Simon Willison’s Weblog

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1,005 items tagged “quora”

2012

How does Linkedin use Node.js?

They use it for the backed for their mobile app. Here’s an article with more information: http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/1...

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Is it true that Ruby is more deployment friendly than Python?

He’s incorrect (or at least out of date). Most professional python programmers that I know of use virtualenv, which makes it easy for deployed Python code to live in its own environment with its own set of modules installed separately from the core system packages.

[... 106 words]

What are the best SEO conferences around Cincinnati?

It doesn’t look like there are many (any?) SEO events in Cincinnati, but Chicago has has SES in November 2012: http://sesconference.com/chicago/

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What kind of publicly available search software is able to be purchased or used freely as part of a website, and how good is it?

There are plenty of good open source options—Solr is currently my favourite. It’s extremely powerful but you do need to do some programming on top of it—I use Django and Haystack to build the search UI on most of my projects.

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Is there a method to programmatically clear browser cache in JavaScript?

No.

[... 18 words]

Is there an open-content alternative to Quora?

Stack Overflow releases all of their content under a creative commons license, and even lets people download full database dumps.

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What platform was YouTube using before they were acquired by Google?

It was written in Python—I don’t think they used any particular framework (they started the site in 2005).

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Which tech startups in London have been funded in 2011?

We (Lanyrd) raised our seed round in 2011—we’re based near Old Street.

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Is Django on its way out?

Not as far as I can tell—but then like many (most?) other Django users I’m too busy using it to build things to worry too much about whether or not it’s fashionable.

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Are there any performance drawbacks when rendering DOM views at runtime with JavaScript, rather than rendering server-sent HTML?

Yes, there is quite a significant impact on first-load performance. The browser has to pull down all of the linked scripts before it can display any content—if you’re using a library like jquery that’s a sizeable chuck of code that has to be loaded and executed just on its own.

[... 152 words]

What are the best tech community event sites in San Francisco?

We have a large and growing community-maintained list of mostly-tech events in San Francisco here:

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Has anyone implemented a message queue with mysql and many workers?

Flickr built their own message queue on top of MySQL: http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008...

[... 29 words]

Is there any reason for a new programmer to choose C# over VB.NET (or vice versa)?

My understanding is that VB.NET was mainly created to help make existing Visual Basic programmers more comfortable with the transition to .NET

[... 65 words]

Is there a framework that allows me to collect input from individual users, and then charge for the aggregate and analysis of that data?

No—your needs are extremely specific. You’re going to have to build this yourself.

[... 95 words]

How to get a Twitter user’s join date?

It’s included in the standard user JSON that comes back with any tweet—or you can hit http://api.twitter.com/1/users/s... and look at the created_at key

[... 40 words]

What are some good examples of a first PHP app to build for someone who is learning?

Build a blog. Blog engines are, in my opinion, the ideal starter project for learning any server-side web technology.

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2011

Public Speaking: How can I control my stress during my presentations?

Make sure you have run through your talk, in full, out loud in the privacy of your home or hotel room at least twice.

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Would having a maths degree put you at that much of a disadvantage against a CS student when it comes to jobs?

No. Plenty of the great programmers I know have maths, physics or even literature degrees. Read a couple of classic computer science text books and get some programming projects under your belt and you’ll be fine.

[... 64 words]

What criteria should a company meet in order to have a 5 million dollars valuation?

They need to convince an investor to buy 10% of the company for $500,000.

[... 35 words]

Why are TED talks 18 minutes long (or less)?

I imagine it’s because enforcing a shorter talk time results in consistently higher quality presentations, by forcing speakers to carefully structure their talk and strip out any unnecessary details.

[... 75 words]

What are the most practical beneficials for Python, comparing to Java?

For me, the single most productive advantage of Python is the ability to work with it interactively in a REPL—I use ipython but Python also ships with an interactive mode out of the box.

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Does domain name masking negatively effect SEO?

Yes, because you’ve made it impossible for people to share links to sub-pages on your site—which means you won’t get incoming links to those pages, a crucial ranking metric.

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What are the most popular conferences and events for digital publishers to attend?

The O’Reilly TOC (Tools of Change for Publishers) events look very good (I haven’t been myself)—they publish a lot of video so you can watch some talks to decide if it looks like the right event for you to attend:

[... 112 words]

What are the ways to create custom jQuery effects?

You don’t need any extra tools or code, you just need to master jQuery’s built-in .animate() API: http://api.jquery.com/animate/

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Is it better to do Python development on an SSD, or on a mechanical disk?

SSDs are faster than regular drives for every application—Python is no different. That said, unless the Python code you are developing does a huge amount of disk IO you probably won’t notice the difference.

[... 57 words]

How do startups verify the real names of their users?

The short answer is they don’t: they expect people to obey the policy, then block accounts that are clearly in violation.

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What are some things I can do if I’m lying awake and unable to sleep for an hour?

Listen to a podcast. If you’re lying at rest in bed you’ll still get at least some of the benefits of sleeping, and you might find that listening to the podcast helps take your mind off things and sends you to sleep.

[... 66 words]

Is there a way to find out what apps are used by a specific django-based website?

Not really. You might be able to figure out some of them by looking out for common patterns of URLs and form field names, but a lot of reusable django apps don’t really expose much of a signature.

[... 60 words]

Why does Wolfram|Alpha present all search results as pictures rather than text?

Wolfram Alpha is essentially a web interface to Mathematica (plus a huge corpus of structured data). Mathematica has been around for decades, and has an extremely sophisticated visualisation engine (try typing “sin(x)/cos(x)” in to Wolfram Alpha and see what happens). It’s also very good at rendering mathematical formulae that would be very hard to represent in plain HTML (without using MathML, which isn’t supported by IE).

[... 137 words]

What is a good video series on learning Python?

It probably won’t teach you the basics, but we’ve collected 190 videos from conference talks about Python here: http://lanyrd.com/topics/python/...

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