skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right now, the field has decided that the coder-designers are worth their weight in gold. As such, at this moment and for the foreseeable future, you are in a great position to pretty much write your own ticket wherever you want to go in the startup world. This will occur even if you don't ever progress your craft beyond being 'very good' at both design and front-end development. For this reason, you now have a good opportunity to decide for yourself what you will enjoy doing most without having to worry about pigeonholing yourself into some particular job description.

Also, consider this: if you have become 'very good' at design and 'very good' at coding in 5-6 years of applied practice, then how much further will you push your skill with another 5 years of dedicated effort?
it's a blob committed to munching trees. :-)
The Hunger Games (2012)
most likely talent acquisition, glancee was not big in the way instagram was.
I don't see how it replaces HTML. At most it manages HTML.

Also a question: can anybody knowledgeable tell us how Opa compares with Meteor? Both of them seem to follow the approach that any piece of code can run in either the server or the client, either with the system choosing automagically or with the code specifying a 'server' or 'client' directive.
Opa however extends the classical syntax with advanced features specific to the web.
HTML fragments can be inserted directly without quotes:

line = <div id="foo">bar</div>;

I'm not sure that this helps readability, feels like reverse php (html inside code, vs code inside html).
I would use pdftotext on the pdf file. It's not perfect, but neither is stripping commands from the .tex source (macros will not be evaluated).
When you're young you'll be able to do both well. As you get older I think you'll find yourself wanting to spend time on one more than the other.

Excellence in both is rare. Shaun Inman is a remarkable example.
Attend a local Meetup-like meetup.
Free or close to it.
Be passive audience or speak or network.
No hotel, airfare, rental car worries or costs.
No union shenanigans.
Eat at home or bring own snack, though many Meetup meetups have free food & drink by sponsors.
No boredom or "well I paid for ticket" guilt.
Come and go as you like, when you like, minimal structure
but still get to meet other people with same technical interests. Lame speakers? Leave -- you didn't pay anything anyway.
Granted, you do need enough people in your local area to reach that critical threshold.
But don't ignore cheaper, easier, more flexible alternatives.
Until I read few commentaries over here, I didn't even know what's the site about.
>I consider myself both a designer and a developer

But do you consider yourself 'excellent' at both?
Hey, this is a very entertaining story! I'd love to blog about this too, but what would really help is a photoshop of a "samsung" phone fitting the article's description while actually being ugly, so I don't look like an idiot when I do.

At a minimum it shouldn't look better than the previous samsung models next to it.

Thanks for any help!
I've been curating a list of people who balance both skills exceedingly well for quite a while on here: https://twitter.com/#!/micrypt/devigners/members. Suggestions are very much welcome.
Amen. Your comment is by far the most intelligent, well-considered and pragmatic thing I've heard in this discussion.
Sina Weibo Censorship Jumps the Shark | Tech in Asia
Video Stabilization on YouTube
Large businesses including publishers rarely base their decisions on ethical principles — businesses are done for profit. It is the consumer's responsibility to punish them for unethical behaviour. So we should be responsible consumers, and we should not buy any DRM-infected content or software no matter how useful it is from a pragmatic standpoint. Every purchase is a vote.
I understand you're unhappy about modern constitution law. But, if you want to understand why your interpretation of the constitution differs from the legal community's interpretation of the constitution, here are two good starting points:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Produ...
If he was talking about '[visual/user-interface] design' and '[algorithmically/architecturally-scalable] development', I could see there being a tangible tradeoff in acquiring expertise. Effort spent on one may offer little spillover benefit for the other, meaning larger returns to specialization.

But '[visual/UI] design' and 'front-end development'? I'm perplexed that so much of a culture of splitting these roles has arisen. In my mind they overlap so much that enforcing a formal division, in either process or the recognition of 'expertise', introduces wasteful mismatches of expectations and cost/value estimates. That is, the dividing "fence" you say your career has been straddling shouldn't even exist.

The cynic in me thinks the advice you've received, from the boss and 'people from both camps', has been more about them defending their traditional turf and comfortable silos than what you should do to be 'excellent'.
What makes more money: sports or porn?
Considering the fact that the GSI and GSII were allegedly unoriginal, to what extent did Samsung actually sell its soul, if it didn't bother cultivating it to begin with?
My SonyEricsson phone is also plastic, but feels much more well built.

The cheap feel of the plastic was what made me not buy the SGS2.
I had folk give me similar advice when I was young. It's dumb advice.

Imagine you go the coder route. When you going to specialise in there. Big data? Databases? Embedded coding? 3D graphics? Game coding? Web app coding? Front-end? Back-end? Testing? People can make careers out of any of them - and many more besides. It's pretty much impossible to be an expert in everything on the coder side.

Imagine you go the designer route. What are you going to specialise in there? User testing? Icon design? Branding? Web design? Print design? Interaction design? Information Architecture? People can make careers out of any of them - and many more besides. It's pretty much impossible to be an expert in everything on the design side.

I've had a pretty successful career with a bunch of things from the developer side and a bunch of things from the designer/UX side.... and some other bits and bobs from other things like project management and business folk.

I'm really good at interaction design. I'm really lousy at visual design. I'm really good at testing. I have no embedded coding skills. I'm great at... well... you get the idea...

Design and Development aren't "things". They're communities of practice. They're social constructs. New ones appear and disappear over time.

Pick "front-end developer" for example. Twenty years ago that role didn't exist. A bit of layout knowledge. I bit of a design eye. A bit of development. A bit of markup. And so on. Those skills existed - but there wasn't a 'role' where you needed to be expert in all of them.

In another ten or twenty years I'll be surprised if anything like "front end developer" exists in the same way (look at how folk using stuff like node.js blurs the coding side of front/back end development for example).

Figure out what you want to do. Then acquire the skills you need to do that - and be excellent at those. The choice isn't between being a design expert and a development expert. Instead make a choice to be excellent at the things you enjoy and are good at - and then go find career where you can use those skills.
Isn't this only a problem at some organizations, for example over a certain size/age?

And if you're a true 'double threat', stuck in an organization that doesn't let your synergy be 1.5x+ more productive than others in specialized cages, wouldn't that be a signal to move on?
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They could start gaining SMS users now and in ten years those same users could be subscribed to Google Talk mailing lists through their system or whatever.
It looks like it supports PHP; anything else?
You are probably referring to this article http://blog.opalang.org/2012/04/one-web-app-one-language.htm... "[Opa] automatically determine where the code should run..."

And some previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3858838
I got the point, sorry if I was unclear.

My point was, it is hard to print 300 chars wide code. Ideal code width for printing is < 80 chars...
What? The advertising?
WebGL around the net, 3 May 2012
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Is not that you can not be an expert on both things. It is that you can not "execute" on both at the same time because you don't have time.

Time is your main resource and nobody can do it all at the same time. Some things take a lot of time just starting to work and if you change from one thing to another during the day you don't do anything.

But don't believe me. Test it yourself. Measure your time, take your smartphone timer and monitor yourself along the day, write it down how you spend your time, not as you should, but as it really is.

If you are as good as you said you can pick one as your main area and them choose someone who knows how to do the other. Having "taste" and knowing who to choose is not as easy as it sounds.

(*) Yes, there are examples of generalist who have led successful startups, most of them are done by generalists, if for generalists you mean someone who is able to trust others doing the specifics because they know they can't do it all. With a startup you have to be accountant, tax payer, product evangelist, sales manager, marketing head, engineering head all yourself...
My design skills are on par with most of the designers I've worked with, and pretty much same goes for coding. I'm not excellent in any, ignoring few bright moments. I've also done game music, play few instruments, and the list goes on.
I DO NOT EXCEL in any of those, but that might just be my high standards. However, in the companies I've worked I've always been THE most useful person.

Earlier this year, I've started my own company and ran it sucessfully basically by myself.

The point being - you probably cannot be excellent at both design and coding but being very good at more than one skill makes you excellent in itself.

Exceptions to the rule always apply.
> at some point Samsung could simply say "no more"

I don't think it really works like that. Apple doesn't show up at the Samsung Shop every day and ask to buy the next day's components for their factory. They have long term contracts, a year or more in advance, often including huge co-investments in the factory toolings which will be involved in manufacturing them. Of course I don't know the details but I doubt Apple or the courts would look too kindly on Samsung suddenly declining to fulfil their multi-billion-dollar, multi-year supply contracts because they wanted to help their own competing products.

Samsung is very much wearing "golden handcuffs" in this situation.
I am tired of "jury culture". These days people's highest ambitions often seem to be to impress some jury (most obvious in those horrible talent shows on TV). Screw the juries!
I think there is simply too much stuff to know about in both coding and design. There is simply not enough not time to become really knowledgable in both.

It's actually "worse" than that. It's pretty impossible to be expert in one field.

I don't know anybody who is expert in, for example, embedded development and game development and back-end web development.

I don't know anybody who is expert in, for example, font design and user testing and icon design.

Yet developers and designers can be successful by picking subsets of "design" and "development" to be expert in.

There is nothing stopping folk being expert in subsets of "design" and "development" - apart from the notion some people seem to have that one skill set interferes with the other.
Do you suppose that medieval master craftsmen had to pick and choose between being very good at using specialized tools to make things and being very good at knowing about the 'human factors' that go into making an object appropriate and desirable to people?

How is this any different? On one hand, you have a set of tools along with a craft of making things with those tools. On the other, you have a set of skills that help you determine the necessary characteristics of the crafted artifact so that it is pleasing to its end user.
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Application Performance and Antipatterns
Agreed, the law of leaky abstractions is pretty brutal. When you're writing serious systems you always have to peek under the hood -- e.g. you have to reason about data structure sizes in the JVM, or check out the code that GCC outputs, or look at the Python interpreter source code. Having a bunch of monolithic magic with its own world view sitting between you and the machine is a big barrier.

I'm skeptical of anything that tries to present a grand unified model. GWT is another example of where this strategy fails IMO.

As noted below, CoffeeScript is a different case that illustrates the point. It seems moderately successful (I haven't used it) precisely because it's a such a modest abstraction. It aims to be a 1-to-1 with JavaScript, and keeps the semantics of JavaScript, rather than imposing its own semantics which are inevitably at odds with what browsers/servers are really doing.
Top Things Every Software Engineer Should Know
A felony? Really? I have no grasp of how your laws are divided in the states and presumed the "every-day accidental crimes" would be misdemeanors. What felonies are you referring to?
Interesting theory but I'm not convinced the nuances of the Samsung/Apple case support it. I'm also not sold that Apple has had enough success with the legal actions against Samsung to spur such a major hardware design change especially when Samsung is simultaneously announcing a Siri clone that uses a highly derivative UI. You would have to believe Samsung is a total mess to accept they forgot to tell the software guys about the change in strategy. Just don't buy it.

I think the changes have a lot more to do with Samsung making a shift towards acting like the big player they are. Samsung is the Android market at this point. It's less about Apple and more about HTC, Sony, Google/Motorola, etc. I think you can see this in the significant software changes they introduced and the larger display. They are making a play to basically own the Android market. It is an effort to design a device that stands out instead of blending in. I think Samsung wants people to understand at a glance this device is not just another generic handset. It's Samsung Android -- not Google Android. So physically it has to have at least a slightly unconventional look as well. That being said I think they failed terribly by adopting this sort of tacky early 00s ascetic. It's the uncanny valley of retro design. We're not far enough removed from early 00s to want a device that reminds us of that era yet. Weird textured plastic, overuse of the blue/purple tint, etc. Once glance at it and somehow I'm reminded of the first popular wave of sub-1MP camera phones in the United States.

The other issue is the size of the device. The Galaxy S was still within the realm of the mainstream. Not too small, not too big. They are walking away from a big portion of the market by skipping both the small and medium sized market. They now have big and they have huge with the Note. Larger devices are a nice option but the mainstream option has to be a bit more reasonable. For a significant number of people this device is just going to be physically uncomfortable to use I suspect.
But do you consider yourself 'excellent' at both?

Do you know anybody who is expert in everything in design or development?

If not, why does it matter if somebody chooses to specialise in a subset of design and development - rather than a subset of design or development.
Nothing surprising here.

- 1149 € iMac

- 100 € One year License

- daily rate € x amount of days required to develop and release

Now how many customers have to buy the app at 1€ to break even?

Same thing on the Android side (just the PC is cheaper to get)
First, know thyself. If you don't have talent, or you do but can't stand hunting that race condition for days, or can't obsess on the tone of green that will convey that company's corporate identity better, you will fight an uphill battle for skills that others master much more easily.

That said, I'd say that the general advice goes like this: If you want to work in a corporate environment with lots of managers to report to, specialize as much as you possibly can. That's "knowing everything about nothing" as my adviser in grad school used to say. Companies with a high number of employees tend to prefer specialists. They of course need people with a high range of skills in upper layers of management, but you won't get there first thing you set your foot through the door, it'll take you years.

But if you'd rather work in a start-up environment, or just be your own boss, you need to know everything from the tradeoffs of apache vs nginx to which css tags render differently in Firefox and Webkit.

That's more a lifestyle choice, in my opinion. You can get successful both ways.
Epic! About time someone made a real-time online editor/tester for PHP. If this can combine the best of JSFiddle and CSSDeck with PHP included, I'm super keen. Can I grab an early invite? ;)
Yes, cold emails, keeping it short and personal. Also a lot of contact was made through Twitter.
Almost 2 mph. Whooosh!
That assumes you're providing the output as a list of elements. Since it's a contiguous sequence, you can uniquely identify a particular output as a tuple (start, length). So you can get a constant-time solution if you're allowed to assume the input is valid (and have a constant-time way of getting the length of the input, I guess).

On the other hand, checking to ensure that the input represents a valid sequence is going to be O(n) in the size of the input no matter what you do...
Thanks for your advice, Paul.
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Multi-classing penalty, of course, applies. BUT there are classes that are multi-skillful by itself. And you can be excellent in those, even if they fall behind in any particular skill behind the more focused ones.
That being said, I've always played rogue or bard. :{-
Everyone wants to compartmentalize you. Many cannot interpolate the steps required to go from being very good to being excellent, so they scoff, and they try to impart advice. How are "very good" and "excellent" even quantifiable? Let them say what they will. Nod, respectfully. Then carry on. You belong in another crowd--a rarer crowd. You absolutely may be a designer and front-ender. I'd even speculate that these two crafts complement each other in making you better at both. You won't mindlessly design something that is artistic, yet up in the clouds (because you have a foundation in usability and functionality). Similarly, you won't create an unappealing and thoughtless front-end, because you have an affinity towards--and respect for--beauty. Your boss meant well, I'm sure, and in most respects, it certainly is a good idea to narrow in on your expertise, but these two trades, particularly, do not conflict. Whenever faced with two choices, those who truly distinguish themselves are the ones who say, Fuck it. I'm doing both.
As others have already said 'I miss the tree eating blob' and the site had character.

The new version obviously had the corporate types in mind. It is clean and optimized to sell it to the pointy haired boss. At first I thought some company had bought and changed the website. Then I realized it is just a cookie cutter template where almost any generic computer program could be plugged in. Then there is the grey color scheme, I see enough websites everyday that have grey color schemes, it is generic and boring. The color scheme before was different and that was a good thing. This constant conformity to sell the corporate and enterprise users on software stinks.

Someone going to censor the man pages because it has phrases like this: 'git - the stupid content tracker'?
Read the OP title: 'Is it possible to become 'excellent' at both design and coding?'
Yes. Don't be excellent AT something. Just be excellent.
I think YC is not only about funding, but Networking. Funding itself is around 20K$. But value of meeting right people is priceless. So, definitely apply.

this is from FAQ: (http://www.ycombinator.com/faq.html)

- We've already taken some funding. Can we still apply?
- Sure. We've funded many startups that have.

This might be also interesting for you:
- We don't want funding, but will you give us advice?

- Unfortunately we can't. We've invested in so many companies that helping them takes up all our time. But we've collected some general advice in our library.
I love this site - except for one thing. When you click on the Next link button on a page such as http://git-scm.com/about it navigates to the next page - but starts at the bottom! Very, very irritating.
Saying that humans live a very long time is quite relative. Compared to what? A butterfly or a solar system?

> An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which
> can be made, in a narrow field.
- Niels Bohr

I don't think most people can be experts in couple of things, as it requires too much time to be expert in at least one of them (but there are always an exceptions).

I agree it is good to know a lot of things but I doubt one can be master of all trades. These days even car mechanics get specialized for a brand of cars.

In area of web design there is a myriad of technologies included in the process of developing a web site or an application.

There is HTML/CSS frontend, there are server side apps (in all kinds of languages), there are couple of web servers, there are few platforms on which those web servers run, and there is a database layer.

You can be an expert in any of these, but hardly all of them, since most of these are generic terms. What kind of database? There are experts for Oracle, there are experts for Postgres, experts for MSSQL etc... Then there are those who excel in maintaining web servers either nginx or apache or IIS etc, there are those who are experts in node.js there are experts in Django. And you could go deeper and deeper still.

And this is just a development part, if you put graphics design into picture there are wast number of options from which to choose that you can be expert in.

But do keep in mind I am talking about being an expert, you can have sufficient knowledge in HTML/CSS/Server side apps/Web servers/Databases to build a web site but you will hardly ever be expert in all of them.

Maybe I am wrong, but I do agree that it is near impossible to be expert in couple of things.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3931114
Ok, I did not usually include that calculation, as inflation/interest is usually around 2% - probably wouldn't amount to much? Personally I tend to avoid subscriptions because they make my finances less tractable, and all the little costs add up.

Good idea to do that calculation for "actual worth of the money" (don't know what to call it in English). Goes to my TODO list :-)
I would like to try it Yash, can you let me in? :) Anyway; it seems rather fishy how enthusiastic the comments on TC are. Without seeing anything... I do like this kind of stuff but these people are acting like you cured cancer which you might have done only no-one can see it actually?

Edit:

I'm also wondering (and very curious!) what you are doing different than http://www.coderun.com/ide/ http://c9.io/ ? Is it the immediate result iframe on the right?
We support Ruby, Node & Python as well.