Good.. because Netflix Latin America is SEVERELY behind the US version.. so it is very hard to do basic things like bookmark what you'll want to watch later or even find things.

I prefer this site for my Corporate BS. Thanks.

Its hard to say what the future of programming is, but more and more I see voice recognition, computer vision, self driving cars, data mining, and other applications of AI.

While you may not need too much math for basic business oriented software fields that apply AI, that estimate the future, that analyze data may often need quite a bit of math.

Math is basic knowledge that a Software Developer is expected to have. Some may get by without it, lots of us may not use it day to day. But certainly to understand the underlying principles behind algorithms math is very useful. One example is the law of limits for Big-O complexity. Understanding how continuos functions work and how to reason about things to the limit helps you write more scalable software.

Inconvenient.. it means we can feel good about ourselves and continue polluting.

I agree entirely.. try some of these forks: http://www.ruby-lang.org/ http://www.python.org/ http://www.java.com/ http://www.microsoft.com/net, http://nodejs.org/

They are actually good for a change!

Exactly my problem with PHP programmers: "lets me code whatever the hell I want"

and ignore any innovations introduced in programming languages 50 years ago like "functional-programming hipster crap".

I think it is time to get an education about programming languages and become a professional. You can't continue to use that PHP pacifier forever!

The world is bigger than PHP and full of scary concepts like:
- error handling
- closures
- multi-threading/parallelism
- production quality
- reusable APIs

Well, my experience was from an overseas embassy.. not from within the US. Maybe there's a difference there.

Wow.. its clear to me that you've never actually gone through the legal immigration process. It is much worse than you paint it out to be. At best, you'll get treating with disrespect, dismisive attitude, rudeness, made to wait entire days in line, etc.. I speak from experience as a US citizen who had to get a visa for his wife.

At worse, well.. there's no end to how bad they can and do treat people when all they are wanting to do is go on with their life.

Even then, legal immigrants or legal visitors to the US get treated like Al Qaeda every by unprofessional TSA types, and rude immigration officials at the border.

I was looking at the stats to see why Brazil and other S.American countries didn't fair so well (Brazil had 520+ participants!). When look through the first problem I see that it makes reference to something that is "one-to-one" and "onto". While many Americans know that a "one-to-one" function is an injective function and an "onto" function is "surjective" many people from other cultures/languages may have a hard time understading what they're referring to.

Since this is a programming contest and not a language contest, potentially troublesome terms for non-natives should be spelled out carefully or better yet there should be some translations in some of the other world languages besides English. Otherwise, English speaking countries and more developed countries in general will have an unfair advantage.

Step aside sonny...

The story in Afghanistan doesn't begin with the Taliban harbouring Osama bin Laden.. it starts much earlier with the US supporting the Mujahedin in Afghanistan under the pretext of "holy war" in the middle of the Cold War to oppose the Soviets.

Once the Soviets left Afghanistan, the US abandoned its allies and 10 years of civil war ensued culminating with the Taliban.

Since the original poster wanted advise about web apps (and not mere flamewars re: Java vs PHP) here goes an attempt at some advice on creating a "modern" web app:

1. Get familiar with CSS3 and other enhancements to make your app mobile friendly.
2. Get a modern looking design. Usually this means pure colors .. think Sesame Street.com. Of course this much depends on your audience.
3. Start learning HTML5
4. Don't write raw JS. Use jQuery or some other JS framework (Dojo, ExtJS/Sencha, GWT, etc..) to keep your JS compatible accross browsers.
5. Consider CSS frameworks like Blueprint
6. The Rails tutorial has some good tips on modern sites. Including using RESTful URLs instead of *.jsp, *.asp, *.php file extensions (who cares what language you're using.. why should that be exposed to the user)
7. Gather detailed stats on your site visitors (info is gold these days)
8. Simplify your login/registration process. Consider using OpenID, or OAuth for site access
9. Use a third party library/module for authentication/authorization if a good one is available for your platform.. don't re-invent the wheel
10. Use a third party library/module for credit card processing (I like Shopify's ActiveMerchant)

I'm sure others have good tips as well. A lot of this is really language/platform agnostic.

I bet GP doesn't even know what "static analysis" is.. hence the lack of knowledge about Eclipse.

PHP is garbage. Bad design all over the place. And I'm talking both about the language as well as the standard mess it calls a "library". It is the new BASIC.. stay away it'll damage your brain. For details see:

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

There are better alternatives if you want to go the dynamic route: Ruby on Rails and I hear Python / Django is great too.

There's nothing wrong with Java as long as you know how to use it. But its always good to learn a new language. ASP.Net is also nice if you don't want to go dynamic.

The hardest part about moving away from Java is losing all the cool static analysis tools that are incorporated in Eclipse as well as tools such as FindBugs. But our experience with RoR (in spite of it missing some needed feature many Java frameworks have).

In summary: learn anything but PHP.. it truly is garbage that must die.

My 4 year old Dell Vostro has a 15" screen and 1680x1050 resolution.. The minimum acceptable resolution for a laptop in my opinion.

What I tend to look for:
- good resolution
- good battery time
- reasonably fast
- tons of ram
- average disk size

I thought the TSA was the one that got all touchy!