skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm over 40, and I've seen some developers evolve into awesome mind-bending experts, highly specialized in a certain domain or tech, but from my personal point of view the majority opted for a more stable, less riskier path and went for a stereotypical nine-to-five.

The odds that you'll find one of the second group actively contributing in online communities is rather small.

And about the ageism: yes, you can still be a very experienced developer, even when over 50 or more. I know a few specimen, and they tend to be very efficient and good in what they do, because they already made most of the mistakes one can make, and learned from it...

For me personally, I no longer feel the need to pick a fight if someone is wrong on the internet. [0]

The stackoverflow stats remind me of story from world-war 2 about survivorship bias: People checked planes that survived a dogfight for bullet holes, and assumed they should put extra armour on those spots that were hit the most, to increase the odds of survival. Luckily a guy called Abraham Wald [1] had the insight to put the armour in the spots with the least bullet holes, as the planes that came back obviously survived because they were not hit in certain spots.

[0] https://xkcd.com/386/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
standard networking stack handle all that stuff already, replicating it in a VPN protocol sucks.
I keep them in my Bitwarden vault
Hub disappearing would be the best thing that happened to Docker in years. People really shouldn’t be running the first result from Hub as root on their machines.

I miss a version of hub with _only_ official images.
Err... the remarkable thing about the US recently is that it is using sanctions at all. Not that it is "shutting out" people.

In comparison with China, the US is one of the most open countries in the world. China is horrifically closed-off to investment, imports, and so on.
Good for you. However, choosing to retire at a certain age because you've the requisite funds is orthogonal to having the option to continue as an IC.
Always keep the human in mind, whatever software you are righting. Its turtles all the way up to the human.
I'm currently working in a team where the average age is around 40 (I'm around the average).

I suspect a lot of developers are kind of 'dark matter' developers like me: working with older technologies on internal tools in non-software companies.
I do to and this is partly my point. If I had taken for granted that traditions are good then I wouldn't have questioned waterfall project stand-ups, a concept that is essentially good and I would have been much wiser for it.

For me, the non-SCRUM stand-up is still in the "trial" phase. My mind still resists the very thought of it.
A self-fulfilling prophecy: systemic collapse and pandemic simulation
Exactly. Especially considering that the plot shows only percentages.

For the author of the blog post it would be better to draw conclusions about 'developers disappearance' from a plot showing absolute numbers.
You are going to see significantly more 40-50 year old devs in the next decade. People forget how new the mainstream software engineering profession actually is. The first person in the world to start their career as a web developer coming out of college probably hasn't even hit retirement yet.
To be able to legally work in France, an American citizen would need a work visa which requires to have a local work contract. So they would have to follow French regulations.

It also includes a minimum of 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of PTO, too bad!
How ironic then, because I personally found Roomba robots extremely dumb, until quite recently at least, most of their models roamed randomly, with almost no planning. On the other hand Neato Robots are so much better, they cover the surface width planification and mechanical precision.

Now baseless speculation: I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a large part of this difference is due to the fact that a company used Lisp because of ideology, while the other company used a language which is actually leading currently in robotics, (c++ or Python) because of practical reasons: they could harness the massive ecosystem to make stuff that are actually useful instead of recoding a robot OS in lisp.
I think it's worth pointing out that whilst hydraulic limes have good breathability compared to cement, they are still inferior to "air" lime based mortars (e.g. hot mixed or made with lime putty).
Although these have a slower set than hydraulic limes they are still in widespread use and a lot of straw bale construction will be using air lime as a superior alternative to hydraulic lime.
iOS 15.0.2 IOMobileFrameBuffer vulnerability POC
No it's not, it's only broken because it's become synonymous with open floor plan, which is fundamentally broken and unhealthy.
https://twitter.com/lego_group/status/842115345280294912
Yeah, I can't stand the Teams client experience, in spite of them nailing the threading model--it's just horribly sluggish--but it nails the "it just works". And for large organizations where the majority of folks don't notice 500ms response times in the UI, it's everything they need. And at PAYGo rates, and at uptimes your IT department can only dream of achieving (yes, there's downtime, but at some point it's unavoidable).

"Productivity" is at Microsoft's core here, and for the large majority case, they're nailing it.
Over 50 here...

Maybe I was lucky... I have straddled both IC and management and was allowed to move between these freely. I've been an engineer, architect, VP (60+ team), and architect again (we have VP, SVP, EVP level architect roles).

I've also worked in many areas. I've automated physical things like oil refineries, worked business appservers, databases, networking, distributed system, and highly scalable data systems, et al.

Need to stay flexible and open to learning and changing. That is exactly what is so much fun working in software! There is always something new to pick up, some new to learn, something new to figure out. The stuff I'm thinking about now did not exist 5 years ago, and what I will be working on in 5 years likely does not exist, yet. Maybe my roles now are not exactly dev, but definitely IC.

While I had my usual ups and downs during my over 30 years in software, I love what I do and will do this as long as I can.
Maybe making a bunch of smaller ones is cheaper/faster/safer?
Nowhere close to how accurate Google is in India
But then, if you live in the UK, Google Maps is not par with Ordnance Survey, or in many places, OpenStreetMap.

(This depends, obviously, on what you want from a map. I'm not a motorist.)
> best practices immunizes

I see this all the time when digging down into why. "It's ok to shut off my brain and just do X, regardless of whether it's situationally even useful." Just as bad as "Policy". It's ok to not think and find a good solution, as long as the bad solution looks "normal" enough.

Best practices are inherently decades old. It takes a long time for a good idea to spread and get people used to it. It's very likely there are better ways to solve the issue around, if you stop to think and read.
What is broken is the open floor plan and the "put everyone in the same room" as a workaround for a disorganised and dysfunctional workplace.
> Apple makes several million/year off their cut from me

So you make 10's of millions a year off your cut from them. Horrible.
Sorry if I misunderstood -- the 5 weeks isn't paid? If it is, what is the difference between the 5 weeks and the 2 weeks?
36. Started my career at 19 and cofounded a company early in my career. Developed a like of coordinating technical direction rather than being in the trenches, and moved into product management in my mid 20s. Grew quickly into director/VP TPM roles, but recently went back to a cofounder de where I’m very much again in an IC developer role out of necessity. To my surprise I haven’t been this happy in years.

The fear was always that I would age out of my job (…probably read too many posts like this). This has simply not been the case, nor has it been for many of the people I went to college with or who were my senior in the early days of my career development. To some extent there’s a lure of managing people, but I also think that as you get older you simply stop answering surveys like this and focus upon the tasks at-hand.

I also lived my younger years with a crippling fear that I’d fall off the bandwagon if I blinked twice. This has also not been the case. technology continues to build upon the same foundational principles; it’s a matter of whether you’re willing to learn and evolve or if your goal is to settle down and avoid this.
Admittedly I do not have children.
There is possibility that you configured your T-mobile account to block certain or even all SMS. It happened to me before. Especially if you are in a family account and someone else is the primary account holder, and they mistakenly configured your line.
Completely agree with the article. And as with such, all best practices have a time an a place.

Here's one great example of what not to do: mindlessly enforcing code line sizes. No, your hand won't get chopped off if you go over 80 chars (unless it's the Linux kernel, but they used to have good reasons for that)

If the first thing a dev does to your python code is mindless chopping it off at 80 chars he's just cargo culting.
We're quirky like that.
And when I publish a web site that hits the front page that will be a meaningful insight from user 650, and users will be critical is assessing what they read.
Them might be addicted to the several million a year they make out of the deal.
Great, I'm so glad it's possible! What's the app that you installed? I've been looking for this for my iPhone 4S on iOS 6.1.3 to receive video, and output HDMI.
Cut the Knot: Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles
It's not the UK, but in Hong Kong on iOS 15, Apple Maps now automatically taps you on the wrist (apple watch) right before it's time to get off the public bus at your stop. It is freakishly accurate.
Extract a Tailwind CSS Color Palette from an Image
Considering their mfa is depended on by millions of people daily and is a critical part of many people's infrastructure, it would be near impossible for Microsoft to have any outages for more than a few minutes that aren't reported around the world.
Ask HN: Stack Overflow Without the Cancer?
Is there a web page where one can ask questions without risking being marked as stupid, irrelevant, lazy etc or randomly being closed? Where helping others is consistently rewarded and never punished? Where possible duplicates friendly point to possible answers? @PaulG: Could you please fund such a site?
The SO survey is an absolutely awful representation of the community, because it mainly represents the young inexperienced engineer and students who can't do much without googling.

The longer you are in the industry, the less time you spend googling stuff. I'd say I probably end up on SO once every 2 months. There's probably huge swathes of devs who didn't even know there was a survey or never visit SO because they can generally get on with their job
Sure. Wear magmaproof boots.

If you don't care to wait or are worried about your boots, you could do the same right now. There's a nice large unclaimed antarctic area.
Do 4chan mobs get universities to cancel events and speakers and successfully pressurise companies to fire people ?
> Open-source doesn't mean free

Counterpoint: yes it does. Hardly anyone pays for external open-source products. Managed solutions, yes, but we've seen multiple times that trying to close an open system so you can charge for it is very unpopular. For example, my workplace has a company-wide edict against using or even downloading the Oracle JDK.
Previous threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496043 [22/7/2019] (103 comments)

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/cjcwmu [29/7/2019] (46 comments)

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cfz8q0 [21/7/2019] (94 comments)

https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/cfz8lo [21/7/2019] (49 comments)

P.S.: discussions found with a site I'm building: https://discussions.xojoc.pw/?url=https%3A//overreacted.io/a...
It's good to see Balena getting some attention - it's a really nice way of deploying containerised software to embedded devices, and managing them in the field. I've been using the free tier for managing a couple of rpis I have round the house in a reproducible way.

It's basically a whole platform built around docker-compose, so you write a compose file for your different applications and then can deploy it to any embedded Linux computer running the Balena OS. Balena manage all the complicated stuff around rolling out updates, keeping the OS up to date, logging etc, and give some nice debug tooling. The other nice thing about the platform is that it's almost all open source - so if Balena the organisation goes bust or changes strategy, Balena the IoT management service could be self hosted.
Yep, and this can be extrapolated onto societies as well. Richer societies have lower birth rates than poorer societies. They balance it out somewhat with a longer average lifetime though.

I think the boomers were overall wealthier than the Greatest Generation and that's also why they had fewer children.
It's just a manifestation of "us vs them" mentality.
Maybe it's a poor example then, I wasn't aware of that.

Mobile BankID (Scandinavian Identity Service), my British Banking app and Okta verify definitely can't transfer to a new phone. I know because I checked recently.

My overall point is: they're not alone, this is a common issue for Apps.
Could you tell more about the separate IC ladder? Never worked at FAANG, but outside, the two ladders I saw were management, and faux-management - i.e. "senior developer" -> "principal developer" -> ..., where you just get all the management responsibilities with little of the authority. If there's a third ladder in some companies, I'd love to know, because I have little desire to do management work.
Ask HN: What do HNers think about Opera webbrowser?
Just google something like "having children" and skim the results. For me I get, from the first articles appearing:

- "Mothers who regret having children are speaking up"

- "The Two Reasons Parents Regret Having Kids"

- "Many people we spoke to about the childfree life said they were happy with pets instead."

- "Why having kids doesn’t necessarily make you happier, according to research"
My car also has an engine and at least two wheels, thus making it a cool bike)
Complete the Hacktoberfest Easily and Usefully
> many people tend to drop out from the game all together as other part of their lives take over.

Many people appear to believe that we must work more rather than doing the right work more effectively. That can often appear to not allow for the rest of one's life.
Yes it's the plan. The idea is to use small and modular reactor.

https://www.usinenouvelle.com/editorial/pourquoi-les-mini-re...
Brand and personal investment of time and money in that brand means people will defend their investment.

It's why you can detect so much anger and pain in anti apple threads, because people's personalities are wrapped up with the brand.

A consumer doesn't just get one apple device, or just use one apple app, they buy the watch, phone, desktop, laptop, subscriptions, walled garden store, etc, and it works. It's a family which is hard to leave because you like it there.
1.) Good.

2.) Neighborhoods in Vancouver were decided long ago and they mostly developed around racist an exclusionary ideology, these “communities” exist simply to separate the haves from the have-nots. Despite conservative efforts to eliminate growth, the city has grown where it can and now the same people who complained are gleefully cashing out on the growth the tried so desperately to disrupt. By the way, home owners are a minority in Vancouver so I suspect most Vancouver residents just want somewhere affordable to live! And since NIMBYs own all the land, the only economically viable developments are high rises!

3.) The land was taken from them and only returned in part after decades of lawsuits. Despite that, the “community” still thinks they deserve to be able to decide what can and can’t be built.
From the article:

"Macron’s proposed six new “mini-reactors” run on technology that is billed to be less powerful but also less complex to produce and run than conventional reactors. Industry analysts say they help to keep France’s industrial competitiveness given that prototypes are already being developed in China, Russia, the US and Japan."
Moving from a freely installed tool to a paid license tool changes the workflow. Its a pain in the ass to manage seats.

Not only that, but it was a bait and switch. Lots of people are using docker because of the previous licensing rules and might have chosen another tool if the new licensing was already in place.

I don't fault docker but I can see why people are annoyed and looking for a drop in replacement as well.
This legal agreement idea does not work at all. In most cases this agreement would have an expiration, only include specific actions and most likely could be withdrawn unilateral at any time. This makes an agreement basically worthless. The fact that people bring up technological solutions for social problems shows their inability to understand the messiness of social constructs.
I'm knocking on the door of 35 (with a decade and change in xp), and I can relate with what is written in that article.

> "Because let's be honest — no one wants to live their life on monotonous repeat. That stuff is soul-draining. You became a developer for a reason. If it’s not to challenge yourself, then to satisfy some sort of curiosity."

This has been my work experience for the last year and a half, and it has spurred me on to start developing more things on the side.

My hope is that by end of next year, at least one of those things will have taken off in a way that would allow me to leave my current employeer (which is not horrible, just soul draining in its monotony) and work more on my own endeavours.

> "As developers, we’re more equipped than others to build and create things out of nothing. It’s not hard for us to bootstrap an idea on a shoestring budget. This is our advantage — making entrepreneurship an even more lucrative prospect."

While I think the developer sphere often thinks it self unique in this regard (it isn't), I do agree that the possible profit margins from turning time + electricity into value are immense.

Beware the survivor bias though!
> The whole point of NaN is that you don't end up with silent data corruption, you end up with an unusable value: unusable in the sense that it infects further calculations instead of covering it up with a value that looks valid.

NaN values are slightly better than silently returning a valid value like 0, agreed. But having NaN silently corrupt a datastructure when you insert it into it is not what anyone asked for. Either make NaN a well-behaved value with well-behaved equality, or make it immediately explode like an exception.

> As for floating point exceptions vs testing for NaN:

x = performcalculation()
if isNan(x) { abort }
y = performFurtherCalc(x)
if isNan(y) { abort }

That's horrible ergonomics, that's like something from the '70s. I know there are still languages that lack proper sum types and high-level composition, but any serious language that can't solve that properly at least has some kind of language-level hack like exceptions.
> But there are so many traditions that are senseless

A tradition is not senseless just because you don't like it or understand the reason for it. Often, there are very good reasons a convention like shaking hands or abiding by hierarchies becomes a tradition. By all means, get rid of worthless traditions, but take care you don't cause unintended consequences when you fiddle with traditions without understanding their motivation.

Also, perhaps a little humility is in order. It's just possible the people who instigated a tradition were smarter than you or knew something you don't.

https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/
Don't post things that are categorically untrue.

Covid infection does not provide immunity. There is absolutely zero evidence that it does, and plenty of evidence to prove that reinfection happens.
Is "SQL" in "SQL server" also a noun? Not trying to argue one way or the other, I honestly don't know (non-native english speaker).
I think an issue is tax breaks. In many European countries (AFAIK) it would be against the law to offer a company a tax break if they would choose to establish operations there.

> The total investment in the project is estimated at 800 billion yen ($7 billion), with the Japanese government expected to provide up to half the amount.

That definately wouldn't fly in many EU countries.
64 years young greybeard here :-) Still coding for a living.

I think because I'm on the autism spectrum (Aspie) I've deliberety avoided corporate culture due to early bad experiences. Money has not been a primary driver, nor has advancement into management as I'd be a bad fit.

I'm currently a senior analysis/programmer within the UK National Health Service and absolutely love it. Very neurodiverse friendly and there is no forced retirement - in fact they encourage you to contribute to "the family", as my hospital calls it's staff, for as long as you want to. So I have arranged to work part time as a consultant after retirement age.

So, to all of you bright young people out there, follow your passion, make your own rules and my best wishes to you for a long and fulfilling career if that's what you want.
Dynamic languages are easy to start out with, but if the project becomes large enough, it becomes extremely hard to maintain and then you have performance problems.

So yeah compiled languages are better for writing maintainable code.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with passwords on post-it notes as long as you secure them.

In fact, printed passwords in a physical safe is what you want to do for your "break the glass" accounts.
Seconding. I live in Kraków, Poland, which has a great public transit infrastructure. For all jobs I had, I could always get into the office in 20 to 40 minutes. That's still 20 to 40 minutes too much - it's 40 to 80 minutes per day, out of my very limited free time. I hated it, and I prefer WFH.

A threshold for me is probably around 5 minutes, counting from my apartment's door to the office door. Anything more feels like wasting time, so I'll avoid it for as long as I have the option.
With a cruise speed of 30kn, better hope its not too windy wherever you are flying, winds aloft can often be much higher than this
I'm 36 here.

It feels like it just starts.

Because development teams are growing and you have the experience you will start to code less and less. You will be in more meetings and do other stuff like interviews and so on. At least this is what I experience.

In general I see 2 kinds of older developers:
- 1. The one that goes into more management
- 2. The kind of developer that stopped learning 10 years ago.

A professor asked me once: "So you want to become an engineer? You know that this means that you will need to learn all your live?"

He was right. You need to learn. Do you need to know the newest bleeding edge frameworks? No but you need to learn something. Basically it is not enough to just finish your school/university and that's it.
I don't know if I buy that argument. The number of new developers isn't much higher today than it was already in the 90s. I know plenty of former developers in a wide variety of jobs, and it looks like most people simply drop out in the first 10-15 years. Being a developer is not a good long-term career option, unless you really like the job. It demands much, but the pay isn't competitive, except for a small minority.