Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged quora, internet

Filters: quora × internet × Sorted by date


What steps can I take to protect my data in case my laptop gets stolen?

Set up full drive encryption—that way if someone steals your laptop they won’t be able to access your data without a password.

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What technologies were used in developing web applications in the ’90s?

Perl. Lots of Perl. There was a site called Matt’s Script Archive which was full of terribly written Perl scripts for things like hit counters and form emailers and guest books. It was very popular.

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What will HTTP be superseded by?

HTTP 1.x will likely never be completely replaced, but there is ongoing work at the moment to define HTTP 2.0. The first draft of this was released in November and is based on Google’s SPDY protocol, which is already widely deployed in Google Chrome and Google’s web properties (other browsers have experimented with support for SPDY as well): http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

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Which web startup conferences are there nowadays?

We have a pretty comprehensive list on Lanyrd—the site works like wikipedia, so if there are any we are missing you can sign in and add them to our Startups topic: Startup conferences and events

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How are websites hacked to have their content defaced? How can I prevent such attacks on my website?

There are countless ways in which a website could be defaced—way too many for a single Quora answer!

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How does a new Website that depends on content from users start?

The tried and tested way to solve this problem is with a closed alpha period. Launch the site as a private alpha, then invite a bunch of people you know and trust to start trying it out. Once you launch to the public you’ll already have some content and more importantly you’ll have set an example of how new users to the site should behave.

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Do country/city IP addresses always stay the same?

Yes, they can change—and there isn’t much central control. IANA dish out IP blocks to regional authorities, who hand them on to ISPs,who distribute them to end users... But the ISPs might cover multiple cities or even countries. You can read a bit about this process here: http://www.iana.org/numbers

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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.

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What are some good ways to promote a “networking event” on the internet ?

Add your event to http://lanyrd.com/ and encourage your attendees to mark themselves as attending. That way, anyone who follows them on Twitter and uses Lanyrd will hear about the event, either directly on the site or via email if they’ve signed up for our email alerts.

[... 80 words]

What are the main things a non-technical co-founder of a tech company should focus on while the site is still being developed?

Building the right product.

[... 32 words]

What are some popular movies that are no longer plausible due to the ubiquity of cell phones & the internet?

“No Signal”

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What is the story of Advogato?

There’s a Google Tech Talk about Advogato: http://video.google.com/videopla...

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Is the 90-9-1 rule of user participation a myth?

Anecdotal evidence from crowdsourcing style projects I’ve worked on tend to support the basic principle (if not the exact ratios). The vast majority of the work on projects I have been involved with ends up being performed by a tiny subset of highly active users.

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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.

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