skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is more or less what happened to me. I had worked in the sofware industry for 15 years, when I decided to get out. Not a developer, but a trajectory of pre-sales support/training, systems analyst, project manager, consultant, and doing a few startups that made me enough money to live, but nothing spectacular.

I took my hobby, sustainable large scale horticulture and tried to switch by starting with a degree in environmental science. Actually taking a degree as an experienced adult was a blast and I can really recommend it. Motivation, even if lectures where boring or subjects hard, was never an issue.

I ended up meeting people at conferences, in my field of study (geology/hydrology) who really needed help with data/information technology. We started a new organisation and I am the co-director of a foundation that run data services for sustainable international development. We have 25+ governments in Africa, Asia and Soth America, UN organisations and hundreds of NGOs use our open source services. Very satisfying work and a decent living.
Yes!

I'm pretty un-hireable right now. I have 4 years experience as a dev, 1.5 in sales, 1.5 in marketing, and <1 as a founder. So ... I started a company making marketing analytics software. It's pretty great!

One of the most fun things about my path in the last couple of years has been embracing the actual problem the business is trying to solve, instead of just the neat tech that powers it. For me, it's a lot more fun to work on problems that have that tightened feedback loop (e.g., somebody gives you money because you solved their problem). It meant breaking a lot of the ties in my head between easy/hard and worthless/valuable -- sometimes the most valuable thing about your software is the weekly update email.

To OP, without a BUNCH more information about what you like and what you can do, I can't suggest a new path. But you probably know something about the products and markets at the companies you worked at. See if any of the other departments have openings for somebody with deep product knowledge. It's easier to switch careers within the same company than it is to jump companies to a different role.
This is so true. I think about this all the time. I actually believe that this type of scenario will be what makes software better in 10-15 years for industries that currently still run on old tech. Those of us on HN right now may end up in different sectors leading "software related" projects and have really good insights on how to scope out the domains.
Since they're compiled into the code, it means you can't change them without recompiling, so they're not actually configuration. But they're not actually code either, so they can't be subclassed or inherited, don't support generics, and have other quirks [1]. Furthermore, they are a sort of explicit notation to make you feel like you're getting 'convention' over 'configuration', but if it were truly convention you wouldn't need them in the first place.

For example, to teach my class how to serialize itself into JSON, I can compile com.fasterxml.jackson annotations into it, but by doing so I've made a particular JSON library a dependency of myproject-datatypes. I'd rather my myproject-controller or some other layer of my application take care of how the data looks over JSON. Luckily Jackson supports an entirely different way [2] of teaching it how to map a class, but not all libraries are so nice.

That is not to say annotations don't have their place. They're good declarative structures, but in my opinion they are used in places where they shouldn't be. This blog post [3] from 2009 accurately describes how I feel about annotations.

[1] http://www.cowtowncoder.com/blog/archives/2009/02/entry_216....

[2] https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-docs/wiki/JacksonMixInA...

[2] http://naildrivin5.com/blog/2009/03/11/java-annotations-java...
My 18 month year old wrote this sorry can't delete it
I have been programming for longer than the OP, I have an advanced degree, and I can assure you: unless you have research-level skills in these areas, they will fall out of fashion and you will be stranded in a niche. Even if you do have PhD-level training, you'll still be in that niche...you just might be able to survive when the pond dries up again.

I know it doesn't seem like it to folks who haven't been around for long, but AI and ML is a fad, currently at Peak Hype. There will continue to be AI researchers in a decade, but they will be the people who are in it for the long term. The magpies who are currently swarming into the field will flitter away when the Next Big Thing comes along.

I point this out only because the OP specifically mentions how the treadmill of constant learning leaves you in place in this industry...and this is a great example of how it happens. If you spend your life chasing every five-year fad cycle in tech, hoping for continued relevance, you'll burn out. Moreover, you'll always be at a competitive disadvantage to the 20-something new grad who knows the new shiny as well as you do, and works for praise and pizza.

If you want to specialize, then really specialize. But be prepared to devote a big chunk of your life to it.
The 1980s were the era of clever supercomputing architechures. You had the onset of computed aided design of CPUs or boards; an individual, or small group, could design an d build a supercomputer. PC or Workstation CPU chips were not yet powerful enough to dethrone mainframes or supercomputers. I was science grad student at Stanford that time. On a monthly basis it seemed some new supercomputer company would try to sell us their clever new machine in the million dollar range: supercomputing for the price of a departmental computer.

But these super companies could only update their architectures every 3-5 years, whereas Intel was chugging out faster CPU every year or six months. It only took a decaded for a commodity cluster to beat a mini supercomter company in price-performance. Most these companies never made it to 3.0.
Apart from not knowing, do you have any reason to believe the Republican campaign is any better?
The observation that "no breakfast" is #1 way to lose weight by extending fasting period that includes sleep is pretty astonishing. Everything I have read says no breakfast is one of the contributors to weight gain.
That's awesome! Thanks
The author asks for evidence of GPLv3 software hurting people. This includes the Linux kernel, for which there are many examples of incidents. The below was the first I found[1] and it has the benefit of involving multiple open-source projects under different licenses.

The idea that software is inherently safer because it's released under an open-source license is overly simplistic in the extreme. Just the most obvious reason for this is that opportunity for independent review doesn't guarantee that review will happen. The wisdom of the crowd doesn't guarantee a third party review will be better or more thorough than a solid first party system. Open-source provides the possibility of review, and that's all. Hypothetical eyes make no bugs shallow.

Edit - I'm not making a claim one way or the other about the relative safety of open vs proprietary software, I'm merely saying that the comparison is deeper and more nuanced than the way it is typically portrayed.

1 - http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28867113
I can't believe no one has mentioned opening up a retail, foodchain (not a restaurant), coffeeshop or franchising. If you open one of these in a good location you can make really really good coin. It's crazy how much money coffee shops in my campus makes. There are more than 20 coffee shops in a 1km radius and they are all making insane profits for a medium size campus.
You pay extra for Macs so you don't have to spend as much time to set it up.

Your time is valuable, right?
7 years of Weibo
It is amusing in the late 1800s some physicists were declaring physics a dead end because most problems had been solved, save for a few rough edges.

There are people today making the same claim.
Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
I'm doing the ML course at the moment and I'm asked to pay for a certificate after every screen.
Especially if you are not going to practice at the end, consider going abroad to study (might be possible even with family, definitely possible without).

The costs in western europe are about 15%-20%. The costs in eastern europe are half that, and in some places in Asia it is cheaper still. If you want to practice in the US, you will have to take some local-law courses (law) and pass the bar/board exams - but it will still be infinitely cheaper than in the US.

And it will be an adventure.
I'm 54 and have never wanted to move out of development.

I've ended up team leading a number of times, but always with plenty of development time. I'm at my happiest when I'm in a straight development role, and I don't see that changing.
JCSAT-16 Mission in Photos
actually I never had blacklisting problems on aws ses.
My guess would be that the big providers ignoring the blaklists for themself.
I mean even Google sometimes gets on a blacklist or Microsoft on still no email happened to be in Spam filter.
The question to ask is why so many races end up so close that we need millisecond precision? For races that end so close, I suspect winner is determined by random chance instead of true differentiation. The length of pool precision is not real concern but rather the possibility that we are hitting human + tech ceiling in this particular sport.
Talk to people who you want to help. Try to figure out if you're good at something they're not.

If you start a startup, you're going to spend every waking hour for, like, 2 years thinking about the problems your customers have. (After that, you'll start thinking about building / structuring your company more.) You have to like them. You have to understand them. Your current ideas about what will sell and scale are, at best, poorly specified. Go ask people what their hopes and fears are.

On the other hand, you also have to actually provide something novel. Think about what you believe that's contrarian, or you learned in the last year or two about the current state of things. Write that down, but don't spend a ton of time on it. That's probably going to be at the root of the solution you come up with.

For me, this was marketing analytics. I was working in marketing, and I like marketers. I was a dev for a while, so I knew how to glue together the data sets marketers used. The specific problem/answer took a solid 6 months to really come together, because it took me 6 months to go have a couple dozen really solid conversations with VPs of Marketing. It turns out there's about 3 classes of tools that are vastly underutilized by modern B2B marketers because they're poorly integrated. If you put them together, a 4th tool naturally emerges. So we're building that. It's going to take a while, because it's a lot of functionality, but it certainly wasn't something that we knew we were going to build at the beginning of the journey.

Go talk to people. Empathize, be curious, apply your slant. Your start is going to have your fingerprints all over it, so don't be afraid to get really personal about finding a problem that gets you excited to solve.
I once rubbed a friend the wrong way when he said "maybe I'll just get out of tech, take a few years of courses and become an electrician or something like that. Make 100k and be happy with that... leave the computer behind."

My response was: "Fine plan but don't think you'll just go make 100k after a couple years of trade school and not have any stresses!"

A few people showed me I was wrong about that but we were also living in Alberta while oil was still strong. Had my friend taken this path he likely wouldn't have made 100k for long if at all (until he had much more experience).

Anyway, point being, it's hard to go make decent money even though we all meet people who seem to do so with what seems like little effort. Lots of folks say they make good money but their interpretation of "good money" might be much different than the yours.
The savages! Ternary logic is best logic.
Some of the modern courthouses reduce the courthouse violence problem with a "triple entrance" system, one for all the court personal, a second for defendants briefly released from county jail, and a third for public witnesses and spectators. You dont have the hallway encounters between the three parties you had in older facilities.
Depends where she was studying as well. I'm in the UK and my elec engineering masters was £4k. They've since hiked the fees for higher education and my medical degree is ~£36k. Still, that's 9 years of education for 1 years of dev salary, plus I work for a startup whilst studying. It's definitely doable!
From The Success Manual: https://www.thesuccessmanual.in/chapter/45-things-you-should...
In many states the prison system costs more and contains more people than their school system.
Out of curiosity, your later-in-life college experience: what kind of school was it at? (Meaning: large state university, liberal arts college, Yale, for-profit, etc.) As a college dropout who was a terrible student, I've been wanting to go back more and more as time passes.
Technically a lane cant be shorter in a swimming pool.
Well yes, but Olympic athletes and audiences tend not to like it very much if we try to do 50 replicates of the same race.
I had a need to test random requests, so I built this: http://loadme.socialtalents.com/

Enter something like:
http://domain.com/article/$RND(1000,9999)} to get random urls every time.

Please note, that website needs to be public accessible.
So all we need to do to create more jobs is abolish the minimum wage? The savings will be used to create more jobs! Econ 101 doesn't actually explain the world that well.
Every year since 2013 was the year of the first Falcon Heavy flight. Maybe this time.
> For torrent sites, this would be an attractive solution because they wouldn’t need to maintain a central HTTP server which implies costs and can be easily shut down. On the other hand, their mutable torrent magnet link cannot be easily shut down, does not imply maintenance costs, and cannot be easily tracked down,

This would imply that all torrent sites exist because they believe in the "cause" and have no other motive. While a small subset might the rest enjoy the ad revenue while appearing to only care about supporting p2p networks.
Good advice for probably every field except law.
Law is so different in most European countries that it won't be of much use in the US. Also a lot in civil law hinges on subtleties in the respective language.
Helpful but not kingpin http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-i...
The one lesson you should probably take from the comments here is that your should take a look at what you enjoy and how you might be able to make a living off it. If your main condition is a big salary and life in a big city, well the consultant world awaits, but it's also not as easy as many here make it sound.

Else, just be honest and see what you really like. A friend of a friend lives somewhere on the African coast and deals in shells. Locals sell them to him, he sells them on to traders abroad. He surely doesn't make 100k, but the change of location and lifestyle also means he doesn't need to.

So: think out of the box. Just make it a new life.
Ask HN: Any great talks you would like to share?
Yesterday I found this talk [1] on the origin of silicon valley in the defense industry, linked in a comment here [2], and couldn't help but sit through the entire thing in one go. So I wonder, what other great, freely available talks or lectures does HN know about?

Rules: Can be on any topic. Can be of any length. Ideally, should be a standalone talk.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12281207
Yeah, that's what I was going for as one is naturally caught and the other is farmed. Not much difference given diamonds created in the lab are more pure than those mined.
One thing to note: when talking to people in-real-life about what they do for a living and how much they earn take everything with a grain of salt. I've had beers with guys that said "dude.. I'm making sick money doing X" only to find out later that "sick money" was $18/hour (in Canada). I've also had similar conversations with other people and found out they meant 300k a year.
In all fairness to United, it's probably pretty difficult to implement real 2FA in COBOL.

(In passing jest to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12246490 )
I think the spec library that they're putting together right now might be able to solve the error messages. What I'm waiting for is to be able to hit something like dot in my ide and see a list of suggestions, I'm not sure if spec can be leveraged to that extent.
Being comfortable is an issue regardless of career. A self-satisfied sales guy who doesn't know the latest buzzwords and customer expectations is as useless as an IT guy who doesn't know the latest buzzwords and optimizations.
Really interesting thought though, experienced coders should be tested about the cutting edge instead of what is familiar
Here at HN, your point could
convince a lot of people
if you gave some solid references
to original sources for your
statements about costs and how
they are covered.

I'm in NYS and have been for 20+ years,
and what I've seen in the last time
or two I renewed the license on my
car was that I paid a surtax
to support the commuter trains,
the MTA. So, it looks like
the car owners are supporting
the trains whether they use the
trains or not. Only once did I
ever get on one of those trains.
And I'm proud to say that I've
never been on a NYC subway.

E.g., I live on a nice street in
the suburbs. There is maintenance
on the streets and snow plowing in
the winters. My impression is that
my local town is paying for that
out of real estate taxes -- if so, then that's
fair since everyone in the suburbs
needs the streets, even if they shop
at Amazon and get deliveries
via FedEx or some such.

But passenger
trains? People in the suburbs
don't need passenger trains so much, and
even if they do they still need
the local streets to go
between the trains and the doors.
So, again, using real estate taxes
to pay for the local streets
is fair enough.

I don't have good data on what the
costs are for Federal highways, bridges,
trains, capex, opex, and
how those costs are being
covered,
but my impression is
that the gas taxes and tolls pay
for what the cars and trucks use
and that in the US it's just
hopeless for the train tickets
to pay for what the trains cost --
but again that's just my impression.

Since I'm not in either the car or
train business, I haven't gotten
the data.

But if you are for trains and want
to convince people, then having
the data on costs and how
they are being covered
would help, really, is crucial.

Uh, writing this, it occurs to me
that to be fair the Federal gas taxes
should need to cover only
the Federally supported highways
and bridges, e.g., the Interstate
highways. In that case, sure,
local real estate taxes
and not Federal gas taxes
may be the main source of funding
for local streets.
I heard somewhere that when we apply all our knowledge to compute the position of the moon, it is a couple of feet off when we measure it, and we don't know why.

I have been trying to find a source for that, but I've failed. Perhaps someone reading this knows? :)
Hitler ransomware just deletes files instead encrypt them
It has also been done by design instead of a fallback.

http://www.boeing.com/features/2015/01/bds-702sp-01-26-15.pa...
Proprietary software doesn't stop people modifying software, it only slows them down.

And it doesn't slow people down anywhere near enough, hence all the talk about DRM, encryption, warranty voiding and anti-convention laws.

There is nothing wrong with allowing people to modify software, the issue is when people modify software to break laws (environmental law, in this case).

The solution is going to be some form of compliance certification/testing. The Manufacture provides the default software and gained a certification to prove it compiles with the laws. If the user wants to modify the software, they are going to have to prove that the replacement software also complies with the laws and get a certificate.

During annual vehicle inspections or licensing, they can check that certified software is installed. Or maybe the ECU's bootloader only allows certified software to be installed, unless a developer mode is enabled (which will require the owner to keep logs to ensure compliance)
Free market in prison products sounds like an oxymoron
There are two sides to this. That story from a few months back about the guy who wrote homebrew getting denied a job at Google because he flubbed some particular algorithm on a whiteboard is pretty messed up. On the other hand, I agree with you that experience tends not to be a particularly accurate predictor of actual skill, and that white board algorithm implementations are at worst a good faith effort to solve the problem of interviewing for competence.
How much of that is paid in rent tho'? Classic landlord tactic, get a business in, if it's a success capture all of its profit, if it goes bust get another one.

As with all things, if it was easy everyone would be doing it...
Providing account authentication as a service seems like a no-brainer.

Does no company in this space know how to sell to conservative IT organizations like air lines?
I uninstalled Viber when the last friend still using it started using WhatsApp.

Btw, everybody still has email and SMS like in the 90s. For me SMS are a fallback when IM won't work for a given person; email is my primary mean of communication for business. Furthermore I can archive and search email much more than IMs.
I have about 3 years of industry experience, but it's been enough to teach me one very valuable lesson: don't transition entirely out of software engineering until you have some reasonable assurance of personal/financial security.

I once transitioned into a more client-oriented role for a brief time and was almost immediately scrambling to claw my way back out for a handful of reasons: (1) the value I was creating became nebulous and hard to define compared to before, (2) I lost the insane value-creation lever that software engineering enables, and (3) things became considerably less deterministic in general.

You really don't need to look any further than the various high-profile executive flameouts of seemingly intelligent people with strong engineering track records (e.g. Marissa Mayer) to understand the problem. You could even be a great manager/salesperson/product designer and still fail because so much is out of your control. I saw this play out repeatedly amongst the various managers and executives at my previous company.

So if you're going to take the risk of escalating beyond the role of an individual contributor, make sure you have a parachute.
Incredibly moving and informative talk about depression and its neurobiological symptoms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
Maybe "undergrowth" is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosmin