Sapient

As a South African, this is really awesome news!

There is however a far bigger problem than just funding here, I have never even heard of the Twangoo (Acquired by Groupon) mentioned in the article. I suppose its down to the almost total lack of any sort of hacker/startup community, and I don't know how that is going to be fixed.

How will this work out in a world where the telcos seem to be bent on increasing costs and introducing data caps?

I live in South Africa, where the normal ADSL account gives you 3 Gb of traffic a month (10USD/gig for each gig after that) at a maximum of 4 Mbit/s (10 in a few areas). I know we are probably an outlier, but judging by what happened in Canada recently, and a few cases in the US, its seems possible a reverse case of Moore's law will come into play.

Also, most people (speaking globally), wont have the network capacity to support this kind of system for many years. There would likely have to be a truly massive increase in network capacity before we ever see this really take off.

For fun, try running your computer off an NFS - even with a 100Mbit connection, it gets annoying quickly.

This is quite a cool trip down memory lane and kinda makes me miss those old text based interfaces.

The other thing I always enjoy checking out is the "code" being edited on screen - I remember spotting some great code in the movie Antitrust, but I cant remember what it was unfortunately.

Until you want to get some bigger projects up, take a look at hosting on Heroku. Their pricing scales badly, but you can run a semi-decent site on the free package, and for any projects that take off, you can scale instantly by simply dragging some sliders.

Enjoy the Koans, they are brilliant fun and great for learning.

I'm actually doing something quite similar at the moment, though for a different MLS system in a different country...

It sounds like you actually want to learn instead of just implement, so just telling you that HN and Reddit are both Opensource probably isn't what you want to hear.

My suggestion is Ruby On Rails (simply because its what I use and like), it has a very large, helpful community and tons of resources.

The steps I would take (in hindsight), are:

1. Grab the Pickaxe book for Ruby 1.9 and start reading. http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9

2. Do the Ruby Koans - http://rubykoans.com/

3. To get your foot in the Rails door, check out the Rails Tutorial - http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

4. Once you have those basics, check out http://railscasts.com, Ryan has covered just about every problem you are likely to face, and his casts are top-notch!

5. Build something

6. Iterate.

Of course there are other languages and frameworks which would all work just as well, but since it sounds like you don't really have a solid programming background, I think Ruby is really a great language for you to start learning as if there is any language which will keep you interested, its Ruby.

Perhaps a question equally worth asking, is "what skills do programmers who AREN'T self-taught commonly lack?"

I grew up on computers, and am exclusively self-taught, yet I have an in-depth knowledge of how computers actually work from spending time learning how to crack programs. A decent understanding of some fairly complex algorithms from writing RTS, Chess and other games and working on some awesome ML applications professionally. And a good understanding of FP from playing with langs like Haskell and implementing a lisp interpreter.

I have also never learned a single thing from sitting in a lecture hall (though I did do a two year CS diploma, the hardest thing we ever had to do was an Address Book in VB), the most important things I have learned with regard to programming have all come from tutorials on the net and the few books I have bought over the years. In a sense, I have been taught by some of the best people in their fields including K&R, Abelson and Sussman, Denthor, CLRS, _why and too many others to mention.

Since I am self-taught, I can't really give a good answer to the question, but imho, our biggest problem, is that we don't know what we don't know... And that we usually don't a solid understanding of the maths behind what we are doing, something I recently realised the importance of, and am trying to remedy in myself.

Aside: What is really meant by "self-taught programmer" anyway? I have managed and worked with people who came out of university and couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.

You are right, the commands in the article definitely don't produce the results which are claimed.

I am currently a full time Ubuntu user and have been for the past 6 months. All my previous attempts to switch from Windows to Ubuntu have lasted only a month or two (and I have been trying every year since 1998 or so), so I am extrememly happy with the progress that was made which has allowed me to continue using Ubuntu for the last 6 months without feeling the need to go back to Windows. But I have some gripes.

One of my biggest gripes if the way fonts are handled. This is a huge issue for the web. For some reason, some package I installed, added a bunch of god-awful bitmap fonts, the most noticeable one is some sort of 8x8 bitmapped Helvetica font, which led to every single page using "Helvetica" in the font stack being rendered with a tiny non-aliased font. This was not limited to Helvetica, but also applied to a large number of other fonts. As an example, here is what I am forced to use as I type in this very comment.

╰─$ fc-match Courier courR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Courier" "Regular"

I initially fixed it by overriding all my Firefox fonts to the Ubuntu font, but then I lose all the typography people are so careful to use nowadays.

I was eventually able to fix most of it by figuring out I could could override individual fonts in the /etc/fonts/local.conf file, but thats a really bad solution, and I cant tell you right now, the disgusting fonts have DEFINITELY been a reason I have moved back to Windows in the past.

Also, please get someone to fix the ridiculous resize handles, I work at relatively high resolutions, even so, those handles actually feel like they are less than a pixel thick!

The "Open With" dialog fills up with hundreds of duplicates I have to manually remove, especially when using wine.

Please fix everything in this list http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322064

Apart from these problems, and a few others I will probably remember once I click Add Comment, 10.10 is in my opinion, the best Linux distro by far.

I think the best solution is to allow everyone to keep their anonymity if they want, and just repeat the mantra: "Don't Feed The Trolls!"

Where necessary, implement some form of community moderation, much like here, unpopular comments are greyed out, on other sites, like Reddit, they are hidden until requested.

Forced anonymity will forever be a pipe-dream anyway I think.

What about gays, atheists and others who could possibly damage far more than their own reputation?

I live in a country where I have absolutely no problem admitting to anyone that I don't believe in any gods, but it seems that in America this can and often has ripped families apart. Should those people be excluded from any public discourse regarding their beliefs?

The price which has to be paid in this dystopian future of yours is far too high, especially when the "trolls" you are trying to vanquish could just as easily be moderated out of existence wherever they became a problem.

How many other parts of our lives should we be forced to expose in order to take part in a community? HIV status? Voting history? Race? Whatever you feel the limit should be, I feel that peoples real names, races and locations is far more than anyone should ever have to share.

On a more mundane note, what about losing a job at Apple e because a search for your name brought up a few very negative, but non-trollish, comments you made about the iPhone, or perhaps Apple as a company.

These examples are generalised and unlikely... But not outside the realm of possibility.

If you are using Firefox, I suggest the Gmail Manager plugin by Todd Long. I have used quite a few Gmail plugins for Firefox, but none of them gets it quite as right as this one.

Details here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gmail-manager...

I'll be waiting for some variation on ;DROP TABLE

I don't think you will be disappointed with Kaminari, it extends the new query interface really nicely. As for CarrierWave, I find it a lot more flexible than Paperclip.

Also, I hadn't seen Rack SSL Enforcer, thanks for that!

Its a decent list, but I would have liked to see Kaminari instead of will_paginate and perhaps CarrierWave instead of, or possibly as a really good alternative, to Paperclip.

Good to hear, but I am curious.

When threewords went viral, you were using a single linode, and seemed to solve your scaling problems by just upgrading to a larger node and implementing a bit of caching. What have you learned and what would you do differently this time?

Do you know of anything we can have a look at which gives a better overview of kernel architecture?

I am really more interested in learning more about good kernel architecture and rolling one the "Right Way" than I am in getting a working but crappy kernel.

Spray-on glass isn't going to make this situation much worse than it already is.

Wave solved this problem really well. I wish it had worked out.

I found this invaluable when writing my own small OS.

http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/index.html

He includes a lot of details, and seems to try to do things "The Right Way" as much as possible. (Not that I am a good person to judge that)

Did you install rvm locally, or system wide? I have never had a real problem installing rails with rvm on 10.10, I just had to apt-get the required libs for ruby, and then everything else worked fine (with a normal rvm install).

I would try rvmsudo gem install rails, who knows...

Also remember, when you run the rvm install script or any of the following rvm commands, dont sudo it for a normal installation.

I see you have added a section about the required libs in the post, it should give no problems now.

If you could include a bit about installing rvm system wide and maybe setting up passenger, it would have saved me a lot of time and grief a week ago.

This is a good start for setting up rails on your development box, but when it comes to deploying it to a clean server, just following these instructions will give you a headache fast.

This tutorial, and some others on this guys blog helped me do just that. http://kris.me.uk/2010/08/30/rails3-hosting-all-in-one.html

With some Markov chain generators and leetification, not as hard as you think.

I may be missing something, but doesn't this give you the same password for all accounts with the username johnsmith?

I think it is something people can get used to quite quickly.

If you look at the Romans, taking a dump surrounded by your friends in one of the Bath Houses was a good part of the day, so its not like abluting in public is something we are inherently opposed to as humans.

Sane people can, and often do choose to do things which could be considered worse than a few months in a Swedish jail.

Given a choice between a Swedish jail and a tour in Iraq, I would choose jail. But then I am not American, or Swedish.

There will always be Xubuntu for older computers though.

This is precisely what happened to me, and the reason I ditched git for Hg in my most recent project. I am not doing anything large enough to warrant paying for a GitHub account at the moment, and its not because I am cheap - its because I am a poor South African, and $7 a month is infinitely more expensive than $0 a month.