skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My anecdotal experience:

I'm ~40 with ~15 years of dev experience and 4 of management experience. I last year I decided to return to IC dev work and started applying for full-stack dev roles.

After two months and not getting few responses to applications, I put my resume in front of my tech recruiter friend:

"You sound ancient. Delete the first 10 years of your work history and take the date off your CS degree."

Whaaaat? I was incredulous at first, but eventually did as he said.

It would seem he was right though. I started getting significantly more responses to applications and inquiries from recruiters on LinkedIn.
40 is not the new 60. Not even close.

At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done and my pay has been better than ever. I'm 52 now and the trend has only gotten better.

Why? Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech, I understood of the whole business process and I had the maturity to deal with people in a productive way. You won't find all of those in a 25 year old developer.

The only way that age becomes a detriment is if you do not grow. I worked with someone my age who only strong skills are a large enterprise storage system. He is a dinosaur and his future is limited. That's not his age, its the way he chose to build is CV.

I focused on learning new tech; Python, Go, Kubernetes, Cloud, etc. I've also spend a lot of time learning the business aspects of my industry and I've learned to be less of a jerk to people and how to communicate. At 52, I have recruiters contact me all the time.

Age is just number guys. Stay current, keep learning and stay strong.
tfw this post told me facebook was offline.
Let’s Secure WiFi Network and Prevent WiFi Hacking- https://www.hackerslist.co/lets-secure-wifi-network-and-prev...
> There’s some really really neat projects in the Julia community though, and some super smart and very hard working people

Absolutely. The people behind Turing, Flux, Zygote, and many others are obviously gifted. But they really need to invest on the practical CS side of things if they wish to further the general use of Julia – something that if unfortunately hard to sell in an academic context :/
probably a testimony to the cost of aws lock-in
Prior to me becoming more privacy conscious I had 700+ "friends", of which less than 250 I actually ever met or was acquainted with. I recall one very specific interaction with one of those random requests of some person adding me and claiming to be Demi Lovato (I'd no idea who that was at the time) with their name spelled really oddly (I can't remember exactly, but they were trying to spell Demi Lovato but with random word or characters in between to make it look mildly like Demi's name, but not really). This interaction was somewhat of a wake-up call and that's when I realised I shouldn't be accepting random requests.

Afterwards my friend's list hovered around 150. These were family, close friends, less close friends, and acquaintances. I also had hundreds on my friend requests lists by the time I deleted my FB around 2015.
French employees also get a pre-filled tax return, they just need to check that it is correct.
Google Home can hear me whispering on the other side of the room, and usually do the right thing. Meanwhile, Siri on my watch gets triggered by the hiss of a running tap or a sizzling frying pan.
I don’t blame the unvaccinated for the continuation of the pandemic, but they can clearly be blamed for overflowing hospitals. The vaccine sharply reduces severe symptoms and long term symptoms.
The second you put it on an iPhone I'll find a way to accidentally break it.
Ok, users are dissatisfied with maintenance windows, I can understand that. But I'd bet they'd be even more dissatisfied if their payment would be booked incorrectly because of a deployment glitch while they were ordering something. So in some cases maintenance windows are still the safest bet...
Sorry to hear that. Having had a wife with medical issues I feel your pain. No matter what you do, you feel guilty or frustrated, which makes everything else frustrating too.

If financially able I would recommend hiring people to help. It can be from care, to cleaning the house, getting your groceries. Outsourcing costs money, but it will create time for yourself.
I agree. I see being smart as the ability to learn some things quickly. However, you have to apply this in the right way and that's why other character traits are important - such as wisdom, kindness, patience. If being "smart" is someone's main personality trait, I think they might miss out on the bigger picture.
The 'I can't code architects' is definitely a common thing, but I suggest it's kind of a different problem.

But for dudes that are coding though, it's cool to see how 'I have solved this problem 100 times already' comes through in solving a problem sometimes.
Host here. Thanks for sharing this.
True, but it might not be a zero-sum argument. I think the point I'm making might not explain ageism in it's entirity but I feel it's a factor. Time will tell I guess.
It might be because my background is CS and not hard science, but non-ASCII variable names are one of the most baffling decisions I have ever seen in any programming language.

Whatever reading comprehension advantage they may carry is completely negated by the fact that they can't be typed from a regular keyboard.

I hear it's gaining traction, though, so it's likely many of the problems you mention will be fixed or mitigated, eventually.
> Emily Stark writes: "Breaking changes happen often on the web, and as a developer it's good practice to test against early release channels of major browsers to learn about any compatibility issues upfront." ... First, she is flat out wrong – breaking changes happen very rarely on the web ... But second, and far more disturbing, is the notion that web developers should be continually testing their websites against early releases of major browsers. That's actually why there are web standards – so developers don't have to do ridiculous things like continually test their websites to make sure they're still working

Yes, so true. Concerning that a Google Chrome engineer does not know this.
Edit to add: the way it was explained to me, the gap isn't about education or intelligence, but simply that computer geeks have trained for years at the specific skill of interpreting dense computer screens, in a manner and degree that the general population hasn't.
More details on Instagram being underrated
Obligatory quote:

>Do not send me email like this:

>>Hi Guido,

>>I came across your resume in a Google web search. You seem to have an awesome expertise on Python. I would be glad if you can reply my email and let me know your interest and availability. Our client immediately needs a PYTHON Developers at its location in ***, NJ. Below are the job details. If interested and available, kindly fwd me your updated resume along with the expected rate and the availability.

>I might reply like this:

>>I'm not interested and not available.

Guido van Rossum 2013-09-18T20:32:32.876Z

He was well over 50 at the time.
Don't even get me started (just take a shufti through my posting history on this very site. You'll see this is a subject that has my attention).

> while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music, it counts against you in tech.

Yup. The Jurassic-scale disasters that are becoming increasingly common, these days, are evidence of unsteady hands at the wheel.

I'm not saying that older folks are better. In many cases, we can be overconservative and overcautious, but that isn't such a bad thing, when the stakes for a blowout are so high.

I have always felt that tech needs to follow the same model as every other damn industry since the start of history, which is to have experience work with youth. They balance each other out.

I feel that when one of them gets too much power, Bad Things Happen.

In my case, I was finally laid off, after a 27-year run at one of the world's marquee imaging companies (which I think was overbalanced by experience). I started looking around for more work, as I wasn't really up for retirement (which I was quite capable of doing).

I was absolutely shocked at how shabbily I was treated, and fairly quickly gave up the search.

I find it offensive, that companies are so self-destructive; especially smaller companies, where a top-shelf employee could "make or break" the company. I have a fairly unique confluence of skills that would have made a startup very happy (I've been ARCHITECTING and SHIPPING software, since my very first engineering project, in 1987. I am quite used to production engineering. I've been doing it my entire adult life. I've heard that could be useful, to some companies). I was also quite willing to work for a lot less money than most, as my retirement was set, and I was looking for work that interested me.

Instead, I was rather quickly told -in no uncertain terms- "Go away, old man. No one wants you."

I took the hint, and found some non-profit folks that were doing work I find interesting, and started working with them, for free.

They are quite happy with my work.
The basics are vaccinations. We have a vaccination now: this is the end game. There is nothing more we can do, unless we want to enforce children to wear masks and distance every winter flu season, which comes at a mental and developmental cost for children.

Children should not have to wear masks for 6 hours a day, and should be allowed to interact with each other normally.

Whilst being the group least at risk of coronavirus, the most has been asked from children and young people, and now is the time when we need to return to normal in society, accepting we balance freedom with risk, and that they will always accompany each other.
> You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.

Well, that's my argument against a communist society. It was designed only for perfectly altruistic people, and that's a kind of people I have never found anywhere. If we want something that actually works, we need something designed for the people that actually exist.

It's the same with the Internet. Once the spammers got the gist of it, it has been a constant struggle between spammers and anti-spam people. We have reached some form of equilibrium, but anytime a new person connects, it's a brand-new learning about avoiding potentially bad stuff. It can be very expensive learning.
The question is one of perception, trends, hiring - not one of materiality. In fact, the point is really about the likely dissonance between perception and reality.
Yeah at around 35 - pulling all nighters actually just kinda starts to hurt… like for more then a day. Also I think no matter the age you’ll always feel old but just remember your not actually old until literally no one else is older then you… think 90s then appreciate being 30s you have 60 years left at least!
How Space Companies Lose Money
I've been thinking that what probably helps too is the fact all German speaking countries are wealthy. Much harder to build a spam center with human callers.
Thank you kind sir.
It's clearly an AWS marketing blog post.
What I find more "insane" than anything else is that the company Tesla is being put on trail here, rather than the individuals committing these acts.

You could argue that the "Tesla company" was responsible for creating and/or tolerating such a work environment, but in the end, that's still one or more individuals making decisions to do so. That is, Jack the factory floor worker called Diaz a nigger, and Alice the manager decided to shrug it off.

I'm not advocating putting these people on trail for $137 million, or even having them lose their jobs for that matter (I don't care much for these kind of "vengeance actions"), but I do wish these was more personal accountability and responsibility in these sort of things, instead of diffusing it to some inhuman company.
My guess is, using your analogy, how often do you see a power outage in New York causing an outage in Nebraska?

Although, given the tech landscape today, that's not a great 1:1 example anyway.
Unrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1445020885472235524.html
This stereotype felt a lot more relvant when cloud tech was still in its infancy. After having worked with 20 somethings for 5+ years and moving into a job where everyone is 30+ I can safely say that this article is nonsense. Sure some older devs get stuck in their ways but the ones that are keeping up to date on new tech are incredibly valuable to have around
I still bang on about software as a form of literacy - and although we still like (cheap, pliable) young gun authors, we need old grumpy editors.

Although I do agree about workplace "environment" - the sooner being in a union is like having https, the better.

It would have to look a bit like: https://www.tuc.org.uk/unions/nuj
I've seen a few people fall off the career ladder to their doom in different fields. I once was a member of a local hackerspace and the place was like the Island of Misfit Toys. So many interesting and talented people biding there time there in between jobs and struggling to get back on the ladder. Lots of horror stories -- a homeless mechanical engineer, a couch surfing old programmer, etc. I think most of us are quite insulated from what really goes on around us, and the people that fall down hard often aren't heard from ever again. As Bukowski wrote:

"...
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant."
Trust me you have plenty of time, and your family is more important. Kids grow up fast though, so don't blink - you don't want to miss a thing.

Best skill is to manage your work time well and set boundaries. Working overtime is a sign of not having the right structures in place, and being disciplined about those boundaries is a force multiplier - it'll force you to be rigorous about what's valuable. You can make up for the lack of discipline by working overtime to an extent, but it's less effective.
Desire Modification: The Ultimate Technology
I understand, but social engineering 1.5 billion names in a spreadsheet that can be automated is lots easier than social engineering 1.5 billion people in a phone book with no real automation available.

But again, the big difference here is that Facebook gives you the illusion that your data is private. With a phone book, when you opt out, you're opted out.
It looks like the author has got a pretty good setup where they are going through all the possible ways of exfiltrating data from air gapped computers and publishing papers on them. I’m not sure how much value this research really adds?

https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Guri%2C+...
The consequences of botching it are high, so taking commits from external contributors requires detailed and time consuming reviews.

Further, people don't know what the edge cases actually are at scale. If I go do my taxes and it doesn't account for some weird thing, I simply don't know that this weird thing even exists in the first place to justify a PR to the tax service.
I have a conspiracy, because nodejs is single threaded asynchronous event loop, hence it is easy to temporarily freeze the entire application by mistakenly introduce a tick anywhere in your application that is just too long what it should be, thus the closer you get to a large monolith the more likely it is that your application has reoccurring freezes.

My conspiracy theory is that this phenomenon partly created the need of microservices within the web community and by that creating entire new set of problems that needed to be solved.
I have a rule. If something stays in my list for longer than a month, it's not that important. I would suggest you just remove it, but fear of missing out is a thing. So instead you can have a low priority todo list and move it there.
In Poland, concrete blocks of some form are definitely most common. Not that many people build with wood.
“Hey Siri, close the living room
shades” works for me. The problem I have is that we have both sun shades and black out blinds and Siri treats the words “shades” and “blinds” as the same word, forcing me to create special group labels for each so it can distinguish them.

That said, it does feel like magic to be able to easily control all the lights and blinds with voice commands and Siri usually gets it right.
Drug criminalization is arbitrary and a documented tool of political oppression, so decriminalization is actually the opposite of your claim. Non-addictive substances like cannabis and psilocybin have put a lot of people in jail where their criminal record can be used to deny them certain rights for the rest of their lives.

By arbitrary I mean why are chemically addictive substances like tobacco and caffeine legal? Or why is alcohol legal when it's a common aide in substance abuse? Addictiveness and abuseability are not indicators of legality.

But historians who have looked into the motivations behind criminalization of cannabis find politically motivated individuals such as Harry Anslinger who weaponized a war on drugs as part of an anti-immigrant and racist agenda.
it costs $27,000 to fire this weapon... for 12 seconds.
The dumbest thing about "smart" thermostats are the batteries. My previous company had some in the office, and after a few times of coming to the office on Monday and being confronted with tropical temperatures because the batteries in one of the thermostats had gone empty over the weekend and it had defaulted to "open", I banished any thought of getting these at home...
Yeah, fair. But framing it that way further entrenches the problem, imo.
Do you local companies not have a staff/principal set of titles? They were once uncommon, but now I feel like most companies provide at least two or three levels beyond senior.
I'm pushing 50 and its definitely harder to even get interviews compared to 30. As much as I dont like ageism, I get it because lots of the stuff I did 20-30 years ago is irrelevant. Coding now is completely different and I have to learn so much to keep up with industry trends I realistically have 5-10 years experience. Of course on the client relationship and project management side I have a lot of tricks that I think are valuable.
Udemy S-1
When I'm a cynical, I'm thinking bad search and bad implementations (to me) are really good implementations, the difference is that the goal is not my goal.

Examples:
* when starting to type, Chrome address bar preferring to go to Google search, instead of the friggin site I've gone to a hundred times already!
* Google maps, search seemingly doesn't deterministically remember my searches. If I start typing the same search term I did yesterday, well, odds are I'm looking it up again! Show that.
* Windows start menu... oh don't get me started on that. :)
That's why you should also consider fancy nail polish an effective canary to evil maid attacks.

https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/F-S...
>>> I've learned to be less of a jerk to people and how to communicate.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh..............

But that bit is so hard !

:-)
You can hide your age online for a while, but when the kiddies find out you're an old fart they suddenly begin telling you how you think and feel about things, and will not listen if you attempt to correct them. The "Old dude" image in their head is so strong it blocks out the reality.

Its not just tech that has this problem; the rest of the world is getting there. I've seen hardware stores firing older people that know how to use what they sell; in exchange for young employees who'll work 4hr shifts at short notice.
I’m also a physicist and (also?) a leftist and I don’t think Motl is particularly wrong in your quote. Exaggerated, but I do think the Nobel prizes have a leftist/progressist tendency, and his examples are not that far off.

So in the context of this years prize, I think it’s fair criticism, albeit somewhat carelessly delivered and unrigorous.
With the anti senescence race kicking off, it could be in 10-20 yrs.
Phone numbers should act like URIs that resolve to one or more contacts via "DNS".
You don't have to imagine it, it's a fact:

1. Every fourth pedophilia suspect in Poland is a priest, state commission reveals: https://www.rt.com/news/530345-poland-priest-pedophilia-chur...

2. Royal commission: Seven per cent of Australian Catholic priests accused of abuse: https://web.archive.org/web/20181212044835/https://catholich...

3. UK Catholic Church sorry for abuse by priests: https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/UK-Catholic-Chur...

4. Irish church and police covered up child sex abuse, says report: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/26/ireland-church...

5. The global scale of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/5/awful-truth-child-s...
Also Stripe is not supported in many countries.
No, I would use: four (vier uur, so literally translated four hour), four past four, quarter past four, half five, quarter to five.
This is fairly close to what we generate for our change log, closed issues and closed and merged pull requests keyed by release milestone. Release notes are separate though, and written by hand.

Maven plugin, if you're interested

[1] https://github.com/heuermh/github-changes-maven-plugin
Contrary to some folks here I've had a pretty good experience learning Julia while adding support for it as an scripting language in an open-source data IDE I'm building [0].

It makes a lot more sense as a language to me than R (which is also a supported scripting language), but I'm slowly coming around to R too.

I do agree that it is pretty slow to start, most other scripting languages I support finish much quicker on simple scripts. But I imagine the reason you use Julia over Ruby/Node.js is the libraries not just the startup time.

But I really like that it has a builtin package manager unlike almost any other language (except R) which makes it very easy to install missing dependencies in a try-catch block. (Useful in my situation since its an IDE that runs on your computer using your existing python/ruby/julia install and only depends on a single JSON library.)

It's also neat that all hosted Github Actions images come with Julia built in so it's pretty easy to be working with it in automated environments as well.

[0] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation
There's no free lunch - if you can't pay that much, you probably won't get the best people because they'll have better alternatives.

Or you can try to compensate for this by offering something else like attractive problem domain, company mission, tech stack, autonomy etc. But that approach very often turns into "come up with false platitudes to attract the most gullible developers out here".
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2916.html
The tech industry wants young developers because they don't know all the employment exploitation tricks the older developers are too wise to fall for. Plus, the management class has no idea what we really do; we're just warm bodies to be worked hard and put down when no longer profitable. It is literally as simple as that.
Late 30's here with an experience in half dozen countries in EU... being interviewed by directors and architects with maybe few years of total experience in one, rarely two countries is just awkward. Perhaps the problem is companies naively give away top roles to those cunning with best selling skills? To those sticking around the longest? I really don't care - call me programmer but pay me well and treat me even better.