skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Backwards compatibility is pretty much a requirement for a widely supported language, otherwise you impose a huge amount of pain on your user base and may kill he language in the long run. Java and Python have pretty much tried to maintain backwards compatibility, Python 3 notwithstanding. OTOH not moving forward in language design also means a slow death as your users move on to more capable languages/frameworks. As the article says, the future of PHP is probably neoPHP, a fork that cleans it all up.

Java is another language that needs to break with the past and may ave already done so in the form of Groovy, Scala, and the other JVM based languages. I think the constant churn in Java frameworks is an indication that something is wrong. PHP, at least, has managed to evolve.
It can't hurt to learn it, right?

I would image that you will find it very simple to pick up and likely very rewarding.
Based on my experience just this morning, yes. And don't neglect Javascript, either -- no matter how hard you try, you're not going to be able to avoid needing it.

glances at copy of Simple and Direct on bookshelf

Learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, a library like JQuery. You'll need them.
What an Inauguration does to your traffic (Last.FM)
I'll avoid me too and agree you should learn these front end technologies. That said, there seems to be a question of how and what underlying your post. I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, still I hope this helps:

== XHTML/CSS ==

1. Learn basic HTML, understand what "semantic markup" means. I assume you know some HTML already.

2. To understand CSS, understand the box model. Understand inline and block elements. Understand selectors. Understand positioning. The rest of it falls in place from there.

Hopefully you'll have an appreciation for markup and meaning versus presentation at this point.

== JavaScript ==

3. Learn Javascript. Understand that everything is a hashtable. Understand how it handles scoping and understand classless objects. Once you're comfortable with this you're ready to move on.

4. Understand the DOM and how to manipulate it.

5. Read a little on AJAX, I found the DHTML utopia book on Sitepoint.com?myaffiliateid=me was good.

6. After you understand AJAX and DOM, go learn a library like JQuery or whatever else people advocate these days. These libraries are like mana from heaven. They will save you time! Oh, if you did steps 3-5 you'll be productive with a JS library in about 2 minutes. The learning curve is small at this point. Great stuff!

7. Install Firebug and spend an hour or two learning how to use it. Firebug will save you time and console.log is so much better than alert(). Firebug has made me happy.

Now you know how to manipulate sites on the client side. Great! Last step:

== Graphics ==

8. Learn a tool like Photoshop or the GIMP. Understand how to select stuff, copy and paste. Then become familiar with layers and masking. I am not a graphics guy but I've only recently become turned on to the power of masking. Wow. People like you and I can do neat things.

I don't have resources for everything because I scrimped and learned as I went. However this should represent a good order (and some pointers on what to look at) as you pursue this. Good luck!
Engineering and mechanics are admirable professions. "Any 'profession' connected to real estate" excludes engineering and architecture, which are completely fine lines of work. Construction depends on whether the buildings are beautiful and useful or not. Construction connected to some gauche nouveau mogul like Donald Trump would definitely not be OK, but construction of beautiful churches (or temples, mosques) and houses is fine.

Also, my "ilk" have always had a lot of respect for inventors and entrepreneurs, who are the productive engine of our economy. My parents were thrilled when I told them I was joining a startup. We just don't like "business" scumbags-- politically-skilled corporate bureaucrats who masquerade as entrepreneurs-- who move money around but don't contribute intellectually to society, and real estate is especially disreputable because of that industry's exploitation of status-driven and simian emotions.
If they could figure out a way to call it SkyNet, they would probably get a lot of attention.
WordPress Dev Tutorial - Creating your first widget
Porting TortoiseSVN to TortoiseGit
Not to comment on this particular incident since I don't know Taggar, but I completely disagree.

Someone with good job prospects--be it through education or pedigree-- giving up a high paying job to be an entrepreneur isn't relinquishing their management of risk. They can always get another high paying job.

A kid that has nothing to begin with and turned it into something. That is inspiring. That is why rags to riches is a literary device.
I looked at both several years ago and picked Python because I thought the language and implementation was cleaner and better designed. The set of libraries was larger and the community was very responsive and helpful. Ruby has come along a lot since, but I still think the advantage is to Python which is still evolving without becoming a junk pile.

But as others have said, the two are close enough that you won't do badly by going with your own preference.
Very well put. A team is only hurting them self if designer|vs|engineer qualms and misunderstandings aren't managed. It's as equally important for the product to work, as it is for the consumer to understand. There are complexities on both ends.
Which muni bus has loads of sweatshop workers?

The trains are fine. The big bus lines like the 38 are pretty good. Some of the other bus lines, like the 19 which goes through the tenderloin to SOMA are gross and can be unpredictable.
Ahhh good ol' Kulveer. Time to revisit my old comment from 292 days ago:

----
As the first poster said, don't believe everything you read. The media is all about hype and thousandaires don't roll off the page.

The details: the acquisition price was $5 Million which was made up of $2 Million Cash and $3 Million Stock.

There were 3 founders, Harjeet Taggar, Kulveer Taggar, Patrick Collison. Each founder held 20.89% of the company at the time of sale. YCombinator held 4.38%. Paul Graham personally held 0.96%.

20.89% of $5 Million is $1,044,500. Of course they only have 40% of that in cash and the other 60% is in stock. The stock was $2.69 the day the deal closed. It's now trading at $2.40. If they still have their shares, they are worth 10% less which is a loss of $62,670.

That is all before tax. Factor in capital gains tax of 10-15% before the stock drop and you are already out of millionaire territory.

On an unrelated note, each of the founders are now making a base salary $100,000 at Communicate.com. This does not include bonuses, options, etc.

Source: http://www.edgar-online.com/bin/cobrand/?doc=A-1108630-00011....

----

So:
Cash (40%):
$1,044,500 * 40% = $417,800

Stock (60%):
March 25, 2008- LIVC 2.69
$1,044,500 * 60% = $626,700
$626,700 / 2.69 = 232,974 Shares

January 23, 2009 - LIVC 0.41
232,974 * 0.41 = $95,519

"to dot-com millions in Silicon Valley - all in just over a year" - article

Yeah right.
I hope he sold his shares in March, cause your stock is down 83% and that means he made barely over $500k, before tax!
132213604
i'l add quickly
Graduate Programs in Programming Language Design
I have a passion for Programming Language Design; designing compilers, languages and dreaming up functional code; I just finished undergraduate studies from Purdue University (BS: Computer Engineering) and would like to pursue the above for further studies...which schools and deptt. that humble readers of HN may know of, would you recommend? It doesn't have to be in US necessarily but that helps...just a bit more on myself; so far, I've not done anything ingenious; just followed standard compiler texts and replicated their code to understand what's going on...in this way, I've implemented compilers for very simple subsets of Java and C. There's obviously so much to do! PS: planning to start with graduate studies in Fall '10 (currently working as .NET developer with an IT Consultancy).
Any help/advice greatly appreciated!
HN rocks! (and "yes", I DO know what a y-combinator is! (yay!)).
Shubham Harnal.
"Taking sides" and "inadequate research" is how news outlets typically work. [..] In short, the news outlet did its job and it's typical journalism.

You must be from the US. That is not good journalism and not what standard journalistic practice mandates. Sadly poor research in the media does seem to be predominant in the US media.

The news outlet did not do its job unless its job was solely to rile up its local readership. Perhaps they do consider that their job - it's a common issue with local news outlets - but that's not how journalism is supposed to operate.

Of course, maybe they know what they're talking about on subjects that you don't know.

Maybe they do, but if they're not honest about what they do and do not know, then you have no basis on which to trust anything they say.
Outlook works for businesses that have implemented AD and require an internal address book, accessible by all.

MS Access databases or Excel spreadsheets for small businesses that tend not to have AD set up.

Go for CSV to start with.
Being the next Zuckerberg might be a lot like being the next Bruce Willis

I don't imagine having to worry about this any time soon, but if anyone described me as "the next Zuckerberg", I'd need three or four strong people on hand to restrain me from getting in a fight.
Did you even read the article?

Replying to people who contacted you first is not mass messaging.
Amen.

The right approach is to understand /why/ it's hard from the front-end so you can make your back-end more suitable to the front.

I still don't know how to answer when people ask if I am a front-end or a back-end developer. I just don't get it. I used to think I could claim to be a back-end guy because I do know SQL, but I don't know how to make pretty mockups in Photoshop. But now it's apparent that knowing HTML and CSS and JS makes me a "front-end" developer in many people's eyes, so I've gone back to not knowing how to answer. It's like asking whether I walk primarily with my right leg or my left.

I think the dichotomy broke completely when Ajax came on the scene. In earlier times it was possible to pretend that the division between client-side code and server-side code was aligned with the division between the presentation layer and the logic and persistence layers of your app. That alignment was never very clean (there are limits to what you can rearrange with CSS alone, and while JS can theoretically rearrange everything the result is liable to be slow and fragile and terrifying to behold, and obviously the needs of the interface designer need to drive the optimization of the back-end data store, etc.), but you could still pretend. The ever-increasing role of client-side JS makes that view of the world less tenable. Now some logic lives on the client as well as on the server, and Google Gears threatens to give the client persistent storage as well, and the interaction between client and server can potentially have a lot more moving parts, and a developer gains a big advantage by having a basic understanding of the entire stack.
The startup world requires intensity and focus. With a lot less effort, you can get a kickass job earning two hundred grand a year. Your startup will fail because millions of dollars might be different from hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they just aren't different enough to justify that much effort.

I'm in a startup. Admittedly, I'm doing it, in part, for the material benefits... but I'm taking the long view, knowing that my short-term fortune is highly uncertain. I realize that I might never see a dime from this particular startup, but I figure that what I'm gaining from the experience, because I'm learning 5x more per unit time than I ever did in a corporate job, will benefit me in the long run. I might never be a millionaire, or even see the "kickass job earning two hundred grand a year" (although I've had average-ish jobs close to that) but I feel like I'll be employable in more interesting roles on account of the knowledge I'm gaining here.
When "85.7% of the population [of India] was living on less than $2.50 (PPP) a day in 2005" is it really that surprising that they are only at 2.8% penetration?

Many people in India are just trying to make enough to eat and survive. You think they care about using the internet?

Source: http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165...

I guess I'm just trying to point out that the 2.8% really isn't that bad when you consider how many people are living below the poverty line.

Once internet access via cellphone becomes affordable to the masses like voice is, expect this number to explode.
This makes me more interested in how he was able to convince Sacca and Buchheit to be on board.
I agree with the author that while PHP is aesthetically ugly, it works well in its niche and already has so much momentum there's basically no point to doing a rewrite.

I also think a rewrite is poinless because in many ways Lua is already a better PHP. It's easy to learn, blazing fast, small and portable. You can easily embed it in web pages with <? or <% tags just like PHP and other scripting languages.

As far as I know the only thing missing is an Apache module of the quality of mod_php. There is a mod_lua, though it appears to have been neglected for a while.

So rather than a rewrite of PHP, I'd rather see someone put the time into getting Lua up to snuff for solid web development, because it's already pretty close.
We definitely thought of it for Luka Damian Kirigin. LDK sounds like an electro krew or a fancy airport.
Have you used Lua for building web apps? I'm thinking of giving it a try.
Some sort of Lua module went into the Apache core svn tree, and is being actively worked on:

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/httpd/httpd/trunk/modules/lua/R...

But I don't think that will cut it in terms of making PHP go away. There has always been competition for PHP, but it's pretty popular right now, and it will be hard to displace...
Censorship By Glut
That's a pretty deceptive title. It's friism's conclusion that TDD makes you work harder, not The Economist's. I'm not saying I disagree with the notion, but half the reason I read the article was to find out why The Economist might be talking about TDD.
Also, what happened to the investment of 180,000 GBP?
I doubt Gates is aware of this fascinating statistical truth: in the third world when you lower the death rate from disease, living standards fall and malnutrition gets worse. It's the same dynamic that sent living standards way up in the wake of the plague in europe. Living standards in much of west africa are now something like half what they were 100 years ago because medical technology keeps the death rate down.
The times in my life when I have made the most money, has been when I set out to make money. So, thanks for the commentary, I think I'll take my chances.
All I did was scan the article for a mention of archive.org and there was none and I was once again reminded of how these big media outlets get technology soooo wrong...

This will continue to happen. As technology continues to "grow" exponentially, finding journalists/bloggers who can keep up with it will be increasingly more difficult.

I wonder if we can measure the approach of The Singularity with it. If we define The Singularity as the milestone when technology progresses itself faster than humans can improve it, then the world must get more confused about technology as we approach that milestone.
> There are few applications of, say, category theory to real life.

...and there you have nicely summed up why CS appeals to me as a field: it is an arena in which interesting, contemporary mathematics can have an immediate and practical application in solving real-world problems.
I've long thought one of the biggest problems with PHP, the ugly inconsistent non-namespaced standard library, could be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility.

While keeping the current function-names for backwards compatibility, move them all into namespaces while correcting syntactical inconsistencies, poor naming and other problems. In the long-run, deprecate the old function names and move the old PHP4 functions into an PHP.ini switch or importable library.
Yes, you need to know design. Even if you hire a designer, you'll be better off in understanding what you're paying for, being able to maintain the site they deliver (and being able to tell if what they give you is maintainable).

I learned design by reading a bit on CSS, JS, and reverse engineering & imitating sites that have a certain effect I'm trying to get. Firebug is awesome. jQuery is awesome. Blueprint CSS might be what you need, or it might get in the way, but give it a try.

Oh, and don't be afraid to break the "rules". If your page looks and works the way you want, you win, even if you used (gasp!) tables.
Funny you find $70K a lot of money. I know a lot of people who'd find that too little. I completely agree though; it's more than enough to live a comfortable life. It's easy to be pushed into jobs you don't really like just to 'keep up with the Joneses'.
How about telecommuting from where you are/want to be? Are any of those of you hiring willing to engage telecommuters?
A kid that has nothing to begin with and turned it into something. That is inspiring. That is why rags to riches is a literary device.

I suspect, but cannot prove, that people who start startups are those who could succeed in other fields, but turn down the steady paycheck for the chance to do their own thing. There certainly are people who started a company because Microsoft wouldn't hire them, but there are plenty more who were hired by Microsoft and realized that they could capture more of the benefits of what they were doing if they set out on their own. Rags-to-riches is a literary device because big-paycheck to big-IPO-payday is not quite so compelling -- and because there's a bigger audience of people who want to believe, and want to be told to believe, that they can succeed despite prior failures.

They can always get another high paying job.

But they can't get back the time they lost, and when that time is worth six figures with a high growth rate, that's a huge cost. In one of his essays, Paul Graham made the point that starting a startup is just barely more expensive than being unemployed -- the flip side of which is that it's not such a huge risk to start one, if you're unemployed. If you do have a job, it's more of a sacrifice.
Three tips from a young dad:
1. Take photos and videos - lots. watch your white balance ... Seeing how much our boy has changed in his 8 months is amazing.
2. Work less. This is a hard one, but working a 4 day work week (or 6 ...) and devoting an entire day to just George time is the incredible. My Fridays with my boy are worth more than money / success / code.
3. Help out with those late night feedings - diaper, rocking, etc. It's amazing how good you'll get at changing diapers when totally asleep - oh, and um, yeah, make sure he's aiming down when you diaper him. Trust me on that one.
I straddle the line between these worlds. My day job is frontend development with some Ruby here and there, while I've been designing and building out a Rails app on the side.

I think my response would be similar to your 'developer-side' response - if at any point in working on a project I find myself confronted with something I do not understand, I have this compulsive urge to figure it out. In the process, I've saved myself thousands of dollars by investing a few days to learn what I need to at the time to get around the problem.

It sounds like you're a great Ruby developer with a leg up on all of the new "ZOMG RAILS!" converts. Don't be too concerned about the "jack of all trades, master of none" category. If you're working on building a company from scratch, product guys/gals are key - people who may not be experts in everything, but can get the job done for rev1 no matter what. If you can play that role yourself, you'll have far fewer people to depend on.

If you decide to work on the frontend yourself, start with raw HTML and forget that CSS exists entirely. This might help you to think of HTML/CSS as a backend developer.

HTML is just XML with a fixed set of elements that are named according to their purpose and have specific functions in a document - and you'll probably only need a small subset of them. So, look at your comp and think of the elements in it; paragraphs, lists, images, buttons, links, etc. Then, start writing what seems like an XML document describing it. Again, don't even think about styling it at this point. Just build the best web page that 1994 ever saw:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Application</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="header">
<div id="branding">(Name, logo, etc. here)</div>
<div id="nav">(Navigation)</div>
</div>
<div id="content" class="column">(Main app content)</div>
<div id="sidebar" class="column">(Sidebar content, if you have one)</div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</body>
</html>

Once you've got your document written, you can start to tackle CSS. Since you've got a valid, well-formed document composed of semantically-meaningful elements, you'll find it much easier to style than people who focus upon the look of the document as they write it rather than its well-formed-ness. If you choose to hand it off to a dedicated frontend developer at this point, they'll be grateful that you've provided them with a solid canvas to build on.

Good luck building your application; whichever route you choose, let us know when it launches!

And if you'd like any recommendations for either a designer or just someone who can slice and dice a comp, let me know; I've got a few solid friends who charge reasonable rates and have some availability coming up.
You are missing a critical caveat about these statistics:

"*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs."

In countries like China and India, PDA's and smart phones are the only computing device in the home for a large segment of the population. My guess is that the percentage on the internet is much higher when this is taken into account. As emerging economies like China and India build a larger middle class with more disposable income, more people will buy "traditional" computers and possibly wired internet as well. Though, I also wouldn't be surprised if the majority of China's internet remains via wireless -- from what I've seen, China may actually have a better wireless infrastructure than the U.S.
The future is languages that target a VM. Once you have a VM humming along on any webserver, you can apply any language you want to that VM.

If today's PHP used a VM, writing a "new PHP" would be pretty straightforward. You wouldn't have to worry about backward compatibility since "old PHP" would target that same VM, too.

You could use the basic syntax, do all your fun namespacing, break oldly named functions out of the core language, etc.

If someone attempts the build a "new PHP", targeting Parrot or the JVM would be the way to go.

ColdFusion made a similar break a few years ago. They rebuilt the entirely language in Java, and now ColdFusion is basically a layer on top of Java.
CSS/HTML is simple as shit. Frameworks like Blueprint make layouts/grids easy as anything.
Give more programmers/developers their own tech columns. They're the best people to know the cutting edge.