skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just turned 36, and while I often worry about the perception that programming is a young man's game, I've honestly been learning more and more the past few years, to the point that I feel I've never been more competently able to build whatever is asked of me.

Sure, there's the manager strategy, where you'll trade one set of concerns for another, and that's probably an easy way out. You might also consider something like a 'business analyst', or a position which sits between developers and non-developers, translating non-technical requirements into specifications for developers to work on.

In short, there are options for 'very technical' people (which developers tend to be) to transition into less technical areas of the same field, and they are necessary jobs as well. You might talk to your manager, boss or (if you have access) a CTO to see what kinds of opportunities are available. You might even try 'interning' for a week or so in those various positions if you can be allowed to and see how they actually interest you.

Regardless, programming might be a young man's game, but there are a myriad of things that I bring to the table that it's hard for youngsters to match. I am proficient in a variety of languages, frameworks, etc. I can build an application from the ground up. I can administer the database, I can build the frontend with HTML and Javascript, I can use Backbone, Ember or Angular to make it super interactive, and I can of course build the backend in Django, Python, .Net, Java, etc., etc. The years of experience you have make you ideally suited for speccing things out too - it's often easier for someone who's worked with a lot of systems to look at a given pair of systems and see where things overlap, where they might fit together, and what an integration effort might look like.

There's a job for this too, called IT Architect. Again, you might find that you love it, or you might hate it, but it's a real thing that demands technicality and expertise.
There's actually a great company called Balbus Speech which develops mobile apps for speech therapy. I've watched someone go from being unable to speak to perfectly flowing English while using their solutions.

http://balbusspeech.com/
For anyone who's looking to learn a foreign language - try Pimsleur. Easily the best program I've come across. It's primarily audio, but it works really, really well.
name is resolved, so all the trolls and snipes that are hung up on the NAME instead of the PRODUCT, please continue your trolling and sniping, but on a new topic (like this comment! it's perfect!)

https://github.com/colinta/motion-xray
How to become a Mozilla Contributor
Every time I submit the order I just get a javascript alert with "something went wrong :(" No idea if the order went through or not...

Edit: Got an order confirmation via email. However, I really think when you are dealing with payments you should implement a more detailed explanation than a javascript alert of "something went wrong"
I know how you feel, There is a similar program in Seattle, codefellows.org. These programs aren't designed for poor people. The best thing I can tell you is to borrow the money from a bank or student loans. Borrowing $7000 is a good investment when you're getting payed $85k or above in the future. Definitely worth trying that out. Good luck to you.
Next up, "What I would like to see from North Korea regarding South Korea."

Seriously guys, this is a day late.
Not sure if joke...
Yeah, it was kind of the "latest thing" at the time, since the sound effects available from coin-op games were somewhat primitive. There wasn't even speech synthesis or sampled playback yet (that came later in 1979 with Williams' Gorgar pinball and in 1980 with Taito's Stratovox video)
You read it correctly, thanks a lot of clarifying my terse comment. Naturally, no market is going to behave perfectly like this, but I think it's important to understand where the natural tendency points to, and what kind of elements will alleviate, smooth or otherwise disrupt the absolute winner-takes-all nature. If you are going to say deliver a new product, you need to understand that unless your product has something superior to the competition or you can subvert the meritocratic dynamics (say, through marketing & PR), it will likely die because there's no reason NOT to choose a competitor.
Hi, great work! I only have two suggestions:

a) Please, publish not only the requests per second, but the memory and CPU usage of the machine for each framework.
b) For JAVA systems, can you publish de heap configuration of the JVM?

Cheers!
Ask HN: What to do when your pet project is also a clients?
So, I started work for a development firm yesterday, and came to find that one of the clients that has approached them wants to build something that's very much like what I'm working on, on the side.

Obviously, I don't want to expose myself to risk of litigation or anything, but It's not clear what to do here. I haven't gleamed any of the actual confidential stuff yet in hopes that shields me somehow...

While it's not the exact same thing, there is definitely overlap... enough to make me uncomfortable.

The firm said they'll ask the lawyer once they land the contract, but I just wanted to ask the community if there's something I should do, like run for the hills; or if there's some legal document that can absolve me of risk in my involvement.
Correct. They are two different strands of the same condition. Inattentive type is what is generally referred to as ADD without physical hyperactivity. ADHD has a physical component as well. The kids I knew in school growing up who were diagnosed with ADHD were those who, in addition to what was going on in their brain, couldn't control themselves physically either. They were the ones always wrestling with you, jumping on you etc. for no apparent reason.
i dare them to acquire jellyfish ;)
when thinking about intellectual property, i don't like to lump copyright, patent and trademark laws under one umbrella.

They are totally different, and only cloud the thinking.
"Jelly will be for everybody, it will be developed first and foremost for mobile devices, and it will be free."

What does that even mean?
I'm talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5466872
I'm pretty sure that was a joke, not the real name of a programmer.
Hilarious, I was just using it before my previous post, continuous deployment fail?
In the situations where nc is useful then scapy is probably not an option. Nc, dd, and a few others are almost always present and great when you are in a real bind... something went wrong in a network install in pxelinux, and you want to copy off dumps or config files, or copy on a missing file. Otherwise, there are better ways to do most of the things mentioned in the article, most involving scp.

EDIT: the number of responses to this article happily highlighting the lack of security in netcat just terrifies me.

EDIT2: Ah, I see what you were saying (and scapy is an awfully cool library). It was just a convenient place for me to highlight was I didn't think was highlighted enough in the article: nc can do neat things, but not much that can't be accomplished better with other tools - its big advantage is that it's almost always present, even if ssh/scp, rsync, netstat, wget/curl, etc are not. Like using cat + sed as a text editor :)
It worked for me, site was slow but I was still able to submit the order
And I have the inverse. No hyperactivity, thus diagnosed with ADD.
I think I've heard that pitch 500 times.
I think it's a reference to Jean-Paul Sartre, who had strabismus-- not naming a real developer.
Dropbox ripe for spamming
Last week I received an email letting me know that someone shared a link with me. Turns out, it was spam.

Nothing special about it - a young lady, naked, holding a sign asking me to visit a website for more pics.

What is a bit frustrating is how completely unprepared Dropbox appears to be to handle spam. There appears to be no method of deleting an undesired shared link from an account. Several days later, the nice naked lady is still at the very top of my Events page - with a helpful thumbnail, of course.

Dropbox appears to be aware of the issue: http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/dropbox-investigating-reports-of-spam-emails/

While they do their due-diligence in creating some working spam filter, though, how hard would it be to simply add an option for deleting a shared link from an account?
Why bother asking when reserving at all then? How do people even know how much their bag is going to weigh before they pack?

I don't even own a scale. I can estimate my own weight, but not the weight of a bag whose contents have yet to be determined.
I got that too, but immediately after I received an email from swish that stated my order is complete, and that I can check my orders at http://swish.com/login/ (obviously not working right now).
Google believes helping others holds more value than money?
For the simple task of moving bytes through a tcp connection (what the article is about) netcat will be fine.

Socat allows you to use raw interfaces, or fifos, SSL, proxies, serial ports,... as one or both end points. E.g. you can forward arbitrary tcp connections (tcp relay;) but also connect stdin/stdout if a program to a serial port... just very, very, very versatile.

http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat.html
Network REPL, with autocomplete and history:

rlwrap nc ....
4) Speak to your GP and see if you can get help. Speech therapy isn't perfect, but it can help

+1. I used to have a colleague with a pretty bad stammer. He attended speech therapy sessions during the time that we worked together and there was a huge improvement. While his speech never became 100% normal, the stammer was greatly reduced and by the end of it, he was even able to give presentations to a room full of engineers and managers. The confidence he gained form the exercises he learnt in therapy (such as taking a deep breath and exhaling into a difficult word) and from the support he received from other attendees have helped him immensely.

Speech therapy is definitely worth trying.
Note: This is a response to clicks's comment, not to the linked article.

I'm not going to comment about OP, but I will say I've noticed that, in the majority of these posts, the person is self-diagnosed and has received no psychiatric evaluation whatsoever.

A significant number of founders may have "ADD"[0] in that they have trouble focusing, etc. This is like self-diagnosing depression based on the fact that they "feel sad".

I have no idea how many founders actually have ADHD - ie, DSM 314.xx - but I take any HN post about "ADD" with a whole heaping of salt. It's nothing personal, but let's just say that my internal Bayesian classifier has been trained to detect most as pure noise.

[0] I put this in quotation marks because the term has been outdated and deprecated for quite a long time in the medical community - in my experience, most people who say they have "ADD" haven't received any medical treatment recently, because that's not the term that any current psychologist/psychiatrist would use.
If anyone wishes to contact me please see my profile for my email address and personal website
PDF Libraries
My friend and I are building Campaign Compass (www.campaigncompass.com), a simple way to comply with political campaign regulations. We are trying to figure out the best way to autofill a single PDF page. This page might need to be copied n times and filled n times with unique data. We are writing this in Python.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
I think you need to dismiss the myth that your 'forming' years are behind you.

I work for a few research groups at a large, prominent southern university. There are people who get engineering phds in their 30s and 40s. You have coded a large chunk of your life and have an excellent framework to bolt stuff on to.

There is always a job market for an enthused developer that doesn't believe in his own hype. You don't have to announce you are not among the best, I don't think a lot of people who think they are the best are anywhere close. I write much better code now when I am in my 30s than when I was in my 20s. If you stay in touch with technologies and you build stuff for yourself that you are willing to show people, then your prospects should look pretty good.

Best of luck.
Sure, that's a valid point. I suppose the best time to do it would be while arranging the in-person/phone interview.

The interviewers will (hopefully!) be told what time the interview is, so this information could be forwarded at the same time.

And if the HR team can't ensure the interviewers have this extremely relevant piece of information? That's probably a signal about how effectively that company handles communication.
I think that what you are perceiving as a "bad player" comes from Vimeo's focus on image quality over other factors. YouTube's compression algorithms are more lossy than Vimeo's, so there is less data to send. This is great for serving Justin Bieber to millions of people every day, but less good when you are a photographer showing off a macro photography reel. Longer load times are a fair tradeoff for most of Vimeo's customers.

I should add that I am in the US, and had no problem running that video on a modern computer, so I don't really how badly it was running on yours.
I do not believe so - interbank transfers are nearly instantaneous and cheap, especially for a firm like Western Union. The meatier costs are from anti-fraud and anti-money laundering.
What's the info on these tomato tastings? I'm in the Bay Area as well and would live to attend.
I will append to most of the comments here. Describe what you want (describe as many details as you can without writing a book (ex. basic description, technology that will be used and a time frame of when you need it by.) Letting the freelancer know that the a budget has been approved will also help. Many times I've gone through the time and effort of quoting a project only to find out that it was in exploratory means of deciding how much it might cost. Include contact information and best time to call if they have questions.

Then tell the freelancer you are accepting quotes until a certain date and you will make a decision shortly afterwards.
I can do the same if you send me the above information. I can take a look at your project and see if I can help you.

sales@se4hire.org
Factors that improve social mobility are not the same thing as inheriting an immense wealth. Bill Gates benefited tremendously from the good financial position of his parents, but his immense wealth came from his own work starting and building Microsoft.
If you’ve ever wondered where those O’Reilly animal covers come from
Side Projects: Learning experience vs. Distraction
With the state of javascript at the moment you would certainly be using library code that's less than two years old to build core parts of your app. The line between language and library can get pretty blurry, particularly when we're talking about a language that compiles to JS.
Gridlover: establish a type system with modular scale and vertical rhythm
Nope, you just have to solve a small easy "puzzle" to "prove" you're a developer.
OK; I kind of thought WTFPL was a good enough license and mine was pretty much similar except for the F part.

Since I got 3 different people asking for a license, I might as well find one. I'd like something really permissive that also lets you strip the thing and doesn't have to be at the top of every file and doesn't require to give credit... Something that lets you do whatever you want to.
I've not used Swish before and like you said I can't access the login page either. However, I never got any account details so do you know how you would login?

Edit: Managed to get on the page and create an account after some f5 hammering. Turns out all you need to do is create an account with the same email you used in the order and it will display the order status.
Why does so many startups feel the need to brag about the fact that they're switching to <hot new technology>? To me it just comes off as an attempt to convince themselves it's a great idea.

How about coming back in a year and telling us how it turned out instead? Actual case-studies and analysis are interesting, fashion statements are not.
I liked these quotes and was surprised to see the negative response.

Sed Itious' comment seems to attack Graham on a personal level, like for being a "tedious ex-nerd" or having "bubbling narcissism", even linking him to racism somehow. Is all this about some issue with Paul Graham's personality that I'm not aware of, or did people sincerely not relate to the quotes? They don't seem that different from the inspirational soundbytes usually upvoted here.
There's more to "the system" than just insurers. The large number of middlemen all extracting a profit is one of the many problems. Don't forget overhead and their middlemen, all the way back to med school tuition...
Thanks. I actually saw that school on the Internet somewhere. I might just take out the loan but before I do I am hoping to get accepted into App Academy which doesn't charge you until you get a job.
Bah, you're right. I've seen the videos before so I didn't bother to try to watch them again. He was widely mocked for that, but now I can't find those videos anywhere. That's very curious.
I'm 26 so I can't speak at all to what a 40ish developer needs to do to get a job. My advice is what I'd give to anyone asking what I think you're asking regardless of age. I'm also assuming you have no desire for entrepreneurship or management.

Since you have a steady and mostly happy job, focus on differentiating yourself after hours. Build out your github profile (my current focus since it's entirely private projects right now), find a programming niche that is financially rewarding and put your emphasis there. Specialist programmers in under-served sectors can earn significantly more than the management supervising them. You don't get to that point by "doing .NET" or building WordPress plugins (not to sound condescending, I've done both for a living), but it can be incredibly lucrative.
Your use of the word "bother" is curious: a two line email is too much?

But to answer your question, rejections are often met with a short note saying "thanks for the time", wishing us well, and hoping we meet again in the future.
It's odd hearing this perspective. I've lived in a country most people consider 'third-world' and yet my recent move to San Francisco is the only time I've been worried about being able to pay rent at the end of the month.
There is a ton of good stuff out there, and I agree that Rosetta stone is awful. Rostetta Stone from a business perspective is brilliant in that they get $400 for the software upfront, and most people give up and blame themselves, not the software. It also demos very well, but gets really boring really quickly.

Michael Phelps would have been much better off if he had just learned one phrase... "Hello, little friend (nihao xiao pengyou)". In China, children a fascinated by foreigners and love to point. I know of no other phrase that so consistently wins smiles from children and parents alike. Even if Michael Phelps had completed all the Rosetta Stone levels, he still would have never known how to greet a child.
It may be that your idea is not feasible - I commonly get requests for ideas that are just not worth investing time and effort in.

Cost is another factor - what is your budget, have you made that clear in your emails?

How are you locating these people?

12 people isn't that many, keep trying and hopefully this thread will get you the right person.
Desugaring Scheme with tree transformations
Riskier than using the latest perpetual beta JavaScript library? I don't think so.
Try http://www.babbel.com
I also have the impression that the research that went in this article is a quite light. R, ML, Python serve different purposes. Julia is cool but brand new and feel kind of out of place compared to the heavy weight that are the other three. The point the author makes about ML and R being black boxes is misleading. At least, R is open source and you can always look at the gut of the software, nothing is more easy.
Track down some deaf or mute software engineers and ask them for advice. Maybe you'll get lucky and one of them will hire you!
BB10 Tells Your Friends When You're Watching Porn
/me too/

I like it (tar|nc) as a quick alternative when moving data to or from low performance devices such as Android phones. Rsync/SSH really burns a lot of power for encryption. Makes a full x GB Backup much faster to pipe it through netcat (or bashs /dev/tcp if available).
"most intense hacker school... in JavaScript". Does not compute.
I think you're correct, but I also think that the comments you were replying to were taking "discriminatory" in the sense that it was actually meant in the original comment, which complained of this being "unnecessarily discriminatory".
Guys... stop clicking the link so I can get my order through.

k thx
Five Cuban Mantras for Success
my first job out of uni was in medium-size finance software consultancy @£35k, up to £37k in less than a year. Trying to live a family life on that wasn't fun (definitely possible, just not fun). Moved 80 miles south for a £34k salary, reduced hours & stress, no dry cleaner bills, much cheaper rent and 0 commuting costs (cycling). Don't miss London one bit :-) OTOH, I've not had a raise yet and can't see one coming any time soon.

p.s. all numbers are pre-bonus, but for junior devs they're near-negligible in both companies anyway.

p.p.s both jobs are enterprise java.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I think long variable names for short-lived variables decreases readability. Oftentimes these "points" are just used to glue functional pipelines together and have little-to-no intrinsic meaning. The true documentation comes from the types and is thus more trustworthy.
I stutter also--it's an incredibly frustrating experience for sure, but there's a lot you can do!

For one, I've been creating iOS apps to help people speak through proven speech therapy methods (http://speech4good.com). We're helping thousands of people improve their speech right now.

You can also join various support groups through the Nat'l Stuttering Assoc. (http://westutter.org) or the British Stammering Assoc. (http://stammering.org)--I would highly recommend one of these groups.

Most of all, stay positive! You're in great company (Churchill, James Earl Jones, and more!)
I take it you've never heard of Jean-Paul Sartre.

http://i.imgur.com/KzbWCP8.jpg
> So if the copyright-owning companies don't have a value-add

its not true that they don't value add; its just that their value adding happens once - the cost of production is borne by media companies, and they assume the risk of not making back their investment money. The value they created then is the possibility of a good work being created.

However, asking to be paid continuously for the right to copy the work even after the cost has been repaid to create it is wrong (but this is what copyright law dictates).

Under the old system, artists are commissioned (by the state, or the wealthy) to create a work, which is then freely available to all (granted, a painting can't be so easily copied back then...). I say as technology improves, we need to change to that system again.

When artist(s) want to create a work and want to be sure to be paid accordingly, they first need to solicit the money (including their living/salary/costs) from the general public, and once their costs are met, they produce the artwork. Those who have sponsored would then have full work, but they cannot enforce copyright over any copies made, including copies they themselves distribute. This way, the masses who didn't pay benefit from those who did, and the artists got paid their share (and upfront too). No longer will there exist rent seeking by middlemen for owning the "right to copy".
tell that to weev
This horribly written article treats the phrase "control freak" as if it's a term the general public knows.
It's not the Ivy League, just one member, Brown.

And no one has been sued.