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What tech and/or start up events are you attending at SXSW ’12?
Our unofficial sxsw schedule site currently has 66 sessions with the “startups” topic—you can browse and search them here: http://sxsw.lanyrd.com/?topics=s...
[... 85 words]What is the optimal description length in the Apple App Store?
Have you ever come across one if those ugly, long pages advertising an ebook—the ones that bang on for dozens of paragraphs with bullet points, pictures, testimonials, headings, more testimonials, more bullet points and so on?
[... 106 words]What conferences held in the Southeastern US cater to those in dot-com and startup roles?
Here are a few:
[... 104 words]How can I look up Django functions?
You can use the ./manage.py shell command to get a shell which will import any Django modules (or any of your own code) without complaining about the location of the settings.py module. Install IPython first to get a much more useful interactive shell when you run that command.
[... 190 words]What are some good conference directories or calendars other than Lanyrd?
Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/cities/ca/...
[... 93 words]How do I get inside Battersea Power Station?
I think it’s available to hire as a venue—there was a conference there called the PowerOfOne last year.
[... 34 words]What are some places that serve X-Y food in Z?
I found an Indian restaurant in Luxor, Egypt that sold English-style Indian food—it was in an area of town with a bunch of other English restaurants, all run by expats.
[... 53 words]NoSQL: On a shared server, what are the alternatives to using SQL?
You could probably run Redis on a shared server—it doesn’t need to be installed as root, but it does require a process to run all the time which shared hosts may not allow.
[... 138 words]If python dictionaries are inherently orderless, why were they given the name if a real dictionary is sorted by letter?
The metaphor here is that paper dictionaries make it easy to look stuff up by letter or word—just like Python dictionaries make looking something up by key an instant operation.
[... 114 words]How can I parse unquoted JSON with JavaScript?
Unquoted JSON isn’t JSON—the JSON spec requires that strings are quoted (with double quotes, not single quotes).
[... 104 words]Was CoffeeScript invented to help Ruby programmers get over that dirty yucky feeling they get when working in JavaScript?
The original Prototype JS library might fit that description—more than CoffeeScript, at any rate.
[... 41 words]How long until Ruby developers are as cheap as PHP developers? is it already happening? should I still learn it or it only has a couple years left and I’m better off with SSJS?
If you want to be a highly paid engineer, you should worry less about your expertise in a specific language and more about developing broad and deep skills across a wider range of development topics.
[... 197 words]What are the best SXSW blogs?
My co-founder has put together a very useful Twitter list of SXSW blogs and twitterers: https://mobile.twitter.com/lanyr...
[... 45 words]What are the best practices to avoid XSS and SQL Injections attacks (platform agnostic)?
Input validation is, in my opinion, a red herring. Sure—if you ask the user for an integer or date you should make sure they entered one before attempting to save it anywhere or use it for processing, but injection attacks often involve text fields (e.g. names, or comments posted on Quora) and validating those on input is a recipe for banning “Tim O’Reilly” from ever creating a proper profile on your site!
[... 316 words]Why does Google use “Allow” in robots.txt, when the standard seems to be “Disallow?”
The Disallow command prevents search engines from crawling your site.
[... 59 words]Does YCombinator fund Start-ups interested in building electronic gadgets?
YC funded InPulse, who make a watch which talks to your smartphone via bluetooth: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10...
[... 43 words]How important is my alma mater to Ycombinator?
It’s really not that important—it might help a tiny bit to get to the interview, but if you look at the questions on the application form they are much more heavily skewed towards stuff that you have achieved and problems you have solved. The interview itself is almost all about your idea and your team.
[... 90 words]What conferences do business leaders attend to learn about digital strategy?
Unfortunately you’ve just missed one—the iStrategy summit in San Francisco was last week: http://www.istrategyconference.com/
[... 42 words]What are XML feed best practices?
It sounds like you’re pretty much screwed already, if you’re dealing with companies that still think FTPing XML around is a sensible thing to do.
[... 364 words]What conferences cover cloud computing and CAD?
We have 36 upcoming cloud computing conferences on Lanyrd here (and 35 videos and 20 slide decks from relevant presentations): http://lanyrd.com/topics/cloud-c...
[... 79 words]How do you find the new URL of a Tumblr that has moved?
One trick that might work is to look up the old tumble in the Google cache or on archive.org, then copy and paste a unique search phrase from that page and run a Google search for:
[... 72 words]Do Twitter API limits rest at the top of the hour or is it floating?
I’m pretty sure they are calculated from the time of the first hit you make to the API—resetting on the hour would likely encourage API users to run large batches of queries at 1 second past the hour, resulting in huge and unwanted traffic spikes.
[... 68 words]Which angels or VCs like to invest in fitness companies?
The easiest way to answer this question is to take a look at existing fitness companies and find out who their investors are. CrunchBase and AngelList are invaluable for this, but many companies also list their investors on their own sites.
[... 57 words]Why is the Zen of Python obfuscated in the “this” module?
I imagine the reason is very simple: Because it’s fun!
[... 27 words]What do you miss out on if not staying in the official hotel for PyCon (or other tech conferences)?
Not a lot really, provided you’re within walking distance of the venue. The official conference hotel for an event like PyCon will likely have a hallway track that continues until the early hours (people hanging out and hacking on things in the hotel lobby) but staying in a different place won’t prevent you from joining in with that.
[... 204 words]Is there a conference for food culture?
There are a bunch of food blogging conferences which might be a good fit. There’s a good list of them here: http://www.namelymarly.com/2012/...—we have a (currently less comprehensive) list on Lanyrd here: http://lanyrd.com/topics/food-bl...
[... 49 words]Do people still write and compile programs from the command line, instead of an IDE? Why or why not?
Being an expert with command line tools gives you super powers.
[... 94 words]Does Facebook’s iPhone app use a proprietary web rendering engine instead of UIWebView?
I did my first bit of iPhone development recently (building the first version of the Lanyrd iPhone app) and there was one thing that came as a huge surprise: the principle reason that people think native apps are “snappier” or “more responsive” than native ones has nothing to do with the rendering performance of a webview vs a native view (especially on the iPhone 4S which is extremely fast).
[... 274 words]