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Are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs taking less risk than 8-9 yrs ago?
I’d guess internet startups today are taking advantage of the fact that there’s a LOT more knowledge now of what works online and what doesn’t. 9 years ago people were still figuring out what the internet is useful for. Today it’s easier to figure out a product that people are likely to want, based on nearly 20 years of experience of how people use the Web.
[... 83 words]How does FriendFeed work, and what programming languages are used?
It was written in Python, using the Tornado asynchronous web server (which the FriendFeed team developed themselves). They used their own schemaless NoSQL-style store based on keeping serialized objects in MySQL.
[... 51 words]What are some great stories about Steve Jobs?
The stories on folklore.org are fantastic—here’s their collection about Steve Jobs: http://www.folklore.org/ProjectV...
[... 30 words]What programming conferences are in Romania in 2011?
How To Web looked like an excellent conference last year. They haven’t announced dates for 2011 yet but I’d keep an eye on their Twitter account:
[... 79 words]Is there a way of tracking shortened URLs with Twitter streaming API?
Think about it like this: the whole point of the Twitter streaming API is to get you the tweets as soon after they are posted as possible. If the API were to provide access to the lengthened URLs, it would have to delay emitting a Tweet on to the stream until a resolver had gone through each shortened URL in the tweet and checked to find what it redirects to. This would mean that the speed with which the streaming API could deal out tweets would be dependent on the speed of the third party servers that serve up the redirects. I doubt Twitter would ever want to implement this.
[... 159 words]How do you find conferences that interest you?
We had this exact same problem, which is why we created http://lanyrd.com/—it’s a wiki-style conference listing site (currently listing over 1,000 upcoming events) which lets you sign in with Twitter and uses the people you follow on Twitter to suggest events you might want to go to.
[... 144 words]What are some other conferences/expos similar to BlogWorld and Internet Retailer?
SOBCon Chicago has four speakers this year who spoke at BlogWorld last year: http://www.sobevent.com/chicago-... / http://lanyrd.com/2011/sobcon-ch...
[... 35 words]Simon Willison: What are new interesting technologies in your radar as of January 2011?
I’ve been head down building Lanyrd for the past 4 months, so not much time to check out new stuff. I’m still very excited by Node.js and Redis, but I was excited about those last year. ElasticSearch looks very interesting (we’re currently using Solr but I’d contemplate a switch). I’m looking forward to giving CoffeeScript another go now that it’s matured a bit. Other than those I’m too busy learning operations software (syslog-ng is next on my list) to play with much other new stuff.
[... 105 words]Why do so many web developers hate Microsoft?
It’s because by far the least enjoyable part of web development is dealing with bugs in IE.
[... 31 words]What conferences should a programmer working in the industry follow?
If I had to pick just one programming-related conference a year, it would probably be OSCON. The maintainers of pretty much every piece of software I use on a daily basis go there.
[... 49 words]What are some recommendations for good social media and/or digital marketing conferences to attend in 2011?
Our list of social media conferences on Lanyrd currently shows 46 upcoming events: http://lanyrd.com/topics/social-...
[... 62 words]What is the best way to debug a Django app?
The Django Debug Toolbar is essential: http://robhudson.github.com/djan...
[... 95 words]Is there an online calendar for all the Ruby / Rails conferences to be held in 2011?
Have you tried both our Ruby and our Rails topic pages?
[... 66 words]Public Speaking: Where is a good place to get started as a speaker?
Start small. There are plenty of small local events around that accept (and even encourage) first-time speakers. The single most valuable thing you can do to improve as a speaker is to get as much experience as possible.
[... 244 words]Is there any fairly easy way to travel internationally without taking a corporate airline, cruise, bus etc?
Apparently there is—I haven’t tried it myself, but it’s not impossible to hitch hike on someone’s yacht. It helps if you know how to sail, but if you know how to cook that can get you on board as well.
[... 82 words]What boardgame is the best to play for a scheming rat bastard?
Junta is a lot of fun: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardga...
[... 120 words]What is the best way to find about the upcoming startup events in India?
There are quite a few events of interest to entrepreneurs showing up on Lanyrd: http://lanyrd.com/places/india/—you can also subscribe to our Atom feed for that page to hear about future events.
[... 53 words]Who are the best female speakers on the topic of social media who are equal parts knowledgeable and engaging?
Meg Pickard from the Guardian
Suw Charman-Anderson
Are there any tech conferences in Miami around the time that WMC takes place (March 8-12)?
There’s SuperConf on the 25th-26th of February: http://lanyrd.com/2011/superconf/ / http://superconf.net/
[... 57 words]How do Twitter apps handle username changes?
Twitter assigns each user a unique numeric ID which does NOT change when the user’s Twitter name changes, so triic number one is to key off that, not the username itself.
[... 150 words]What’s a good web dev platform if I work in Python, but want something faster to set up than Django?
Sounds like the perfect use case for Google App Engine, with its offline task queues and one-click deployment.
[... 44 words]What are the most easy-to-use, effective event calendar websites?
Our site Lanyrd.com is shaping up quite nicely (in my opinion)—if you sign in with Twitter we’ll show you events your Twitter contacts are attending, tracking or speaking at. We also have a pretty powerful search interface, and you can browse the site by location and topic as well. Some examples:
[... 81 words]Are there any large tech conferences in Sydney, Australia?
We have a list of conferences (tech and non-tech) in Sydney here:
[... 41 words]Are there any wikis that allow the use of JavaScript on wiki pages?
Such a wiki would be grossly insecure. That said, take a look at TiddlyWiki—it’s implemented entirely in client-side JavaScript and allows plugins to be implemented by pasting JavaScript in to a textarea.
[... 53 words]Why does Facebook chat use subdomains so aggressively?
Probably because it involves long-running connections. Browsers have a limit on the number of connections you can have open to the same domain at the same time (I think it’s 8 in most browsers these days). If Facebook chat opened a connection to www.facebook.com and you opened up 8 Facebook windows you would no longer be able to navigate to any more Facebook pages, since all 8 connections would be taken up by the long lived chat connections. By connecting to a different subdomain for each connection this problem can be avoided.
[... 107 words]How are real time web applications achievable with PHP?
You don’t need to build your comet server using the same technology as the rest of your site.
[... 181 words]What are the reasons that make jQuery more popular than MooTools?
MooTools is the only major JavaScript library that still thinks extending the prototype of built-in JavaScript objects is a good idea.
[... 44 words]What are the best free resources to begin learning UX design?
We’re collecting videos and slides from conference sessions covering user experience on Lanyrd—here’s 10 videos and 14 slide decks:
[... 42 words]What makes mobile application backends different from Webapp backends?
Nothing at all.
[... 18 words]