Simon Willison’s Weblog

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1,005 items tagged “quora”

2013

Which event gave you a real happiness?

The Maker Faire in California, and the Mini Maker Faire in Brighton, UK. The enthusiasm for making things for the sake of making things is delightful and infectious.

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What are movie scenes where the hero hurtles from high-up to Earth and nearly dies, but is saved somehow?

You may find http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwik... relevant.

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Why didn’t Apple release a gold (champagne) iPad?

According to John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/2013/1...

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What exactly the error meaning client closed prematurely connection while sending to client from upstream in nginx?

I think it means that the connection to the user’s browser was lost before the request had been fully transferred—for example due to the user hitting the stop button in their browser or switching off their wifi connection.

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What are the most “New Yorkers” experiences you can do in London?

There’s a Shake Shack (legendary NY burger chain) in Covent Garden now.

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What kind of website can be run on AWS for 10, 100, 1 thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million dollars per month?

“But is there a simple way to say that for 10$ per month you can run website on AWS, that has X unique users and Y data transfer...”

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Would you test your web app against simulated infrastructure failure?

I think this is a pretty interesting idea—simulating these kind of conditions isn’t easy so I imagine many teams don’t bother. If it was good (really easy to get started with, great control and reporting tools, maybe helped set up the actual tests to replay) and I trusted the service I would definitely consider paying for it.

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Does y combinator review applications in the order they were received? If you apply just right before the deadline should you not expect your app to be reviewed before next week?

Appslications are reviewed in random order.

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What company or service sends the most beautifuly designed emails?

Litmus (who provide an excellent email testing tool) send out the most attractive newsletter in my inbox.

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How do I explain my patchy job history to a VC when pitching investment?

I wouldn’t worry about it. Entrepreneurs often have patchy job histories. A VC is much more likely to understand “I took a few months off to work on a startup idea” than a regular employer.

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What is the role of angel investors? Do they help people who find themselves in financial difficulty relating to a business failure?

I’m afraid you are misinterpreting the word “angel” in the term “angel investor”.

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Y Combinator: I want to apply to YC and I have 5 people on my team. we have two founders one technical and one designer but on our application I want to only include our three programmers one being a founder. Is this frowned upon at YC and does it hu...

YC are fine with three founders—no need to limit it to two.

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Why is it important to expand/upgrade my professional network?

There are plenty of reasons, but the most obvious is for finding a better job. Next time you are job hunting having a high quality, wide ranging network can make a huge difference.

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Why did Facebook remove their hamburger navigation and go back to docked tabs in their mobile app?

Probably because the swipe-to-see-menu gesture conflicts with the iOS 7 standard swipe-to-go-back gesture.

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If you’re starting a website as a product, what are the important things to consider for the domain and how important are they? Ex: effect of being .com, .net or .io etc., and is it okay to have a hyphen in the name?

Get the .com. If you don’t, you’ll find that a surprisingly large number of press mentions etc will link to the wrong place—and you may end up having to pay a fortune later to buy the .com from a domain squatter (the price goes way up once your site starts to gain traction).

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What is way that android connect to Oracle database?

As a general rule it’s not a good idea to allow mobile devices to connect directly to a server-side database, as it’s an invitation to hackers to figure out what’s going on and then connect to the database themselves for nefarious reasons.

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It is posible to send an RSS feed to Twitter geolocalized?

Yes, this is possible using the Twitter API. A competent web programmer should be ale to build this for you in a few hours.

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What do you do when you passionately believe in what you’re doing and have been seeing strong customer validation, but people around you constantly diss it? How do you persevere without a support system?

This is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to build a circle if trust with other entrepreneurs—or potentially even move to a “startup hub” region where more people are doing startups.

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Who would like to help set up a Wordpress site that is event focused?

Eventbrite (my employer) recently worked with WordPress.com to provide an integration between the two services which you may find relevant—it makes it very easy to set up a WordPress.com hosted site which ties in to the Eventbrite API to promote and enable ticket sales: WordPress.com Integrations for Eventbrite

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Why can’t Twitter Web Intent pages be loaded into an iframe?

I imagine this is to discourage clickjacking: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

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What email marketing tool does Goop, InsideHook and other popular newsletters use?

You might be able to tell by viewing the full email headers on one of the emails they have sent you.

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What should the CEO’s salary be in a startup seeking seed capital? Is there an average number?

If you haven’t yet raised any capital, how can you pay a CEO salary at all?

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How can one become a masterful Rails developer (and still have a life)?

Don’t sacrifice your social life. Sacrifice TV.

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What are the differences between “forking,” “cloning,” and downloading the project as a zip file on GitHub?

“fork” creates a copy of the project hosted on your own GitHub account. This is an exclusive Build software better, together. (links to: http://Github.com) feature and not a Git feature.

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For a Django application, deployed on Heroku, what are my options for storing user-uploaded media files?

S3 is really a no-brainer for this, it’s extremely inexpensive, very easy to integrate with and unbelievably reliable. It’s so cheap that it will be practically free for testing purposes (expect to spend pennies a month on it).

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Does GitHub hire developer advocates? If so, how do you go about applying to be one?

If you’re a good candidate for a developer advocate position, you already know how to get in touch with the right people at GitHub!

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Is GitHub a reliable tool if I want to upload all the non-proprietary scientific computing code I have from my hard drive?

Yes. I find GitHub is a particularly good place to host older code that you might not intend to actively maintain, as it makes it extremely easy for other people to pick up where you left off.

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What are prominent examples for remote work besides 37Signals, Github and Automattic?

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) have a very impressive distributed team culture.

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How many cups of coffee can a venture capitalist drink in one work day?

When we were raising our seed round we quickly realised that lining up four “coffee” meetings with potential investors in a single day wasn’t going to be sustainable... so we switched to tea and other lower-caffeine drinks. At one meeting I even had a hot chocolate.

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How could we using couchbase with binary document as value?

There’s a system called cbfs that acts as a distributed blobstore on top of Couchbase server—https://github.com/couchbaselabs...—it looks like it is currently under active development.

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