Saturday, 2nd October 2010
I think that “bad technology” can kill a startup, but slightly different variations of good technology don’t have much effect. Choose what you know/like best. And Ruby and Python are both in this latter category.
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’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]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]Facebook’s Instant Personalization: An Analysis of Fundamental Privacy Flaws (via) Oh FFS. “Instant Personalization” means you visit one of Facebook’s “partner websites” and Facebook instantly tells them your full identity and gives them access to full Facebook connect functionality—without you performing any action other than visiting the site. This will not end well.