Interesting read and nicely written. It's just a shame HN doesn't have a 'report' feature like Reddit, as I can't report all the whiners in this thread as douchebags.
Being in the UK, I typically enjoy a substantial amount of tea during the day. None of that poncy herbal tea though - stricly strong white tea.
The British Armed Forces are supplied with a particular brand of tea from NAAFI (http://www.ringtons.co.uk/shop/tea/naafi-tea), which is now available to the public too. I had it described to me by an ex-forces friend that 'it's a tea to clean your gun with', but I actually find it to be one of the heartiest and warming drinks I've had.
Does anybody actually use top, rather than htop? It's the first thing I install on every system I build.
Something I've become very fond of recently is Monit, which doesn't appear to be on the list. I've found it very reassuring to have Monit set-up and watching the processes on my server.
The number of available and useful gems makes Ruby my favourite for the kitchen sink. I recently had to build a web spider very quickly for a concept, and there was a gem that provided a multi-threaded spider. Obviously, Ruby wouldn't be my choice for an actual production spider for larger projects, but it let me get a prototype done very quickly :)
Your response seems overly-critical for someone who's simply looking for advice. I have a few issues:
Quitting a job within a year won't look particularly bad on your resume; quitting multiple jobs within a year will, however. I left my first job after 3 months and I've never faced a problem because of it.
There's no need to berate him on his English, especially if he's moving to London - as long as it's clear that English isn't his first language, or that he's dyslexic, then he won't be judged harshly there.
There's no point sticking with a job you hate if you have the means and freedom to move on. Being young allows you to change your mind before too much depends on you having a stable job.
@op: Look up on what's currently in demand in London (Java, probably) and start learning in your spare time. Check up on a few UK-based recruitment websites (http://reed.co.uk has a good list of programming jobs). It's totally possible to change your area of expertise; I currently work as a Ruby/PHP developer and I have a first-class degree in design :)
I would assume that they're building momentum before they introduce premium services. Flickr's probably quite a good example of this. I know Posterous have mentioned that they'll be implementing paid-for extras in the future, but that the current offering will remain free.
I was hired as a PHP developer, but I'm gradually transitioning them over to Ruby. I still need a manual for both of these languages; PHP for the ludicrous amount of functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.levenshtein.php anybody?), and Ruby for the frequently confusing code I come across. Ruby is my current hobby language.
I also use Javascript for jQuery, and for Node.js in my spare time.
My university did exactly this. (Supposedly) spent anywhere between £5 mil and £50 mil on a new building; £80,000 on their opening ceremony with lots of local celebrities; and then left all the students with 4 year-old hardware for design/video courses.
I really appreciated the sterile white-washed building for creative courses while attempting to use After Effects on a G5 iMac :|
I'd highly recommend Spree (http://spreecommerce.com/tour). It's based around the payment processor that Shopify uses, and it supports a lot of the more advanced Google Analytics features.
I've yet to use it myself, and I'm not sure if it's entirely been released yet, but Amazon has a payments system in the works: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/