1005 items tagged “quora”
2013
What are some great board games to play for 3 or more people?
I suggest looking in to German-style board games. They tend to be quick to learn and extremely well balanced but with a great deal of strategic depth once you get in to them, and they also have running times in the order of 45 minutes to an hour and a half. They’re ideal for games nights, especially if you might be playing with people who think they don’t like board games.
[... 254 words]What would be a good web application framework to use for running a small online retail business?
I’d look at hosted SaaS solutions rather than running your own. I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve heard excellent things about www.shopify.com
[... 47 words]Is there an unsecured credit card that you can apply for that everyone who applies gets it?
No. Any company that offered that would quickly go bust.
[... 33 words]What’s the best way to reach out to alumni if you’re interested in working at their company?
Yes, it’s fine. Many tech companies have a referral bonus for employees that help them make a good hire, and any alumni you contact will be able to forward your details straight on to the recruiting department.
[... 96 words]Does Ycombinator accept applications even though we will not be able to work full time on project?
Very unlikely. One of the questions on the Y Combinator application form is something along the lines of “Which of the founders listed on this application are ready and able to work full time on this project—please explain”. If none of your team are able to work full time on the project, your chances of being picked over other teams who CAN commit are vanishingly small.
[... 91 words]How can I convince my boss that I should dedicate time to clean an important part of our code base?
It sounds like your boss needs to learn about the concept of Technical Debt: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog...
[... 42 words]If a startup has raised 10M, how much is it worth?
That depends on how much equity they sold for that $10 million.
[... 142 words]Is there anyway to game unique link verifications? Like when you get sent a link of the form https:/........com/UID=TYYN04001 How would one change the digits to reproduce another working link?
Not if they’ve been implemented correctly.
[... 42 words]How could GitHub improve the password security of its users?
By doing exactly what they’re doing already: adding more sophisticated rate limiting, and preventing users from using common weak passwords.
[... 80 words]In which case have you seen a non-tech sole founder rise to build a sustainable great company without a tech co-founder? How can this work? What are the steps/advice you would give to the non-tech founder?
Here’s a great write-up of his experience: From Selling Scoops Of Ice Cream To Founding ZeroCater | TechCrunch
[... 110 words]I’m a developer, I’ve an idea, how to look for funding?
If you only need $10,000-$15,000 you should be looking at funding it yourself—professional investors very rarely get involved for that size of raise, and you probably wouldn’t want them to—giving up equity in exchange for so little money is usually a bad idea.
[... 90 words]What should be my strategy to become a tech entrepreneur?
Go and work for an early-stage startup. Pick well and you’ll learn a ridiculous amount in a very short space of time: excellent preparation for later striking out on your own.
[... 47 words]What is the best way to setup a conference website for a barcamp?
Since BarCamps are arranged by the attendees, I personally think the wiki-style schedule editing we support at Lanyrd makes it an ideal fit. Speakers can attach their slides to their session pages afterwards.
[... 52 words]PostgreSQL: How can I store images in a database? What existing products makes it easy for a user to upload photos into a general database?
As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to store images in a database. This is due to the large amount of space they take up, which can affect database read performance and will greatly increases the size of your backups, making them both take longer and cost more to store.
[... 187 words]Why doesn’t xkcd site have social media share options?
My guess: he probably thinks they are a bit tacky.
[... 45 words]How can I find info on startup companies in stealth mode in a particular market segment before they launch?
The whole point of stealth mode is to prevent you from doing this. That said, if you make sure you’re well connected with entrepreneurs and investors in that particular space you’ll increase your chances of hearing about things before they launch.
[... 66 words]What are ways to avoid getting discouraged while searching for a job as a software developer?
Do you have any programming side-projects? If not, I suggest starting one. You’ll learn a bunch, it will impress interviewers (and help you pull ahead of other candidates) and it will help you build confidence in your own skills.
[... 83 words]What’s your opinion on sharing your presentation slides (online for anyone to access) after speaking at an event where eventgoers paid to hear you (and others) speak?
I think sharing slides is almost always the best thing for everyone:
[... 277 words]Is there a compilation of all of Paul Graham’s essays available online?
Yes: his website. http://www.paulgraham.com/articl...
[... 23 words]What are some ways that brought your proficiency of CSS to another level?
An exercise I found useful when I first learned CSS was to implement CSS versions of the designs of popular sites. This was back when most sites still used tables for layout.
[... 76 words]How can I invest in pre-IPO companies like Quora, Github, etc?
Get to know the founders and investors and see if you can get involved in a future funding round. If you don’t have at least a few hundred thousand dollars to invest you probably won’t get very far though, an even if you do you’d better have more than just money to bring to the table—these rounds are often over-subscribed which means the company can pick the very best out of a number of investors.
[... 139 words]How long does it usually take you to prepare a presentation?
Damian Conway (one of the best technical presenters I’ve ever seen, who also runs amazing tutorials on giving great talks) says “to produce really top-class presentations, budget at least ten to twenty hours per hour of speaking”.
[... 71 words]How did The Voice implement Twitter voting?
You don’t need full firehouse access to implement this—you can use the statuses/filter API to get a feed of tweets that match a specific hash tag: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api...
[... 63 words]What’s my shot at getting into YC or TechStars NY if I am applying from outside the US, alone with both business experience and technical skills?
I’d say your chances are significantly higher than the average application, for both of those programs. Go apply already!
[... 51 words]Does the Google Maps API let you remove details of the map such as street names to focus on pins on the map?
Yes—you can do this with map styles (which allow you to set the visibility if road labels, among other things): http://developers.google.com/map...
[... 53 words]Is there any way to generate thumbnails of web links like Facebook generates when we paste a link in status or comment?
There are a bunch of services that can do this. I’ve successfully used http://url2png.com/ for this in the past.
[... 48 words]Why can’t I do style=“padding: 20px” and a border in the same div?
You can’t have two style attributes on the same element—but you can have two styles rules inside the same attribute. Try this instead:
[... 48 words]How many YC companies have tech co-founders?
Ballpark guess based on my experience in YC: over 90% of YC companies have the technical capability within the founding team to at least ship their MVP. YC is really good at taking technical teams and teaching them the business side of things.
[... 56 words]What are tips for keeping website up on Black Friday? (due to large number of hits)
Serve as much of your site as possible using Varnish, and/or consider a dynamic content CDN such as www.fastly.com
[... 42 words]What’s best the site to visit to START building a website?
There are two ways to approach this: you can try and learn HTML yourself, or you can use tools that will help you build websites quickly without needing to code.
[... 114 words]