August 2013
Aug. 13, 2013
Is Quip self-funded or VC backed?
VC backed: $15,000,000 Series A from Benchmark Capital. Take a look at their Quip Company Fact Sheet linked from https://quip.com/about/
[... 33 words]I want to write a short summary for every article I read online for future use. What is the best tool to do this?
http://pinboard.in is well suited to this. It’s a bookmarking service (like the old Delicious) with a bookmarklet that lets you quickly annotate and add tags to a link, privately or in public. For an extra fee the site will archive copies of the pages you are linking to as well in case they vanish in the future.
Aug. 14, 2013
I have embedded videos in a PowerPoint presentation (using a fix), but now they do not play when I save the file as a .pdf. Any idea how to make this work?
It isn’t possible to embed a video in a PDF file. If you want the embedded video to play you will need to distribute the presentation in the original PowerPoint format.
[... 69 words]Besides MTurk, what are some good resources to use when doing market research for a startup?
SurveyMonkey and Google both offer services where you can pay to get responses to a survey from a large number of recipients:
[... 51 words]Aug. 15, 2013
What are some books that programmers should read to understand logic?
Logic is more of a mathematical concept than a computer science concept—programming books are unlikely to focus on it.
[... 69 words]Aug. 20, 2013
What advice would you give to a new technical co-founder at a startup?
It sounds to me like you’d be better off seeking an engineering role in an existing, relatively mature startup (one with 5-15 engineers) rather than looking to be a technical co-founder of a brand new company. Startup engineering is likely to be pretty different from what you’re used to, and there’s no better environment to learn than a fast-moving company that already has a small and highly talented group of engineers.
[... 102 words]Aug. 21, 2013
What is a good list of conferences, speaking gigs, hackathons, and other technology-centric events where one can reach software architects and developers?
We have a pretty comprehensive list of (mostly tech) conferences in the Midwest USA here: http://lanyrd.com/places/midwest...
[... 45 words]How scalable is Django?
Django scales in exactly the same way as PHP or Rails or any other stateless shared-nothing web technology: you ensure that the web nodes (running your Django code) are independent from your persistence layer (database, caching, session storage etc) and scale then independently.
[... 191 words]Aug. 26, 2013
What’s it like being an attendee at Google I/O?
It’s a fantastic opportunity to spend quality time with the Google employees who built the APIs you build software on top of—the core Android team, the Google Maps people, the Chrome engineers etc. it’s kind of like Apple’s WWDC in that regard—short of going to work for Google there is no better way to meet and interrogate that many expert Google engineers in one place.
[... 84 words]Benefits and disadvantages of cashflow positive startups joining an accelerator program?
YC has a very low time commitment. There is a dinner once a week (which takes up the evening from 6pm onwards), and any other sessions are 20-30 minute slots you book yourself with the YC partners and advisors. My experience was that most teams have 2-3 of these a week.
[... 338 words]How to find the URL of a page in an iframe?
You can’t, as this would be a security and privacy violation. Imagine an evil website which loads up Google in a full page iframe and then tracks what the unsuspecting user searches for and clicks on.
[... 125 words]What are some good Facebook Graph search queries?
Employment related ones can be interesting: “friends of my friends who have worked for Google” for example.
[... 50 words]Aug. 28, 2013
What are some interesting Facebook Graph Search URLs?
I rather enjoy https://www.facebook.com/search/... because it suggests that Facebook have taken polygamy in to account.
[... 30 words]Does Facebook Graph Search scale linearly?
You may find the paper they released about the underlying implementation useful: https://www.facebook.com/downloa...
[... 26 words]