skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are four different issues here.

1) To what extent does starting programming at a young age help in becoming a good programmer?
2) To what extent are young people better at programming than older people?
3) To what extent are older people better at programming than young people?
4) How much do years of experience count?

Brief thoughts:

1) It helps a bit, but most people don't start very young. Solid foundation of math, logical thinking is important, though.

2) Young people have better memory are able to focus for longer periods of time, and learn quicker.

3) Older people have more knowledge of the world, and are better at communication and navigating social relations, which is very helpful at real world programming jobs, not so much at coding tests.

4) Experience is very important. Some of it generalizes to the entire programming domain, other parts are specific to languages and frameworks. Some fields change rapidly, and there experience is more transient.
There is a simple mode available on melpa, called obsidian. The issue with it which I am facing is that if you link using markdown in actual Obsidian, it is able to find the link in whichever subfolder of the vault the target is in. But this does not seem to work with the emacs mode. It searches only the top vault path - so creates a new file when the file actually already exists in some subfolder. Maybe it is something I am doing wrong, I will read the source code and figure out/change the code.
Cycle whenever you can an a gym bike (mine cost €200, is very quite and quite comfortable). It is very comfortable to participate in all kinds of meetings unless they demand you show your camera instead of your photo,* and quite comfortable for all kinds of reading. If your work includes a lot of these, consider buying a gel seat.

(I also made a kind of top desk on my bike for other tasks that involve typing and moving the mouse, but it wasn't comfortable at all and I quickly gave up.)

* my coworkers actually don't mind seeing me on my gym bike and they enjoy it, but I heard stories about people being offended by "lack of respect" so I'd advise to be prodent
I would say that the social benefits of leaving the house to go to a gym, even if you talk to nobody throughout the visit, outweigh trying to solve the problem in the place where you already live and work.
I think those are great but would suggest not walking on it while you're on camera in a video conference. Recently worked with a guy that did that and it was remarkably annoying.
Thanks very much for your feedback, much appreciated! I’ll try to fix this
I'm pretty sure you don't do 4000km trips to southern France every week?

You can easily rent any car you want with the money you saved by using the cargo bike for daily needs =)
It did make it easier, at least the barrier to entry. I remember reading about jails years ago, when I had a lot less sysadmin knowledge, and I couldn't wrap my head around it.

With docker, many people still can't wrap their head around how it works and will do stupid things if they need to run them in a serious environment, but they can still run a bunch of containers to run some hard to install software easily on their local machine!

Sure, jails were easy in some ways, but boiling docker's success to sexyness, instead of usefulness, sounds a bit like yet another "Dropbox is just rsync". Docker wasn't solving the isolation issue (which had been obviously solved for years) but mostly the distribution issue.
Tbh, you don't need to win Olympiads or competitions to be a good programmer. In fact, competitions can often be distractions. Some programmers aren't even good at mathematics. It's not that learning more can't help you (as a rule, you can always learn more) but it certainly isn't an age thing.

There might be a certain demographic you won't fill, but tbh, that has no bearing on whether you can be a programmer first (just learning to program), or learning to program in order to contribute to say open source. As for getting a job, there are barriers tied to age which are primarily ageism, but that doesn't have anything to do with Olympiads than more to do with stereotypes about old people.
> The economy is becoming an authoritarian power.

Well, no. Monopolising a market with the economy, which is a tiny fraction of all decision-making power, is not authoritarian.

The main thing to ask is: are there high barriers to entry for new players? If not, then competition will arise when it needs to. If there are, then we have a problem. If there are, and they're government/state regulations, then we have a common problem :)
OP has stated he has ~50 free minutes a day (which I find doubtful anyways, no one is that busy). So he does have the time even if he doesn't do it early in the morning. I suggested early in the morning since that's where people actually can get free time usually.
https://iode.tech/en/iodeos-installation/#1611168530685-c5ff...
Here's a more fleshed out list.

As for using Iode over others, it's mostly up to preference.
I use it as a daily driver and it does what it says it does. The browser is pretty solid and the request blocker has some neat functions (Although I can't seem to find a way to see/update the blacklist).

If you're looking for a new OS give it a shot, otherwise it's not worth switching.
I consider the books i read to be quite private information. Just think about medical or psychological books.
While it looks great it feels very different from pixel art. More like a pixelated filter.

I think this is a better video from him showing how it looks in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FrIBkuq0ZI&t=420s
Join a gym. Free weights are cheap. Do some curls while you're on a call. Balance ball instead of a chair. Jumping jacks don't require equipment.
Four months of pay may not be that much if you moved to another country or continent with your family for this job.

While it's probably easy to land on your feet and find something with a good pay in SV or London, it's probably not the case everywhere.

4 months of pay for this kind of trouble doesn't look like a good deal to me.
The fluffy vanity project budget comes out of revenue not Zuck's personal holdings ;)
I personally decided the structure of a in person job was beneficial and went back to a in the office job twice a week rather then the full remote opportunity I was at. I need that framework to be mentally and physically fit.
I am going the gym route, though I would either do it in the morning or the evening. As a writer, I have max 4-5 hours of useful work in me today before my frontal lobe gives up, but once I am started on a writing session, it is hard to have it interrupted.
Same here, block 60 minutes for lunch. Either 30 minutes lunch and 30 minutes walk, or just bring some sandwiches to eat during walk. If i'm lucky i can take 120 minutes lunch, will go surfing for 60 minutes.
I never said it was one file. I think every agent had one file for their area (a few hundred houses). Then some excel macros to pull all those files into one mega file, that the backend system dealt with.
Exercise is something you should set aside / make time for if you're doing computer work, it's not something that will happen passively. Treadmills are okay, but they're not a substitute for focused exercise.

Do sports; there's bound to be something around that vibes with you. Team sports might be a good motivator, or things like boxing / martial arts. If you prefer to be by yourself, walking/running/cycling are options if you can get over it being boring (get good rain gear and put on a podcast or audiobook if it's too boring for you). It'll be good for your mental health as well to do an activity outside of work entirely.

How much time did your commute use to take? Take that time to spend on yourself. And what else do you do in your spare time? See if you can combine that with exercise. I mean if you spend an hour watching netflix or whatever, you could get a static bike and put a tablet on there. Just make sure to get a sweat on, it should be an active activity that gets your heart rate way up.
You said yourself - it’s starting to impact your health. And it will get worse not better.

You have to make time for it.

You’d make time to get a cancer treated - make time to exercise to preserve your health while you can, or there’s no point in those other commitments.
> grind through tutorials until 3am

I'm not sure this is a valuable use of your time. It's not an option a young person will miss as they get older.
> whereas humans understand the game rules

I'm not so sure it's that simple. The "understanding" a humans have is build upon knowing thousands of strategies. Does a person understand chess if he knows the rules but has never played or seen an actual game? I would say no. In some way I argue the AI understands Go better then any human since it mostly defeats humans. That there are strategies that work well against it doesn't mean it doesn't understand the game. Humans miss obvious things all thr time too.
Seconded. I lived in Phoenix for a few years and the static was awful. Maybe OP lives in a humid place?
> (well, certain classes of functions, such as L^2 anyway -- I'm certainly no expert here)

For any vector space V over a field F, the set of functions V -> V is a vector space over F. This is essentially because the vector space properties are carried over "point-wise".

When you consider only certain classes of functions (such as L^2), the question of whether they form a vector space boils down to the question whether those classes are closed under addition and scalar multiplication. All other vector space properties are satisfied because they are in the larger vector space of all functions.
Sometimes, as you say. Even the car seats fall into the not-society category more than the society category.

And happily your examples are nothing to do with the call for regulations on the topic of having kid-safe versions of content production, so I feel encouraged.
Who would have thought that WW3 is fought via social media apps.
> Have you tried pushing through and getting used to it? I run for half an hour in Shanghai summer weather. Over 35 degrees and humid.

I am a person that runs cold, terribly affected by heat; I don't think I could make much headway doing this. I get heatstroke very easily.

There is a park, but it's not so near, and walking in the dark just has zero appeal.
Cycle instead of public transport/car
True it depends on the exact period we are talking about. The situation was pretty different in ~1000AD and in 1200. By the later period Constantinople’s influence in the west was waning or even non-existant.

e.g. by during the first Crusade there was a clear expectation that the Emperor will be the one in charge and will lead the crusaders to the holy land. It was basically a relief expedition organized to help the Empire defend itself from the Turks. There was clear cooperation between the pope and the empire. While cultural and linguistic differences were obvious to everyone there was no clear animosity (e.g. a loose modern analogy would be the relationship between Europe/EU and America)

Obviously it didn’t exactly turn out the way the Pope, Emperor and most of the crusaders expected. The subsequent Crusades were very different in this regard. And 12th seems to be around the time when the political split between the papacy, the latin world and the empire became permanent.
Technically speaking:
Have you tried chezmoi? [0]

IP speaking:
You can make the code public in your repository, but keep a private set of scripts that you won't move between companies. This also helps reducing the information you're leaking about the company you work for, to avoid stuff like [1].

[0]: https://www.chezmoi.io/

[1]: https://cs.github.com/?scopeName=All+repos&scope=&q=corp.goo...
The Satisfactions of a Small Business Owner
They do innovate, but not to better humanity or make a product better. They innovate to make more money for the share holder.
I never said there isn't, I just pointed out some existing facts.
What worked for me is signing up for a crossfit gym and try going there at least 3 times a week before work, at my gym they have classes at 7:00 which means I'll be home at 8:15 which is plenty of time to get ready for my first meeting at 9:00.

The beauty with crossfit is, that it offers a nice balance between strength training and HIIT. Also, if you're of weak mental resolve like me then Crossfit is doubly great because something about doing the same workout with a group of people is extremely motivating and makes it much easier to really push yourself.

If you have a crossfit gym within a 15 minute drive of your home then I would definitely seriously consider this!
The general public, sure, but young adults and teenagers? Aren't they already getting sponsors for e.g. NordVPN pushed down their throats regularly?

"This video is sponsored by NordVPN! NordVPN can help you stay secure and get back access to the social media content you love - when you want, how long you want. Check out the link in the description to get 10% off using code INFLUENCERNAME" doesn't seem very outlandish, IMO.

Those VPNs are also more or less fire and forget - download the app from the app store, pay, accept the OS modal, done.

I agree that fewer people will use those apps after such regulation, but I also think that a very substantial part of the (young) userbase will do their best to circumvent the regulations, because they like social media and TikTok very much. Not the best comparison, I know, but: When Epic Games only provided the game Fortnite as a direct APK download for Android, it also didn't stop kids and young adults from downloading it en masse, even though most probably never sideloaded an app before.
Programming in a professional setting is mostly a young person’s game. You’re cheap, employer assumes you have all the time in the world and you’re more permeable to motivational speeches.

Programming in itself is a game for everyone and you’ll get better with time.
I almost always use 24 hours DNS TTL except for things like dynamic DNS. I never felt the need to urgently change DNS.
There is a slight risk with auditability, but were it me in the mid 90s I'd be honoured to hire someone who is excited enough to keep source copies of the GNU coreutils at home.

Someone who is eager and creative like that is unlikely to be a sociopathic jobsworth. I.e. the type most likely to steal secretes or undermine your business.
It was trivially easy back in the day to use DOS DEBUG to rewrite COMMAND.COM so that instead of giving an error message like "Command not understood" or whatever the default was, it instead responded with, eg:

"My hovercraft is full of eels"

The height of school humour. As long as the replacement was shorter than the original it was just a text substitution.
Scrivener is pretty impressive, but its Latex capabilities are not as good as those of other formats. I found indexing and bibliography lookup to be spotty. Another reason I found it lacking was when having labelled equations to be later referenced, Scrivener does not seem to have an autocomplete for this.
> An aspirational future is not the same thing as the present, and we see "guys", in the plurals sense, definitely being used as male-only.

We see guys being used as male-only. We also see guys being used for mixed-gender or female-only groups.

We see them being applied to groups and we also see them being applied to individuals.

We see a lot of things in the present - and 40 years ago, for that matter.

> What it does do is date the "Since when is the use of the word “guys” a micro aggression" as starting at least 40 years ago.

Ageeed, it illustrates that it was used 40 years ago and that there were proponents and detractors of that use. The use may be more extended today - I don’t know. (What definitely has changed is the ubiquity of “microagressions”.)

Another random testimony from the intertubes:

“When I was a teen back in the 1960's (yeah, I'm old!) the "Hey, Guys!" or "Hi, folks!" was a common way to greet a group regardless of gender. For most of us, at least. It was how females greeted their female friends. Almost invariably, if the group was mixed, someone, almost always male, would try to "correct" our gender-neutral greeting. It was irritating.”

(Isn’t it funny that using “guys” in a gender-neutral way is a microagression and telling people not to use “guys” in a gender-neutral way is also a micro-agression?)
That’s not the type of movement that will keep you healthy though.

Proper biomechanics requires that you move, a lot. Lifting weights while not actually moving around enough actually puts you at risk for injury and imbalances because your body isn’t progressing through proper range of motion enough.
and it's a very nice looking blog.
Oh, yeah! I did the Sub7 thing too. And Back Orifice. Good times. I was the scriptyist little script kiddie ever. I largely had no idea what I was doing, but whatever it was, I wanted to do it.
> You only see top programmers who started as kids and probably won some Olympiads and programming competitions, and this continued in their 20s and maybe kept their skill up till 30s but that's about it. What do they do after that?

I kind of feel that you are making this up. I couldn't tell you of a single child prodigy that won competitions and disappeared in their 30s, the field is barely old enough for this to be a thing.
FWIW I use Obsidian, and just a private GitHub account and git for syncing, it works well no costs, I just need to remember to use git :)
I think .rpm/.deb is a bad analogy, since those (a) get installed into a global namespace (the / folder), (b) rely on the existence of other packages in that namespace (their dependencies) and (c) require global consistency between all the installed packages.

You can avoid those global consistency problems by installing RPM/Deb packages into a chroot (or a "proper" container), but that ceases to be a good analogy of what containers are.
Yes, but you said all private communication should be E2E. Apparently you're defining communication in some way that excludes an awful lot of what I'd consider communication (e.g. HTTPS traffic).
The docs (or lack there of) were the reason I stopped playing with Phoenix and Liveview. As an Elixir n00b, source diving to figure out how things work isn't an option for me right now.

I'm sure you've been linked these a thousand times, but the docs for Laravel are imo, the gold standard for developer documentation. I love the idea of Hex being a built in solution for documentation, but a hodgepodge short guides supplemented by the Hex docs isn't enough.

I also realize you're not Chris, but I figured it was worth mentioning. I do really like Elixir and hope I can come back to it when these ideas mature a little more!
Another reason to set a low DNS TTL, is if you are running a service with very limited resources and still want some kind of HA / Disaster recovery. For instance you setup your web app in both Digital Ocean and Linode, with a system that takes the database (for instance mysql replication) and the web app synchronized in the "replica" VM. When something bad happens and you can't recover, you switch DNS and that's it.
No, programming is a keep-it-simple-stupid kind of game. I've got colleagues who started programming in their 20s, 30s even 40s. All the hard thinking has already been done by someone else. You just build with legos. It's more tedious and time consuming than it is mentally challenging. At least for the average joe software developer. All that academic fancy stuff I learned in the University turned out to be useless once I got a job. For most of those prodigies the harsh reality of 9-5 is probably a big disappointment.
I want to do digital art...
Yes I was using SQLx when writing Rust code and I've enjoyed it a lot.
I'm in my early 40s, love programming, still very productive. The only trouble with being older is that you can see through the hype as new frameworks and libraries keep chasing their tails. If you aren't as hyped about those things you may find it hard to fit in. If you can find your clique or be a generalist and can build stuff as a solo engineer/designer/janitor, programming can be a lifelong craft that you meticulously develop, creating your own personal tools and libraries along the way. It can be very lucrative as well.

> I'm 30 and missed my chance to be a kid prodigy in programming or math

Programming is one of the most empowering things in human existence. You always have a chance to build something that impacts millions and you have to do the work only once. So, forget about the bygone chances, drop out of the race, build cool things and have fun. You may yet change the world for the better :)
Programming is whatever you want it to be and can therefore be enjoyed in any age.
I have desk with treadmill. It is not attached. So I can use desk with normal chair as well. I'd recommend it.
> slightly smaller organization than we are today

"slightly" doing a lot of work there
Dr. Donald Knuth just published Volume 4B of The Art of Computer Programming.

Dr. Knuth is 84 years young.

30? Seriously 30? Don't psyche yourself out.
And it isn't chess. A lot of programmers who are good start in their teens or younger may be but it isn't really something you are groomed for, at least I know no one in my personal life who is like that. The fact that passion brings you a lot of the way vs. professional training or just prodigy as a youth (think olympics, gymnastics, basketball, chess, e-sports, etc) means that really you can start any time.

Like others are saying, the only difference where age might matter is life circumstances, it's less about mental faculties (you don't need a quick reaction time to hack unless it's a competition may be) beyond logical reasoning, which people of any age can master.
When it comes to TTL I try to imagine the perspective of the person on the other side that implemented the resolver at a university (which copies might be anywhere) or isp a couple decades ago. What odd behavior did they have to manage and what quick hacks might they have done to fix them?

From this I have chosen a minimum of 5 minutes of TTL. Anything that might have caused a large amount of dns traffic in the early day of the internet to go off every minute, or worse ever few seconds, might killed their server and taught the young programmer to sanitize inputs.
I used Joplin for some time. It is really good and it has been very stable.

Using Joplin Web Clipper from Firefox I could also snip pages (or parts of pages) into Joplin.

But the most amazing thing is that

- it works on mobile devices as well.

- No lock in: it syncs flawlessly (AFAIK) over WebDAV so I can sync all my data using a really inexpensive Hetzner instance.

Personally I happily used it for a long time but always felt something was missing and never felt completely at home with it.

So now I use Logseq which is a little rough around the edges but which I, for now at least feel very at home with.
I'm 43 and I took my first fulltime gig 6 years ago. I was working in unrelated sectors before that. I've been wanting to relocate to another country lately and I managed to find a -better paying- job there too, and I signed the contract recently. It's my childhood hobby and I did do some open source or freelance work from time to time but never full time. I was a fine programmer at 16 but I'm a much better "engineer" now. Much better than 6 years ago too.

Yes, your chances of becoming a world-class developer (or athlete, or musician) are slim. But they were slim when you were 15 too. That's not the point. The world still needs heaps of above-average programmers, whatever the age.

Also, I'm in a rock band with some 65+ guys, playing anything from Beatles to AC/DC. They would have a good laugh if they heard your concerns :)
Similar experience, although I didn't even search actively but wanted to let the famed algorithm work its magic. I think I made it to maybe 30mins before I meh'd out. I might have given it another try now, but I just saw that I already uninstalled it.