skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am in my 40s, and this is my experience:

I work as an independent contractor, and my pay has gone up

I still code every day, but my understanding of what is important has changed a lot.

I care much more about the solution as a whole than the technology. While the technology is important, most clients care more about correct results. From the business side, nobody has ever tell me "Thank God you used TDD over Angular with a no Sql database". But on the other side, I have seen software that crashes every other time they run, but big companies still willing to pay in the 6 figures to use, because when it runs, it solves a very complex problem for them. So understanding the whole solution, and why is valuable, has become much more important. And that is what has kept me as a valuable individual contributor.

I went into management for a while, found a few cultural differences, like that Indian woman are way smarter than most of team members. Also with younger people, some of them need to be professionalized before they can be fully useful, once I got one that sustained that being late to work because he was drunk in a party the previous night was a reasonable excuse because he was the king of JS in his shop. Didn't last 6 months.

Nobody can guarantee you any pay scale, you make your own profession.

Family becomes a big factor, so job jumping is not something to be proud of, even as a young professional, it can be easily read as lack of maturity, and it plays against you in your resume.

Specialist vs. Generalist. There is room for both, but just be careful that you don't become specialist in a passing fad. Is better to accumulate specializations, so you become a well rounded generalist

Today I am coding in 3 different (but business process related) projects. I am part of the "think tank" that design the mathematical models behind the different products; and also work with the rest of the senior team on how to bring the energy of the younger people to a more self disciplined and productive place. We are finding that too many people think that "loud and opinionated" makes them noticeable, but the truth is that we cannot put high value products in the hands of the frat house king (to put it in stereotype terms: the bullied geek in the school probably has many more chances than the high school quarter back)
I'm 38, and Software Dev. is as lucrative as ever.

I've never done any 'IT work', and I've focused almost entirely on product development, over my 16 year career.

As a salary, I think I have plateaued at 160K, which is good enough for me. With 'adjustments for inflation', that's usually an extra $5K increase per year. There are people who make more than me, I know. For example, a guy I work with probably makes $200K (and he doesn't have a college degree).

There are always 'business problems' to solve with software, and there is always software to maintain. A lot of software never 'ends' - it just keeps going on, or dies dramatically, replaced by something similar. There's never been a better time to be a developer.

At a certain point, you'll have to become something like a 'manager'. For me, this is more of a 'tech lead' / 'architect' sort of role. I'm responsible for the quality, functionality, road-maps, integration, etc. I'm responsible for understanding the business domain, in and out. I'm responsible for managing the parts of the system, and ensuring that they all work together. I have to lead meetings, give presentations, work with the field and customers.

However, all of that is a small part, for me. I still code a good 85% of the time.

I get somewhere around 10-15 recruiters contacting me per week. So, I believe the job market is hot. But, I am really comfortable where I am. I work from home, and I run an entirely distributed team. We meet in person, when we think we need to meet. Things go very smoothly, because we're all experienced devs, and we fit together culturally.

I'm far from an 'amazing dev'. I don't have a slick github account. I don't run any important open source projects. I just know how to do a lot of different things, I am very efficient, and I have a great track record for success. I know on any given week, hundreds of thousands of people use software that I had created, and that makes me feel good.
The Ultimate List Of Developer Podcasts
The nice thing about external USB drives is that you can position them some distance from your computer. Back before I switched to LTO tape, mine were taped down in a low/no traffic area. But, yes, they're fragile, almost certainly the most fragile backup media you can use, and my first set didn't survive this http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/, at least not without reporting so many errors I gave up on them.

And you're of course right about the cloud, especially in the US; I've got rock solid AT&T ADSL, but it's very A(symmetric) and has a 150 GiB monthly cap, so only my very most important stuff gets saved to rsync.net, which e.g. saved my email from the tornado.
Is it just that you are in a different timezone than the author?
The innuendo that congressman switch their allegiance based on who has paid the most is also just that, and mostly a misunderstanding of how the game works. You don't donate to people who don't agree with you: you donate to ones who do agree with you, to make sure they keep getting elected. If you're a coal company, you don't need to pay Congressmen to support strip mining the mountains bare. You can find plenty who believe deep down in their heart it's the God-giving right of people to do that. You then donate to those guys, to ensure they stay in power.

Political influence is both more subtle and more shocking than the popular caricature of "bribing a Congressman." American politics is far more sophisticated than that. Here, you don't just write a check to get the decision you want, at least not typically. You do things like convince an entire state that an industry that damages their health and their land is actually a crucial part of their culture, history, and heritage, and that anyone who wants to reign it in are an existential threat to their community. That's the kind of influence that a nosey prosecutor will never be able to pin on anyone.
yea those are due to JQuery UI icons for the spinner control not being accessible...I'll fix it.
I was a dev for 20 years at the same company - went from being an Assembler and BCPL programmer to C, C++, Visual Basic, learnt web stuff when that came along. Then the mid-life crisis hit ( well, more like my daughter was grown up so I had freedom to move ), thought about career changes and became a tester.
A few years after that I moved from the UK to the USA and am loving my new adventure. Working at a small company as their main exploratory tester, working on several projects at a time, all sorts of domains and techs and still learning new stuff.

The devs I worked with for 20 years either stayed and stagnated with average pay rises every year, moved onto new firms to get a bigger pay rise, one went contracting then earnt a lot of cash and retired to be a farmer in Cornwall. Another dev retired with a nervous breakdown
I wouldn't read too much into five-figure bribes, those are probably for tax purposes. This particular congressman's position more likely comes from his personal opinions and the types of people he golfs with.

In general donations (bribes) don't dictate political support for defense contractors. That support is a given, for two reasons. First, defense contractors are also large civilian employers. Second, contracts are a form of subsidy, to maintain what they call the "defense industrial base."
Well, it's illegal for them to fight the unionization of their workers. Normally when they do it, they say "but we're not anti-union" with a wink and a smile, and that makes it okay. However, if the leaked documents are legitimate, they may be evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Also, I'm troubled by the fact that this submission seems to have been deleted from the front page(s). It's only showing up on new submissions now.
If you walk into any Fortune 500 "enterprise" environment, MOST of the employee developers working on the core business systems are typically in their 40's, 50's, and up.

It's not as "sexy" as tinkering with this month's Scala/Node/Go/Rust/Julia fad... but when you get older and have family and other commitments, perspective often changes. A lot of guys just want to "get things done", and then go have a life outside of work. To be fair, most developers continue to learn new technologies and skills throughout their life. But the drive to always be on the bleeding-edge with your professional work tends to be a trait of younger developers and smaller companies.

I think a large part of the fear of age is that we don't see a lot of middle-age web developers. That is because Generation X was really the first generation for which web development even EXISTED during our entry-level formative years! So I'm not convinced that we will all simply vanish into management 10 years from now. Rather, I think you'll just see a lot of middle age Gen-X web or Java developers, with perhaps younger guys focusing on newer niches (e.g. wearable devices, VR, pure client-side JavaScript with little to no backend, etc).

Or maybe web development will become a more cross-generational field, with middle-age and younger developers working side by side. Hard to predict the future with certainty. At any rate, I'm about to turn 40 myself, and I stopped stressing out about my "exit strategy" a few years ago. I'm currently working for an exciting small start-up. I ENJOY being hands-on with the code... and as long as I maintain that passion and desire to learn, I find that my income and responsibilities keep going up. I'm sure that will plateau at some point soon, and maybe decline later in life if I choose to slow down a bit. But I find that I'm still highly employable among the employers that I want to work for.
Please click on my zidisha link below>https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/Nellyjpkrr/6136.ht...
No. The clocks use the local Date object, but the rotation calculations for hour hand were copied over from a 12 hour clock.

One downside of 24 hour clocks: a broken one is only right once a day.
Every programmer who loves Perl should ask him/herself: Is this a case of Stockholm Syndrome?

I think for me it was. The jobs kept coming, stuff kept getting done, I enjoyed myself, I'm proud of most of the code I wrote, and yet, it never felt completely right. Probably because Perl has always been more of a petri dish for idioms than an organized home for them.
Anecdotally confirming. When shopping around for the past 10 years, I've usually bought used PCs and used parts, both desktops and laptops, but after deciding to try out a Mac in early 2012, buying used just didn't seem to be worth the discount.

It doesn't seem to be so bad right now, but part of this may be due to my insistence on getting at least 4GB of RAM for a MacBook Air, which was hard to find on the used market.
My manager is at least 55+ (he retired, but came back because he was bored) - he writes code all day. My CTO is 50, he also writes code (though not as much as my manager).

From my (limited) experience, it looks like, as we age, we have these options:

1. Continuously learn new things - this negates the "old man" perception in the industry

2. Be good (not necessarily bleeding edge) in programming, but have good domain knowledge (this ties us to one domain though) - these kind of people are very valuable, as most programming jobs don't need bleeding edge skillsets.

3. Become a suit
I see it as moving into path 2 and 3 combined.

It is interesting that some parts of CS have more opportunities for consulting than others. Has anyone else experienced this in their chosen specialization?
They do better with generational collectors
Tell that to the Mt. Gox Software Development Department.
Yes - I try to hire a lot of experienced developers. There is no hand-holding, with them. If I hire someone skilled and with a lot of experience, I can give them vague requirements and a general deadline, and I know that I'll get something high quality, that just works, and that's probably better than I original spec'd.

I don't like risk, but that's just me. I know I could hire more inexperienced (e.g. cheaper) staff. But, there's just a lot more risk that goes with that. I'd rather pay someone good, a lot, and know I can sleep at night.
I'd like to link to the top HN story now: http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-fac...

The WhatsApp guys are experienced engineers who were rejected from FB and Twitter. Prepare yourself for ageism. Your path is to create a $19B company.
JB?
Upvoted just for the TL;DR remarks. Dead accurate.
Soylent green.
Have you ever seen Soylent Green ?[1]

Watch It, and you'll discover what happends to Older Developers.

By the way, I'am 36 now, nearly half way. I still looking for code only jobs, I've been managing people since I was 18 to now. I go reverse, and toward more and more coding, architecture, research ...

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Bulgaria Web Summit 2014
My dad was programming right until his retirement. He always refused any sort of management role (though he occasionally got a lead role for a high-profile project thrust upon him). I know one of the things he worked with was Java, so it definitely wasn't all old stuff. He was working on an open source project in his spare time, though strangely that seems to have stopped since his retirement. I should ask him about that.

I'm 40 and still young. I'm learning tons of new stuff, developing into new areas, and started as a freelancer two years ago (which boosted my pay quite a bit). I still have great plans to work on ideas of my own in the future. No idea where I'll be in 10 years, but I bet it's something totally different.
https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/Nellyjpkrr/6136.ht...
> 1) The 10 year developer who has 1 year of experience 10 times over. This is just a junior developer who wants the salary of a senior developer.

How simple is it to gain 10 years of real experience in the industry? Are there enough jobs and opportunities for the ambitious developer to keep improving and gaining novel insights and experiences in that person's jobs? Or does she, after a point, have to relegate most the learning to free time projects because the work doesn't take her out of her comfort zone any more?
The funny part is that if Facebook had hired them when they had the chance, they probably wouldn't have built anything resembling WhatsApp or whatever Facebook was trying to achieve by acquiring WhatsApp.
Bitcoin Miner Earning $8 Million a Month
You aren't going to need it
Google Could End up with a $5 Bn Antitrust Penalty in India
Yes you're right - he seems to be using adsense to drive traffic. I guess if adsense didn't work for small businesses, google wouldn't be making the money they do :)
Oh, nice. -fvisibility=internal is what I was about to go looking for. I want to write an operating system as a static library, so I don't want its internal symbols visible.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote
I've had this happen to me on different topics (IIRC it did happen with Stripe a month or two ago) way too often to attribute it to coincidence. My working assumption is that online privacy does not exist anymore.

With all these microphones and cameras attached to all the net enabled devices we use, it's a matter of time before offline privacy stops existing as well.

Email in 1985 must have felt weird too.
Cheers,
F
Article is behind a paywall.

Mt. Gox, the struggling Japanese bitcoin exchange,
has filed for bankruptcy protection in a U.S. court
to stop customers from freezing any of the company's
assets that are located on U.S. soil.

Lawyers put MtGox Co. Ltd. into Chapter 15 protection
in Texas on Sunday, stating that a potential
class-action lawsuit in Illinois could get in the
way of reorganization efforts that are taking place
in the company's home country.

Mt. Gox, an exchange for buyers and sellers of the
digital currency known as bitcoin, halted customer
withdrawals on Feb. 7, later stating that it lost
almost 750,000 of its customers' bitcoins and around
100,000 of its own.

"This theft or disappearance is currently the subject
of an intense investigation which required Mt. Gox
to devote most of its resources," Mt. Gox lawyers wrote
in court papers.

In the potential class-action lawsuit, lawyers are
trying to round up U.S. residents who paid a fee to
Mt. Gox to buy, sell or trade bitcoin, according to
court papers filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas.
As part of that lawsuit, lawyers are expected to ask
Tuesday during a court hearing for the power to freeze
any of Mt. Gox's U.S. assets, which include any servers
or other computer equipment that stores customer
information about bitcoins.

It is unclear what assets—if any—Mt. Gox has in the U.S.
Still, the U.S. bankruptcy halts existing lawsuits, at
least temporarily.

More specifically, Chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy
Code is available to foreign companies that have sought
protection of their home courts.

Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan last
month. Participating in the U.S. lawsuits at this
point "would wastefully divert resources away from"
the Japanese bankruptcy, Mt. Gox lawyers wrote in
court papers.

The company's lawyers said that Mt. Gox's debts
totaled 6.5 billion yen ($63.9 million) versus
assets of 3.84 billion yen.

Mt. Gox hired the Baker & McKenzie law firm to
represent it in bankruptcy. The company's case,
numbered 14-31229, has been assigned to Judge
Stacey G. Jernigan.

—Jacqueline Palank contributed to this article.

Write to Katy Stech at katherine.stech@wsj.com
Some percentage of the workforce essentially manages to not-get-fired and little else. I don't necessarily think that's a rationalization about a specific hiring circumstance, rather that it's a fairly general observation that probably applies in lots of fields.
Does it really matter to Windows XP owners if Microsoft pulls the plug?
Hiring for Video of Guru ed User
I have no idea. Google X, Facebook AI Lab? I'm struggling with this myself, the solutions (for me) now seem to be: learn something new every year at work (by changing the technologies your employer uses or changing employers), and research in the afternoon.
I bought medicine online one time. Moments later I received an email to purchase Viagra. Coincidence?
You don't need the \ (because it's in single quotes), and as mentioned by clarry all regex implementations are slightly different.

grep '"[^"]*"' test.txt

should be about the same, and not reliant on less-standard features.
This is a great response. As someone who's approaching my mid-30s, I can identify with a lot of it.

I'm at an inflection point these days on whether I want to push forward on the management path or go for the third path, as you mentioned above.

The management path seems to be the path of least resistance, but getting into the politics of management is unappealing. Also the level of competition for management jobs is at another level. As an engineer, I'm used to having jobs thrown at me left and right, but it seems like engineering managers compete for jobs quite a bit more. It feels risky to go from something with high demand to something with clearly much lower demand.

The third path is very appealing from a satisfaction standpoint, but clearly a lot riskier, especially for someone US-based who needs better healthcare as they get older. Also the feast or famine nature of consulting can be a little brutal. I think a combination of consulting plus products is the best bet, but it can take a while to get that going.
Ask: How would you visualize a segmented funnel?
The grid snap happens after the movement. You are correct that the higher level grid may not move. To fix this, the higher resolution tiles (1x1 in your example) are morphed near their edges so that gaps do not appear. I cover this in the blog post, see the 'Morphing between regions' section
I'm willing to admit I lack imagination or vision here. I think the lack of killer examples to sort of show me the way here is hobbling me. Wolfram's demo video was interesting but viewed to me more like a demo of a fancy calculator than a path towards a new way of doing development. I have a drawer full of fancy calculators I don't use because my need to "compute" things in such a general sense as presented here is pretty rare, or is so narrow in scope that I can usually just go hunt down the relevant information myself in less time than it takes to learn all of this new stuff.

I'll probably wait on the sidelines for a while and wait to see what kinds of things come out of this work.

Please take my skepticism as a healthy challenge and not as dismissal. The day the Wolfram language shows me something that fundamentally transforms some aspect of my life I didn't know needed transforming, I'll sign up.
Ask HN: What events are worth me attending?
Hi HN community,

I am a British technology lover.

My question is simple, what are the 'Must Attend' events any where in the world that are worth travelling from the UK to attend. If you can give reasons why, that will be awesome.

Tech events, network events, hackathons etc. Anything you think is 100% beneficial.

Thanks in advance for your responses
I am in a vertical industry, i.e. something else (energy) plus computer science. Lots of purely trained CS-types do not do well here because they dont understand the domain. My degrees from MIT and Stanford are in the domain.

Incidentally, Google has matured and hired some of my classmates. Facebook still seems to be more of a CS kindergarten.
What? America doesn't believe in R&D much?

I'd push back rather hard on that statement. US companies invest loads of cash in R&D, more than any other country. The problem is that if you expect to be doing R&D for a YC startup (or even a typical SV consumer web or B2B startup), you're really barking up the wrong tree—those sorts of companies don't do a lot of R&D. If you're really interested in that kind of work, you'd be far better off in bioscience or hardware. Or at least larger, established software companies.
Right, but if more people were playing basketball in schools today than were 20-30 years ago then the talent pool would be much larger today. If you look at people born in the 50s and 60s most of them didnt have a computer to tinker around when they were in their teens or even 20s. But my generation saw the dawn of the Internet. When I was young everyone had a desktop in their house the family shared, now families each have their own computers like laptops and smaller computers like tablets and even smaller devices like phones. 12 year olds are building iphone apps and elementary schools are having programming days. Being a beginner is easier today when you have an internet community and the device of your choice to play with. More people enjoy building websites using blogger or wordpress or what have you and some of them dont even write a single line of html much less CSS.
First off, brilliantly cogent post. I am getting to the stage where the latest fancy framework doesn't really seem as much of a win but more meta-bullshit to deal with.

> The problem for some people is that these kinds of more generalized roles put you in charge of systems that do not have the sort of clear-cut deterministic behavior you remember from your programming days.

Can you expand a bit on this? What do you mean by "clear-cut deterministic behaviour" ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
7 Things To Get Your Startup Covered by the Media via Onboardly
People tire out but realize they can work at 5% utilization (sometimes 0%) and not get fired.

It's not common among ambitious people and in geographic regions with a robust job market, but some people resign themselves to career mediocrity.
Mentioned the competitors too. I have no problem with the post.