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Can we apply to Y Combinator on a visitors visa? Or is a work visa an absolute must?
I understand it is quite common for out-of-country YC founders to do the initial three month period under a visitors visa, which is OK provided they do not pay themselves a salary while in the USA. You can get a long way on expenses though.
[... 69 words]What are some good book discovery and recommendation sites?
I really like http://readernaut.com/—here’s an example profile: http://readernaut.com/nathan/
[... 27 words]Why would or wouldn’t SXSWi be worth attending in 2011?
Yes, it’s worth attending every year.
[... 139 words]What would be the best plan to spend a 4-6 day trip to Egypt?
You’d have to go fast, but I would suggest arriving in Cairo, staying one night there, seeing the Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum, then an overnight train from Cairo to Aswan, a day there, a two day cruise down to Luxor (you can book yourself on to a boat that’s going in that direction in Aswan and save some money, especially since the down stream cruises are shorter), then two days in Luxor to see Karnak, the Valley of the Kings etc, then home. There’s a ton to see in Luxor so you could do the same route but take the train from Aswan to Luxor instead of the cruise—or skip Aswan, which would be a shame because it’s the nicest out of those three places in my opinion. If you go to Aswan, don’t miss Philae temple!
[... 160 words]Egypt: What is the best restaurant for fish in Dahab?
We’ve tried Al Capone and Ali Baba (both excellent, Ali Baba had slightly more exciting bread), also Friends (not quite as good) and Funny Mummy (good, but not quite up to Ali Baba’s standards—great decor though).
[... 54 words]Would you recommend using Google Go with web.go, or Node.js for a new web server project which will involve high IO?
If you already know JavaScript, picking up Node.js is pretty easy. It also has a much larger community of web developers around it at the moment than web.go, which means there’s more example code / open source bits and pieces floating around.
[... 69 words]How come Google Maps provides so many more local Wikipedia entries that GeoNames?
My guess is that GeoNames just uses the latitude/longitude fields from Wikipedia (you can see them in the top right corner of most pages that describe a place), whereas Google actually do some text analysis and attempt to geocode articles themselves, even if they don’t have an exact latitude longitude assigned to them.
[... 72 words]If I have data that loads using json / JavaScript will it get indexed by Google?
No. Personally I dislike sites with content that is only accessible through JavaScript, but if you absolutely insist on doing this you should look in to implementing the Google Ajax Crawling mechanism: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxc...
[... 56 words]What are people’s experiences using Memcached?
That it’s so obviously a good idea (and works so well) that you’d be crazy not to use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s part of the default stack for any web application.
[... 46 words]Is there a good online calendar for upcoming technology conferences?
We’re trying to build exactly this with http://lanyrd.com/—not just for technology conferences, but they are definitely our largest niche.
[... 208 words]What is the best JS library for automated cropping?
Not entirely clear what you’re looking for, but if you mean a UI tool for letting people resize and crop an image Jcrop is really nice http://deepliquid.com/content/Jc...
[... 43 words]What is the best way to integrate MongoDB with Django?
Personally, I just “import pymongo” and start calling the regular Python API—no need for any special treatment to get it working with Django.
[... 41 words]What are all the advantages of jQuery?
jQuery’s API is astonishingly well designed. It’s extremely consistent once you learn its rules (e.g. methods often take one argument to read a value and two arguments to set one, e.g. .css(), .attr(), .width(), .height()) and its functionality is so complete that the last few major releases of the library have hardly added any new methods at all.
[... 166 words]Why does Python load imported modules separately for different files, unlike C or PHP? Isn’t that inefficient in terms of memory usage?
It doesn’t—you’re misunderstanding how Python’s module system works. If two different places have “import os” in them, the os module is only imported and executed once—it’s cached in the sys.modules dictionary so you can see it happen if you want to. The key thing to understand is that “import os” attaches the os module to the “os” symbol within the current file’s scope, loading it only if it hasn’t been loaded already.
[... 104 words]What is the best lightweight jQuery tooltip plugin? Why?
Last time I went looking, I was very impressed by qTip: http://craigsworks.com/projects/...
[... 28 words]What is the story of Advogato?
There’s a Google Tech Talk about Advogato: http://video.google.com/videopla...
[... 21 words]What’s a good book about basic usage techniques and patterns in Python? (a la Effective Java/C++)
Dive into Python 3 is well worth a look: http://diveintopython3.org/
[... 48 words]Is it a good idea for new start-up to outsource Software/App Development?
It depends on what you mean by “outsourcing”.
[... 130 words]What is the best Mac OS X text editor for a web developer? And what makes it great?
It’s still TextMate for me. It gets the basics right—syntax highlighting, sensible indentation, a good project pane (I use “mate ~/Development/my-project” at the terminal to open TextMate with my entire folder hierarchy), solid extensions and good unix integration (Filter selection through command).
[... 77 words]What are the best APIs for creating location-based Wikipedia mashups?
GeoNames has a fantastic API for finding Wikipedia articles near a specific latitude/longitude pair:
[... 32 words]What is the best way to maintain a API wrapper class across multiple languages?
1. Use JSON for your API. That takes away a lot of the necessity for an API wrapper, since it means you’re automatically returning native data types (hashes, lists, strings etc) for most programming languages.
[... 175 words]What does an ideal Django workflow setup look like?
Short answer: virtualenv, pip, south for migrations, fabric for deployment.
[... 57 words]What is the best way to hire Solr developers?
Do you really need to hire a Solr specialist? It shouldn’t take a competent developer more than a few days to get familiar with Solr—the HTTP API is extremely easy to work with in my experience. You can always hire in a consultant from one of the companies that provide commercial Solr support for a few days to help your developers get up to scratch.
[... 82 words]Why do some websites implement their logout link as a form post via JavaScript versus a plain old GET request?
Probably because if you implement logout as a GET action, I can force you to log out of a site by tricking you in to visiting a page with an <img src="http://yoursite.com/logout/" width="1" height="1"> element on it.
[... 64 words]Did you mean rel=shortlink vs. rel=shorturl?
That was the cute trick in the initial proposal: it’s REV=canonical, not REL=canonical, suggesting a reverse relationship.
[... 29 words]What are the main weaknesses of Java as a programming language?
A cultural bias towards over-engineering. In my experience Java code often ends up a huge network of Factories and AbstractFactories and Visitors and XML configuration files and every design pattern you care to mention, dozens of classes many of which contain hardly any procedural code at all. A lot of Java projects are essentially impossible to navigate without an IDE.
[... 77 words]Is there any consensus yet on link rel=shorturl vs rev=canonical?
It’s pretty clear from the answers that rev=canonical v.s. rel=canonical is way too confusing—so it’s down to rel=shortlink v.s. rel=shorturl.
[... 38 words]