mtbcoder

True, but by doing apt-get install php you won't be up and running either. My point was really to clarify that you don't need a full blown framework to run basic Python scripts for web programming purposes and also to state that the barrier to entry for Python isn't really that much higher than PHP.

Laravel (or any other PHP framework) also requires an "up-front install", but you don't need a framework like Django to "slap" together a Python program for web purposes either. What you need is an understanding of what a CGI application does and how to deploy one with your favorite web server. Deploying a Python application with Apache/mod_wsgi (or nginx/uwsgi) is really no more difficult than deploying a PHP application with Apache/PHP-FPM or FastCGI.

Regarding information overload, it seems that this is on track to get much worse before it gets better (if it ever does get better). Subsequently, I think we are building up to a large scale consumer backlash or implosion against "hyper connected-ness" as no one will be able to physically parse, consume and manage the deluge of bits and choices thrown at them. I think we'll get to a point of peak information and at which point it will be more hip to be offline...at least that's the hypothesis that's been ever so slowly nagging me in the back of my mind.

Working face-to-face is wonderful, however, the rigid need to have "bodies in chairs" 8+ hours a day seems quite antiquated. It's simply a gross inefficiency when you consider that realistically an office worker is able to provide, at maximum, 4 to 6 hours worth of output a day.

The title of the article is a bit unfortunate. The context is about "information overload" from over-consumption and not that the act of reading is itself harmful.

That would presume we are all collectively interested in reducing complexity and work. Too often these complexities exist to benefit a small minority at the expense of the majority. For example: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mill...

Is it not the job of the contracting companies to find and retain the talent though? One major issue that I see with many of these government contracting companies is that they exist only to support the US government. They have no other clients, no products of their own and no non-government projects coming in. How many young developers want to join companies like that? How long until even more experienced developers move on to more interesting work? I just cannot fathom many of these companies being sustainable in the long run. As for the government, I believe it would be in their better interests to starting working more with companies outside of the beltway for a change.

> "Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda"

This was starting to be discussed on HN the other day, but unfortunately didn't seem to get much traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202533

I very much agree with the Buddhist thought process that compassion, empathy are pivotal to well-being. I was a bit disappointed that these were absent from the list. In my opinion they are foundational in regards to points 4 through 7.

> I'm sure they could trim the fat

Indeed, the article mentions they were paying for office space in both Manhattan and San Francisco.

Not scientific, but I find I have less eye strain with dark themes.

> If 1 reporter writes "Top 6 reasons why kittens are cute - number 5 will SHOCK YOU", the potential audience is millions. You can scale your content as needed, and readers / writer is potentially unlimited.

Even in this scenario you still need a tremendous amount of domain authority and/or a Herculean marketing effort to achieve any kind of traction in terms of traffic.

I don't mean to be snarky, but is there something terribly interesting going on here? The only bit that seemed somewhat interesting was the "AI page curation" tool, but they hardly touched on that other than to mention that it was a Grails application, which was then ported to CakePHP, which was then ported to be a WP plugin.

"No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it)."

This is a double-edged sword that can get you into trouble quickly. Personally, I prefer systems that focus on one thing and one thing only.

"I attributed it mostly to WordPress being WordPress though."

One of the unfortunate issues with Wordpress is their continued support for outdated PHP versions. Wordpress is compatible with as far back as PHP 5.2.4, which was released back in 2007. There have been many performance improvements to PHP since the early versions of 5.x. The fact that Wordpress is eating up so much CPU on trivial CRUD logic is probably attributed to the sheer amount of technical debt/cruft in the code base, but also compounded by the need (insistence?) to support legacy systems, thus not being able to take advantage of newer features of PHP.

> " And now these things have gotten so easy that the value of knowing how to do them is basically zero."

Have they gotten easier...or have you, yourself, gained more experience and knowledge that you understand things better now?

"I'm sure there were plenty of skateboarding companies that tried to stick with the old style and simply went out of business."

All of skateboarding came to the brink of collapse in the late 80s and early 90s. No company was making any kind of money off the sport, only a few made just enough to keep some small sliver still alive. Major brands went under, skate parks went under, shops went under, contests ended, ramps went into disrepair, "vert" was declared dead and anyone who still enjoyed skating was harassed and ostracised as outcasts.

It wasn't until about a decade later that modern skateboarding, as we see it today, saw some hope of resurgence and was able to rekindle itself from the ashes of its former glory. All thanks in part to the those that trudged on during the rough times just for the love of the sport.

In the past, Twitter did provide RSS feeds of your status updates.

Wouldn't RSS fit this role?

I think much of the hatred towards PHP fundamentally comes down to the fact that it broke down a lot of barriers to entry in the web development world which allowed for anyone with a basic text editor to patch together CRUD apps. This led to an army of "w3cschools.com developers" referring to themselves as software engineers, which offended many in enterprise Java land.

> Think about the problem as this: A worker sets up a website offering services. A potential customer is looking for a local purveyor of that service to hire. How does the customer find the website? If there are 25 local workers willing to do the job, how does the customer choose between them?

Right, but these issues that the Web currently faces (discovery, signal-to-noise ratio for example) will plague any given open marketplace after a critical mass is reached as well.

> If the customer wants to pay with a credit card, how does the worker get the money?

There are numerous payment systems that aren't terribly difficult to implement for small transactions (PayPal, Stripe, et al). Sure, a little HTML, JS knowledge might be needed, but that is really nothing difficult to do after a small amount of reading.

You mean the Web?

I agree, but I'm not questioning whether or not the service sector is growing. The rise of the freelancer/contractor in any given industry seems to have grown exponentially just in the last decade alone. If we assume this to be the "answer" the free market has, I simply do not see how this is sustainable on a large scale. It seems to me that we would rapidly have an excess of service providers in an ever-shrinking pool of service consumers. Furthermore it would introduce a whole new set of issues from exploitation to underbidding/cutting.

I'm not following how the "service sector" is any kind of answer to the problems and issues we are facing with regards to automation and labour.

Contract programming parallels much of what he says about contract teaching, with the added difficulty of having to track down and find projects to work on.

"Learn to code in order to generate side income" isn't as simple as it sounds. I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.

This was also my experience. Years 1 and 2 covered general programming concepts like data structures and algorithms. Years 3 and 4 transitioned into lower level topics like compiler design, some embedded work, lots of math. However, as most CS depts at the time we're relatively young, they had gaps to fill, which usually meant adding on more math courses to the curriculum to fill credit requirements.

I am sure these days CS depts are far more comprehensive than 15, 20 years ago and can offer many more courses in advanced programming topics (for example big data, enterprise, security, distributed, project management, mobile, etc).

DHTML? I haven't heard that term used in a while. I think can translate that job posting as such: "In order to save costs, we've trimmed all developer positions except one. You will be the sole developer responsible for everything we do. You will always need to be on-call to work, even if it's formatting a Wordpress post for an editor on a Saturday night. You will work long hours but we'll only pay for 40/week, no overtime. Your salary will be peanuts and will not cover the cost of living in Washington, DC. Be a team player and join us."

True, but then really no one could be considered a "full stack" developer. Personally, I consider "full stack" to be just a blanket statement to mean people who have no problems wearing different hats and can figure things out to get the job done. Unless they've been pigeon-holed their entire careers due to enterprise specialization or are just that closed-minded to learning new things, I think most good developers end up becoming "full stack" after enough time.

Unfortunately, government purchasing isn't that simple. It's really much more complex and rewards those who know the system. A convoluted RFP would need to be issued and some vendor listed in a GSA database would wind up with the contract. Not necessarily because they are better (and certainly not cheaper), but because they can navigate the procurement process and avoid the red-tape pitfalls.

In the US, especially in the Midwest, former farm fields are quickly flipped and filled with stick-built homes in mere months. Seems pretty "mass-produced" to me.