skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a little bit older than you and have been in the industry for almost 30 years. I have a different perspective than mental decline. I think it's that after seeing code and patterns for so long, you might be defaulting to generalization of ideas. I know that I do that.

For example, one of the best developers on my team (a little bit older than me) is "on the spectrum". We've worked together for nearly 20 years, starting at about the same time. Early in our career, we would dig into the details of APIs and patterns and be able to rattle off the details of the changes when a new dot release of an library came out.

As the years have gone on, I've "lost interest" in the details knowing that I can look them up when I need to and have naturally defaulted to generalizing ideas. That is, rather than knowing that we need to change the third parameter in the function call in FOOBAR 3.2 when we upgrade from FOOBAR 2.9 because the details of the memory management changed, I just know that we use the FOOBAR function because it does a specific task that we need.

The reason I bring up my friend/coworker is that he never generalizes, he gets stuck in the details. He can't design his way out of a paper bag, but he can write thousands of lines of code over the weekend with full unit tests and there's never any bugs. So we make a great team, he's one that has focused and has every detail at the tip of his tongue. But he never sees the big picture.

So I view getting older in software as (over) training AI. My brain works in the generalization route and the more I see, the more connections I make, but I need to "make room" in my brain by not encoding the details. My friend's brain works differently. He encodes details and can keep a deep call stack but at the expense of ever being able to see the big picture.

I guess that's a long way of saying that maybe you shouldn't be so quick to think it's cognitive decline. It could be just that your brain is encoding things differently after seeing so many examples in your career.

I know I'd fail miserably at porting an API now (I've done that when I was younger very efficiently). But I also know that I can bring a much higher level of design and ideas to the team than I could have 20 years ago.
Which they ultimately should do when crawling a site. OpenAI does according to ChatGPT.
Escape Velocity from Bullshit Jobs
SDRs solve IIoT industrial systems
> They're buying 88 because the government has convinced everyone that running more than one type of fighter is an expensive luxury that only top-tier militaries can afford

Honestly they have a point. There are a ton of inefficiencies associated with having more than one type of aircraft in your inventory. You need separate training pipelines, not just for your pilots but all your maintainers. Spare parts aren't going to be compatible across airframes. All of these costs are relatively constant whether you are purchasing a handful of new airframes or a bunch. Which is why in most air forces around the size of Canada's you tend to see only a handful of distinct jet fighters. Usually there are just 2 procured in numbers: one being the new airframe, the other being the legacy airframe that is slowly being retired. Which is exactly what you are going to see in Canada's airforce: the hornets will be slowly retired as new F-35s show up, a process that will take decades.
Seconded, and I'll add a regular sleep schedule to the list.
I think most people usually get almost all of the food off the dishes before putting them in the washer.

If your dish is covered in dried yogurt & avocado slime - a lot of time the dish washer won't even get it off.
IDE code intelligence can help a lot. Anything that makes reduces the cognitive load of navigating within the codebase helps increase the mental capacity you have to keep the context loaded.

When tracing deep call stacks I can find it helpful to write out the question I am looking for the answer to in a comment. Then I can retrace my thoughts back up the callstack using the very handy shortcut to go back to the previous curson position.
Yes! Never underestimate the role of distractions, especially in this day and age. Social media, news sites with a steady flow of 'new' information, 10-15 second videos you can endlessly scroll thru, etc. All of that can be fun, but it will play a role in taxing your cognitive capacity.

Not everyone agrees with it, but I highly recommend checking out the concept of 'deep work' (and the book of the same name). There's nothing new about the concept, but there's a definitive history of folks who have embraced the uninterrupted time approach that have been successful with it.
The AML stuff is expensive even for the investment industry which unlike crypto, isn't perfectly catered to hackers, scammers and money launderers. I'm guessing AML and support is big a cost area for COIN. This is just speculation as i don't have time to read their public papers.

Take a look at the Coinbase Subreddit to see how many suckers are getting hacked, scammed, locked out for AML reasons on any given day and getting their lawyers to write legal threats to Coinbase. Responding to this all costs money and it's where the Binance model of avoiding AML responsibilities and hiring outside US is superior (until it isn't, when execs end up in a US prison).
this scam industry can't collapse fast enough
I just want derivative work to respect the conditions I chose, that the copyright laws allow me to impose.

And I think training an AI is not like learning or reading for a human being.

And that's not silly. It's an opinion, but one shared with many people.

You know one of the core arguments is there. You tried to hide it and you didn't blink before using words like "simply" and "silly". That's disrespectful.
Not very good at it is a bit too much. My most fun with phones todate were with the Symbian phones especially the N-gage and 6600
What's weird about passing an application state back and forth in a serialized format? Surely your counting bits example can be extrapolated to make sense of that.
Shouldn't you use %f for a float?
A short video is more than a thousand words:

https://youtu.be/tmKrF-QAcOk

For a longer visual introduction, I have been enjoying kaveh808's videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTA6M4yZF0MzsMlNL0N67tIU1...
A journalist's job is to report on the science, and remain impartial.
> Point being, performance is a weak selling point to switch text editors

You’ve never worked with IntelliJ I see. If someone builds the exact same thing but any amount faster I’ll switch in a heartbeat.

I’m using Zed more and more, even though it has barely any of the features I use, purely because it’s so fast.
It's all obvious nonsense, always has been.
I have studied many of the existing attempts. Every time, they lack the p2p network and rely on some centrally controlled infrastructure. This might work for smaller countries, but it does not work in adversarial environments with larger countries.

A core tenant to everything I build is that it can all be audited and verified by absolutely anyone. An individual is capable of establishing if all votes are legitimate, according to their own criteria if desired, and measure the error rate / fraud rate according to said criteria. Anyone will be able to do this from their home system. My intention is to optimize performance so much, that anyone can do it even on 1 billion+ votes.

The system is p2p, trustless, decentralized in moderation, decentralized in identity management, and enables anonymous voting with anonymous identities with verifiable claims. This means it is possible to have, say, a globally trusted identity provider certify that a public person is unique, real, and only registered a single time. They can then form an anonymous identity with that same claim being transferred to the anon identity, allowing anonymous voting with a claim absent binding to a physical presence.

No existing system allows this. This is the main problem I have already solved.

The implications of such a capability are far reaching. Imagine peer reviewing research with academics who have verifiable claims saying they have a PhD in X field, and being able to, in a decentralized way, have an anonymous identity with that credential. This enables research publication and review absent any central authorities, while being able to have confidence that the people reviewing are qualified.

For social media, imagine having people with verified credentials anonymously commenting and being able to speak their mind without any technological way to identify their physical presence, but knowing they are qualified to speak on a specific topic set.

This is the fundamental mechanism upon which many, many more capabilities are provided. And it is functional and verified. But it is useless without a planet-scale high-performance decentralized p2p application network.

If we lived in the society I am dreaming of, I could work openly and be forward with specifics. Unfortunately, I have no social network to speak of and am not connected. I have no protection and my irrelevance as an unknown individual is the only thing that protects me. I can talk about this system abstractly without much fear (and if I have something to fear for useless words, then I’d rather not exist here on this planet anyway), but the moment it is shown to be technologically capable and I am shown to be competent, all protection is lost. I cannot shatter that protection until it is ready, unless I encounter a verifiable benevolent person that can protect the work (Buddhist monks have been the closest I’ve found to that).
as a coworker of mine liked to say, "'should' is a funny word"
Nobody today would believe naming classes after greek gods or anime is a good idea, but for some reason it's okay for (micro)services.

I've worked at places that do this, I think it's a bad idea.

Not having descriptive names turns architecture discussions into bikeshedding ("I think we should create a new service named Pikachu instead of extending the scope of the Naturo service").
FeatureBase uses Arrow for processing data stored in bitmap format: https://featurebase.com/
I've always considered the upgrade route when purchasing motherboards, but I've never done so over the 32 years I've owned PC's. In the beginning things were moving too fast but lately it was because I was really lucky picking my CPU 10 years ago. Sandy Bridge was the last 25%/generation improvement from Intel, we've had 10%/generation improvement ever since. So that Sandy Bridge has held up surprisingly well. Everything but the CPU & MoBo has upgraded - 5 SSD's, 3 GPU's, RAM, monitor, keyboard, even the case, but it's still the original CPU & MoBo. This year I'll complete the Ship of Theseus and replace the CPU & MoBo and whatever else has to get dragged along (aka RAM).
I feel you. Tooling for programming often seems to presume that programming is your primary focus and that you can afford to spend time every month keeping up with changes. For a small passion project the overhead of this churn eats a large fraction of the time budget, not to mention the demotivation of realizing how much energy you are spending to essentially tread water.

Whereas with art or math or writing projects I can come back to old notes decades later and basically pick up where I left off.
Can you expound upon this? I've not heard this talking point before. I do know Nintendo has a history of pushing the technical limits of their own hardware, but I'd be interested to read more about some specifics.
> The name gets repeated in so many places if it's important.

like the parent points out, the named thing is likely "important" precisely because it had a non-descriptive name to begin with and engineers added things to it they shouldn't have

if it had a descriptive name then other functionality would've been put in their own module
Let's hope Samsung (and all the other Android phone manufacturers) adopt this by 2050 :-)
Rackspace was one of the first big "cloud" companies, before cloud was a word.

They went in the direction of OpenStack, which didn't pan out.

While at the sametime, Amazon ran the "Oracle playbook" and started offering Apps.
I don't need a "peer-review scientific study" or "50year-long statistical study on 10,000 people", and then a peer-review to review the peer-review, to know that if you can't go to hospitals for 2 years, you'll be more ill as a result.
This is good advice. Just a few days ago I randomly stumbled upon a youtube video where someone was using — blast from the past, here — a hunk of green bar line printer paper as a big scratch pad to write on. It made me wonder how I ever got out of that habit. That stuff, when it was ubiquitous, was the best scratch paper ever, and I used to do it all the time when I was young and, one would think, at my cognitive peak. Maybe falling out of that habit is part of my percieved decline.
I'm pretty sure that's a light saber, right?
I had the same thought - we already have this concept with licenses and laws. When I buy a movie it comes with a bunch of terms limiting what I can do with it, if I publish something I can limit how other people are allowed to use it - including if they're even allowed to view it
Sounds like Diet. Eat stuff rich in nitrates (spinich) and do some cardio to get the oxygen and blood flowing. I'm 41 and that trick has a noticeable impact for me.
They spend $2 for every $1 of revenue. That means they lose $1 for every $1 of revenue.
Tropical forests post-logging are a persistent net carbon source
Thank you much!

> GUMSHOE - Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported License

> FATE - Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) / OGL

> Forged in the Dark (Blades in the Dark) - Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.

> Dungeon World - Creative Commons Attribution

> Quest - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

> Trophy - custom, permissive-looking license

Yours was by far the most helpful response I got.

There's also this list:

https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems

Which I found from another thread you were in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34304853
LOL, is this sarcasm?

Perhaps we should copy science and maths and name services after their developers:

chet-obagdu-braithwaite server
peyton-garcia endpoint
murata-checkov service
somerstein API

etc. LOL.
I’ve felt this too in my 40s. I generally don’t recommend books that might be considered self-help, but a recent book by Arthur Brooks called “From Strength to Strength” was really helpful for me to understand what’s happening to me, and how to embrace the use of crystallized intelligence in my later career. If that doesn’t interest you, you can find some interviews with him about the subject and book in a few places by search.
I do this. I was burning through a lot of paper and ended up going with a reMarkable tablet which is perfect for that sort of thing.
ImageMagick Security Policy Evaluator: check if your security policy is hardened
The ImageMagick Security Policy Evaluator allows developers and security experts to check if an XML Security Policy is hardened against a wide set of malicious attacks. It assists with the process of reviewing such policies, which is usually a manual task, and helps identify the best practices for ImageMagick deployments.
I’ve thought about this - quite a bit, in fact, and have come to the belief that one can separately respect and honor a person’s contributions. Both JW’s antipathy toward AI, and ELIZA itself, are significant contributions. Just because he rejected ELIZA (which, BTW, I do not think is the way to think of his relationship to it, but that’s a longer story for another time) does not make ELIZA’s influence and historical value vanish.
I recently turned 50 and am finding the same (to the point that I might want to step "down" to something a little less intellectually-intense like sysadmin) but in my case it's the fact that 18 month old toddler sons are pretty much life-absorbers.

Yesterday I realized that a hard-ish problem in my tiny shell script testing library https://github.com/pmarreck/tinytestlib which I had worked on for over a day was completely moot, and ripped it out while facepalming.

Incidentally, I'm looking for work as... well, the above things, although previously I was a solo Elixir dev.
length("passwordpassword") > 15chars
what do you mean by scam pedestrians?
Like you, there were things I could hold in my head when I was younger that I cannot now. However, thinking back, it probably had more to do with the fact that when I was younger my other knowledge was less useful to anyone so it was unlikely I'd get interrupted. Now, I get interrupted much more frequently.

Might it be that the people making progress are less interrupted? Also, this sounds like it might be a place where pair programming would be more efficient than two people working alone.
The name is there but almost no payment processing companies that I know of care about it at all.

It serves no real purpose, hence how I could get a eSIM by supplying an incorrect name.
I set up LDAP with sshPublicKey extension in 2021 together with some scripts to configure new servers to use it and a small command line tool to add and remove GIDs per user (across any infrastructure). It's working great. The biggest effort was learning to manage LDAP, which is a bit anachronistic, but the payoff is worth it I think. Even with <20 users, managing public keys across all of our infrastructure was not sustainable.
Worrying about a reasonably well predicted end of the world won't stop it to happen. But systematically denying it, specially in the big numbers, well could accelerate the trends.

It is not about exactly when, or exactly how, but that it will happen, and is something that may probably happen this century rather than in a thousand years. And that it may have been a chance to avoid it if weren't for all the people denying it all this decades.
Glimpses into Kafka’s Workshop
btw, >>> 2 * 3 # Equivalent to `pow(2, 3)` is true. At least, that's what I am getting with Python 3.10.2.
I've seen a couple sites that do this. One of them just asks for the square root of -1!

And sure, qntm.org isn't nearly as big a website as HN, but I concur that this isn't likely to be super-difficult. The wide use of recaptcha seems like mostly laziness; most websites aren't big enough to get targeted attacks.
It might be worth seeing somebody; you may be suffering from burnout or depression. 40 is not the age you'll see cognitive decline; rather, in many situations, you will begin to approach peak mastery. That's not to minimize or say that you may be experiencing some kind of true decline; rather, it's that I think it's potentially more probable that it's something else. I am of course not a trained medical professional.
Coinbase is a double exception, they didn't just ask for regulatory approval for their lending product, they asked for permission to file the application.

Can't wait for the next round of crypto hype, excited to see mew use cases along with new scams.
That's just the nature of our work.

Anyway what worked fine yesterday isn't necessarily a bad choice today.
I've been thrown to the wolves many times before, having to absorb and trace huge commercial codebases and be productive the same week on making updates and answering questions. Over abstraction is a real thing - real smart developers seem to pride themselves on how much juice they can squeeze out of dependency injection frameworks such as Structure Map and leverage the syntactic sugar of these tools until the solution is almost crystallized with hyper engineering.

I'm telling you this because I don't think it's you necessarily, but that more and more there are codebases that are dense with this kind of thick obfuscating abstraction.

I dropped out of IT when I was 52. I'm 55 now and don't think I could keep up with the constant myriad changes in literally all aspects of tech. Change for change sake is a scourge that lots of companies fall prey to in the name of keeping up which feels to older developers like chasing the rainbow that is just over the next hill...
Not quite 40 yet but I’ve felt this way sometimes. Like the problem is too big and I can’t break it into small enough chunks to make sense of it.

Sometimes it helps me to open a text doc to use as a “thought stack”. Just a bulleted list of items as I descend into a problem. Whether that’s an actual call stack, or just a yak-shaving exercise, it’s nice to have those first few levels written down so I can get myself back out. It also helps for refreshing the context.

Another strategy I’ve used is to write out the architecture in prose, explaining the pieces and how they relate, stream-of-consciousness style. I find it helps my mind break out of thought loops.

I also notice that my mind recoils at anything that is boring, or that seems relatively pointless, to the point where it’s very hard to get into a flow with work like that. I think that used to be easier to push through.
2022’s seismic shift in US tech policy will change how we innovate
Could be burnout, could be ME/CFS, could be Long Covid… could be something else. Have you noticed a limited working memory or loss of enthusiasm? You might notice things like forgetting why you walked into a room, or abandoning hobbies and activities you no longer enjoy. I have ME/CFS from hEDS (far more common than people think, especially here on HN, and double especially those here on HN with ADHD) so I ended up taking a bunch of pharmaceuticals which got me back to work and sharper than ever. One of the core combos I take is a low dose of Modafinil in the morning and Amitriptyline at night, together these act a bit like a triple monoamine reuptake inhibitor but with better timing of action. It’s a reasonably common treatment for depression.

The point is, even if you live a perfectly healthy life with the perfect diet, exercise, and rest, it’s possible that something else is out of kilter and may need serious intervention.

Maybe try a max exertion test for post exertional malaise.
Fortunately for me this isn’t something I have to reconcile. We’re a Java shop.
Others have given a lot of good advice, but porting code is a menial task and not suited for someone of your experience level. Unless this port is a real game changer and you're going to get lots of credit for helping the company in a major way, it's just a thankless waste of time.
This is what I was looking for. It seems weird to always have a jump box sitting up, waiting for someone to come mess with it. Part of the tooling should be to spin up / boot an ephemeral instance.
Bitmap rendering is incredibly fast. Old computers were so slow it was the only viable method.
..Or create a new product with a standard connector for both, an adaptor for lawn mower and another one for mulcher, using the same engine. It can be called Mulchwer - cute and descriptive! When the company inevitably invents a new adaptor, say a snow blower for clearing the sidewalk, the product can be renamed Mulchwer X, or Multi-Mulchwer Deluxe. It's now an all-purpose product with a set of adaptors for any front/backyard needs. It will also be a subscription-based business model, always needs to be connected to the Internet, and have machine learning for full self-driving.
Wait till your 50!

Days get shorter, winter gets colder, days blur together. Things change.
Fortran was way easier... Pfff objects of objects to keep track of.

Remember what your core strengths are... Where the true wisdom is.
And always check back to the requirements document.

You have a detailed one right?

Break what you are required to do into smaller components, but from the other side of the problem, systematically. I find by going smaller and smaller I eventually find a manageable chunk that I can start with.

A rainbow attack on the sha512 can often deliver a fast result.

I have to go yell at a cloud now...