to a server somewhere with actual people interacting with it?
[... 109 words]Which is the best open source tool to populate my database with test data for my load test?
I’ve seen tools that do this, but to be honest it’s very simple to write your own script for this (especially if you’re using an ORM). The other benefit to writing your own script for this is that you’ll have a much better chance of accurately representing your expected data, sizes etc.
[... 221 words]How did slashes become the standard path separators for URLs?
I’m going to take an educated guess and say it’s because of unix file system conventions. Early web servers mapped the URL to a path on disk inside the document root—this is still how most static sites work today.
[... 57 words]