I wrote one years ago, but I suspect the schema has drifted quite far out of sync: https://github.com/robmiller/ruby-wpdb

Rory Stewart, the speaker here, is a slightly unconventional politician, having in 2002 walked across Afghanistan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Stewart

Vim ships with a command called `view` that will start it in read-only mode, and makes it very much a viewer — not just an editor.

True, and I like using this for syntax-colored views of files. But it's got an annoying tendency to switch to edit mode with very little fuss.

Sometimes I want a viewer to just be a viewer.

Speaking of which: are there any Linux/Unix viewers that do have generalized syntax highlighting support?

You can give vimpager a try. It even supports vimrc. But I have felt it to be considerably slower than less.

chmod :)

It took me way too long to grok that.

…and Ruby has the PTY module which includes an `expect` method, which is in the same ballpark:

http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.2.0/libdoc/pty/rdoc/PTY.html

mailto: is the same principle and has been around since the 90s.

If you don't want to appear rich or a good robbery target, why buy a Ferrari in the first place? Plenty of other rich people somehow manage to get by without such extravagant displays of wealth.

Ferraris are fun to drive.

So are go carts.

They are actually a bit more dangerous to drive on public roads though....

I'd imagine the fun parts of driving a ferrari aren't really legal on public roads in the first place

It's a grey area. You can have a great deal of fun between 0 and the posted speed limit. Acceleration, breaking and handling matter at any speed.

However a cop may judge that you are driving recklessly regardless of whether you obey specific traffic laws.

Very late, but a) Ferraris are fun, b) it's a life's ambition fullfilled for him, and c) it's proven an excellent investment for him.

I'm using MailMate[1], which is a brilliant client developed by the Danish coder Benny Kjaer Nielsen. It has too many neat features to name, but the one I absolutely couldn't live without is the ability to write emails in Markdown.

[1]: http://freron.com/

It's at such a fragile point, though. Monetising a previously entirely free service is risky at any time, but there's lots more risk than usual here (fickleness of audience, existence of competitors, fundamental simplicity of offering).

We've seen plenty of startups fail at this point before; is there anything to suggest Snapchat will beat the odds?

Assuming an average valuation/yearly revenue ~= 20 it means that for $3.5bn the should make $175m a year. If they have 350m photo shares a day (!!!) this number seems very well within their reach. They can even afford to monetize less aggressively and thus more user-friendly. I think it's one of these cases where numbers are so huge that they work in their favor whatever they do.

20X revenue would be a really high valuation even for a SaaS business. 6-10X would be more likely in the long run.

When Twitter had ~$140M in revenue their price was ~50x revenue.

Source: http://www.quora.com/What-are-revenue-multiples-for-technolo...

The company is very hot right, basically selling expectations thus I think well above 10x. In any case $350m with these kind of numbers still seems very feasible. Won't you agree?

It's a fair point, but to be honest, I think if anyone is OK with an ad-supported product, it's teens. They're used to free services being supported by ads. They get the tradeoff.

So I don't think the ads will drive them away, but they are an inherently fickle group, so something that is shinier, newer, and doesn't have every parent on the world using it will always be appealing.

Isn't the problem that, while the house may cost $30,000, the land on which it would have to reside will inevitably cost far more than that?

No. A couple minutes with zillow.com or trulia.com will show you lots available for well under $10,000. Sure, they won't exactly be in premium locations, but with some work you can find some that are desirable & decent. I've seen some under $2000 just outside Atlanta, rural half-acre lots close to rivers & lakes.

The tech inside the house visually appears to be mobile home tech not self contained RV tech. So you'll need the $10K septic field, the $10K electric power line, maybe natgas/propane for heating/cooking, a $5K and up water well or $10K to connect to city water if available, it adds up.

(edited to add I forgot to add the cost of a foundation, in the south the freeze line is like 2 inches, but where I live I believe its 4-5 feet, so you're already spending 90% of the cost of a full basement, may as well finish it off and have a basement, but thats another $10K perhaps for something this small?)

An interesting, short & relevant read: http://homestead.org/NeilShelton/HowToBuyLand/VeryCheaply.ht...

TL;DR - buy/access a "plat book" for each county you're interested in, correlate each lot with a topographic map to identify interesting properties, visit the Assessor's Office to find the owners, write a polite but terse offer letter to the owners who live farthest away - good chance they don't want the property and will part with it fast for a reasonable offer. Yes, takes some work & money, but a whole lot less than list price.

Not necessarily. I'm on a 10,000 sqft plot of land which is valued at $20,000. I easily have enough room for this house.

Did pg really invent backend web development?

It's impossible to know for sure, but Viaweb is considered to be the first web app.

??? Maybe the first online store builder, but not the first web app...

CERN had some remote app to control coffee maker.

quite obviously, no.