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Does Quora have the same problem as Stack Overflow?
Quora isn’t one community, it’s thousands of separate communities—a community for each tag, and then a community for each user comprising their followers. As such, I think it will scale much better than the Stack Overflow community did, without needing to split out in to separate verticals.
[... 64 words]What are the best places to visit in Morocco?
We just spent six weeks travelling around Morocco. Our favourite town was Chefchaouen, up in the mountains—it has an incredible medina (walled city center) painted in different shades of blue. It’s a lot more relaxed than other parts of Morocco, though if you got there first (as we did) you may not appreciate it as much. It’s a three hour bus journey from Fez, so I’d suggest visiting Fez first.
[... 134 words]Are there any web design conferences in Southeast Asia?
Our site, Lanyrd, lists a few:
[... 39 words]Who are the best Python developers in Los Angeles?
Mahalo is based in Santa Monica, and they have a very talented team of Python/Django people. They also host a regular Django meetup: http://www.meetup.com/ladjango/
[... 40 words]Nile Cruises: Does the “Oberoi Shehrayar” actually exist?
Yeah, that’s the site he showed us I think. I’m leaning towards “bog standard Nile Cruiser adopts confusing name to try and get ahead of the rest” as the explanation at the moment. There are 270 cruisers on the Nile, after all.
[... 223 words]Is there a modern, tested, reliable, standalone onDomReady function that isn’t part of a larger library?
I’ve just noticed that the original comment thread on Dean Edwards blog from 2006 is still open, and a comment by byron from January 2010 has a promising looking candidate: http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/...
[... 54 words]What is a painless way for a non-Unix programmer to get started learning Unix or GNU/Linux?
I’d suggest getting yourself an Ubuntu virtual machine running on your own laptop—VirtualBox is free, so that’s a good starting point. That way you can play with Linux all you like without fear of breaking anything, since you can always delete the image or roll back to a snapshot.
[... 73 words]Is it important for modern programmers to know how to use Unix? Why?
I’d say yes. If you do any kind of server-side development, Linux/Unix etc UNIX (links to: /topic/Unix), etc., is where most of the exciting innovation is happening. Tools like HadoopApache Hadoop (links to: /topic/Apache-Hadoop), RedisRedis (links to: /topic/Redis), MongoDBMongoDB (links to: /topic/MongoDB), nginxnginx (links to: /topic/nginx), git etc Git (links to: /topic/Git-version-control-1), etc., all come from a Unix UNIX culture, and not knowing your way around a command line makes it much harder to get to grips with them.
[... 110 words]How does Lanyrd compare to Plancast?
Plancast is a general purpose event site. They handle concerts, birthday parties, gigs, conferences and so on. They allow you to sign in with Twitter or Facebook, and make use of your social graph from both.
[... 429 words]What are some tips for a new Python developer coming from C++/Java?
Read “Python is not Java” from 2004—it has some good tips on how working with the two languages differs.
[... 41 words]Is the complexity of basic Python data structure operations documented?
Python’s C code has some excellent documentation, including detailed write-ups of how Python’s dictionary and sorting algorithms work. They’re a great read.
[... 42 words]What’s the easiest way to take an existing Django view and make it “real time” via long polling?
I’d advocate decoupling your long polling endpoints entirely from the rest of your web app stack. Personally I like Node.js for this, but Tornado would work just fine too (I’ve experimented successfully with Tornado long polling in the past).
[... 171 words]Aside from Disrupt, what other tech conferences do you track?
Self promoting here (not sure if that’s OK by Quora community standards or not), but the site we just launched, Lanyrd.com, answers this question. It lets you sign in with Twitter and see what events your Twitter friends are tracking, attending or speaking at. It also lets you create a conference profile page—here’s mine, which shows the upcoming conferences I am tracking at the moment: http://lanyrd.com/people/simonw/
[... 86 words]What is the best conference for Web Designers in Australia to Attend?
I’ve not been, but I’ve always heard great things about Web Directions South. I attended/spoke-at @media in London run by the same team this year and it was excellent.
[... 71 words]Why are XSS attacks spreading like fire these days?
XSS attacks are common and easy, and crop up all the time. What’s new is that the number of people who are aware of the potential for XSS worms has increased hugely, so when an XSS does crop up in something popular there’s a much higher chance of someone turning it in to a worm (as happened with Twitter the other day).
[... 96 words]What new tools and technologies you learnt recently are worth it?
Redis: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Oc... and http://simonwillison.net/static/...
[... 144 words]Will Redis support per-database persistence configuration?
I don’t know if that’s on the roadmap (you’d need to ask antirez on the mailing list or Twitter), but it should be easy enough to run multiple Redis instances with different settings—especially on a multi core machine.
[... 52 words]Why are tech conferences so expensive to attend?
Large conferences with big name speakers are expensive to organise. They are also priced to what the market will bear.
[... 103 words]Why do so many Internet sites end with the letter ’r’ (but not ’er’)? Think about Tumblr, Dopplr, Migratr. What’s behind this?
We just launched a project called lanyrd, which is a play on lanyard. We partly picked the name because the domain was available, but there’s actually a big advantage to using a made-up word: it’s really easy to search for coverage and feedback on Twitter, Google Blogsearch and the like. The string “lanyrd” is almost exclusively used to discuss our project—had we used a dictionary word, tracking down feedback would have been a lot harder.
[... 105 words]Who are major competitors to Solr?
ElasticSearch is a really interesting one—it’s the same underlying search library (Lucene) and the same integration model (an HTTP interface) but takes quite a different approach. It hasn’t been around for a long time but it looks very impressive: http://www.elasticsearch.com/
[... 95 words]What is the largest production deployment of Server Side JavaScript?
I believe Flickr used to use Rhino for scripting the image processing (resizing, thumbnailing, sharpening) that was applied to every single uploaded photo. No idea if that’s still the case though.
[... 47 words]How do Solr, Lucene, Sphinx and Searchify compare?
Lucene is a Java library for creating and searching through a full text index. If you want to make use of it, you’ll need to write your own Java code that integrates with it.
[... 109 words]Does SQLAlchemy depend on MySQLdb?
No. SQLAlchemy can talk to all sorts of different DB-API compliant backends, including MySQL Connector/J (Jython only), MySQL Connector/Python, mysql-python (the MySQLdb module) and OurSQL—plus backends for many other databases. See the full list here:
[... 50 words]Django (web framework): Why did theonion.com stop using Drupal?
They wrote about their reasons in detail in a post to the Django sub-reddit a while ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/django/c...
[... 165 words]What is the best way to learn about setting up server software for Python based web apps?
I’m a big fan of Fabric for automated deployment scripts. Start by reading this tutorial: http://morethanseven.net/2009/07...
[... 40 words]In what circumstances should one use “magic quotes” in PHP?
Absolutely never. Magic quotes was a badly designed feature, and PHP has been trying to escape its legacy for years. If you are constructing SQL strings using string concatenation you’re asking for trouble—use prepared statements or a library that interpolates and correctly escapes variables for you.
[... 65 words]Which major companies are using Solr for search?
The Guardian newspaper uses Solr for its Open Platform Content API. http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-p...
[... 27 words]Which Solr app for Django is better: Haystack or django-solr-search (solango)?
I’d go with Haystack—while it supports multiple backends, I get the feeling Solr is the principle backend it was developed for. It’s extremely well documented in my opinion, and the SearchQuerySet API it gives you makes running low-level queries really easy if the higher level class-based view it provides don’t do quite what you want.
[... 109 words]What is the largest production deployment of CouchDB for online use?
The BBC have a pretty big CouchDB cluster, which they use mostly as a replicated key-value store. It’s used by their new identity platform which includes customisation features for iPlayer.
[... 47 words]