skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clarity comes from familiarity. It's not an objective measure.

The speed benefit is well known, as is the corollary, premature optimisation. I expect checking for null is even faster if speed is the main concern. It's an engineering tradeoff, just like making the abstraction to a monad (or monad plus). In the normal course of events I'm more concerned about flexibility than performance and would prefer the abstraction.
Do you mean "correct" as in that's the absolute right order (as in math) or as in that's the original intel syntax?

My first programming language was mc68k assembler where the "correct" order of registers is the opposite.
>You have probably encountered the occasional Java desktop app, without realising. If you can't easily tell it is Java, the development team have done a good job.

I've never seen any Java desktop app that I cannot easily tell it's Java. With most of those apps, even on i7/16GB/SSD systems, you get laggy behavior with Swing and the GC. And SWT still has the "uncanny valley" look going.
Laverna – Store your notes anonymously and encrypted
"technical skills are a serious roadblock to a career". You've discovered Putt's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successful...
Well, you're overlooking mistakes that I made. I feel that generalists should be valued more highly; this is a significant issue. However, I should have built more of a social network, taken better care of myself physically, diversified my investments more, and kept up more with how the market was changing.
Eventually that's where it's going to go. At the moment resolution is the biggest limiting factor and probably will be for a couple of more years.
> I thought the general consensus here is that security by obscurity is bad.

How is running web views in separate processes "security by obscurity"? I agree that there is nothing inherently secure about it, though it has other benefits, but it doesn't increase obscurity as such (you could argue that the need for well-defined message-passing semantics leads to more decoupled code, decreasing 'obscurity').
> programming has always been something I do, not something I am

I think this is important, it's the kind of thing that I read and think "Yes, how obvious, of course!" but in practice I wouldn't think of it myself. A very healthy way of seeing things.
you can use the intel syntax with gas too (see -masm=intel or .intel_syntax noprefix).
In principle you are right. But there's weird errors then and now, which I don't want to investigate. There's annoyance with having self-signed certificates. Adding new users. Not to mention spam and, so far not an issue, getting blacklisted for some reason.

Basically, there's some things I want to do myself, other's I can outsource.
Duck typing is borderline psychotic. Is it a number? Is it not a number? What's the logarithm of an hour?
If this Apps for Education platform is targeted at children, are many unable to consent to terms perhaps?
Well, your responses mostly amount to "OMG, I hate Java coders / everything there sucks" etc. Not really insightful.
So what's your plan going forward here on out, to secure financial and medical stability for yourself?
Making Ghost Blogs Faster and More Secure: Hello CloudFlare
Two parties. (Dems = libs)
I imported one of these (paying roughly the same price) and it was well worth it purely for netflix. My family has since bought about a dozen of them.

Hopefully with the official UK release BBC iPlayer (both TV and Radio) support is on the way.

edit: iPlayer support rolls out today, yay!
As an aside I think your resume could be better.

To me at least it reads as a bit unfocused. You've clearly got a mass of experience but for any individual job much, if not most, of it isn't relevant. It's a CV that says "look at all the experience I've got" but doesn't really do a great job of saying why you'd be good for any specific role.

I'd look at three or four resumes, each more focused around a specific skill, industry or problem type. Maybe one as a hardcore Linux developer, one with a more web / multimedia focus and so on. Pick out three or four projects relevant to each one and write a few lines about them. While the fact you've got 35 years of C is impressive and maintain your own Linux distro, it's not going to be relevant for roles focusing on a higher level language and is just distracting from your abilities which are relevant.

Also, personally I'd put it on two pages and space it out far more. Larger font, larger borders, more white space generally.

TL;DR: You're probably better than 90% of devs out there but you're not selling it well. Overall aim for less content but with more punch and make it nicer to read.
The links to the copy should be marked with nofollow otherwise you'll be promoting their search engine ranking.
In http://christfollower.me/#D140311GUIDO, OldCoder says, "I'm shy about talking to new people. I'm autistic and, actually, not high functioning. I communicate decisively when it's necessary, ..."

I don't know much about autism, but if it tends to affect careers, it may be a relevant difference between OldCoder's career and that of a typical programmer.

Please note that I'm not making any judgements or claims here -- I'm too uneducated on these topics to do that -- I'm just pointing out a conceivably-relevant factor.
In the UK, it could be fairly soon.
That's Pixar - they've been late to the path tracing party by several years. Also MU didn't use raytracing for hair shadows - they still used deep shadow maps for that.

Other studios like ILM, SPI and Bluesky have been using full path tracing for years.
This was after I was reading on HN last week about 12 year olds freelancing.

Bottom line, you have to learn how to hustle. You find a way, or you don't.

If you can't get employment as developer, then create your own job. Or don't.

As a freelancer, nobody knows my age. They don't ask. I work from the Philippines, but as long as I'm reasonably available, people don't care. I have friends doing the same thing who aren't nearly as technical or knowledgeable as I am making a good living in the most expensive cities in the world.

Reid Hoffman is co-author of a book called "The Start-up of You." I haven't read the book, but the title says it all. You have to treat yourself as a start-up and put in the same sorts of blood, sweat and tears that you read about other people doing here. Maybe you have a job that you can coast in and have work-life balance. Maybe you are nearly on the street and one notch above being completely fued. If you are the latter, then you probably need to be doing some serious disaster mode action. Really, what else do you have to do? Being a transient gives you a lot of time to think, but that gets old.

But it's all about people, really. A developer who is just okay at dealing with computers but great at selling to people is probably in a better position than someone who is the opposite.
Yes, it's U.S. specific. I don't think it will happen in the EU. The EU may go through some changes, but I feel that health care will continue to be seen as something that countries need as part of a sound infrastructure.
My takeaway from this is: save. Resist the temptation to match your spending to your salary, you don't need all that crap anyway. I hope to have enough assets by the time I'm 50 that permanent unemployment at the time will be at worst the difference between uncomfortable retirement and comfortable one - not between hungry+homeless and food+shelter.
Still, you should be preferable than any college graduate in any kind of junior role. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a junior role mean 100K in SV? Or do you want a more senior position?
Adding to Tyrannosaurs' sibling comment, describing those Open Source projects front and centre might make sense, given that Open Source is currently trendy.
Google is taking Motorola to the next level!
> (Most) humans aren't supposed to work 80+ a week. I say most because there are always those superhumans you come across that just seem to be able to do it

I don't think they're superhuman, they are people who have no lives and will burn out in a short period of time. I can only feel sorry for them.
> most programmers will stop at age 35 and become management level.

That's not going to happen to "most" anything. There are always fewer spaces at the next level up the pyramid. Usually drastically so. What's the "programmer" to "manager" ratio where you are?
The composability of vi/vim is not only its power, but its weakness. It's like a non-redundant language in which (almost) everything can be validly interpreted leaving no room for error detection. In vim nearly everything can be interpreted as a command and executed (sometimes even without strong visual feedback to be noticed) which means a lot of rope for mistakes. And mistakes human do. And for (such imperfect) humans editors are.
>Apple is more a fashion company than a tech company

That's completely false. They make good looking products sure but they aren't just pretty little bricks.
You're right.

Western Union telegraph offices will never sell telephone service, either, and that hipster vinyl store is never going to sell MP3s.

This matters why, exactly?
In print they'd probably never be published at all.
It definitely is nice that you get to live in a Scandinavian Country, it's funny but I know two American girls that have totally changed their lives by meeting Scandinavian guys and moving across the ocean.

Anyway I'm just a low level system admin that looks at this stuff and always freaks out. It's ironic because the perceived situation is not unlike how women often feel the need to settle down before their looks go away.

When I'm healthy and I can take a step back (I'm 28), I kind of feel like if you are interested in technology you should be able to find work into old age. Maybe the reality truly is something different but I hope not.

The people I really feel bad for are Indian H1B workers. At least Chinese have a decent shot at getting citizenship, I know quite a few Microsoft employees (I live in Seattle) and the Indians are basically high paid slaves. They all make more than double my salary, but they can build a whole life here and then if they get too old or their performance suffers they get kicked out.

Anyway there are lots of hard things in the world I hope that old IT workers really don't have as much of an issue finding work as seems to be implied on a regular basis by my preferred news outlets
Yeah, IDR got shut down(?), as did Neville Maxwells own site. Scribd has a copy.
As a small hack: Write your resume (or variants thereof) in LaTeX. That look can give you a slight boost with some people.
I admit I find my-self thinking from time to time that I need to "return multiple values from this method". But this is not often, and in most cases I find that it is a result of bad design. A method should be short and have a single responsibility, that is at-least the java best practice mantra, having only a single return type help enforce this.
That's Pixar - they're behind the curve, and PRMan 17 and 18 (their commercial renderer they sell) has been pretty poor at full raytracing (monte-carlo integration) due to poor acceleration structures and the overhead of their RSL shading language.

PRMan 19 looks like it's going to fix these issues to some degree.

Other renderers like Arnold and VRay (full raytracers) have been being used for the last 5 years by other studios.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the departure of permgen space and the dreaded PermSize and MaxPermSize JVM arguments. While it was actually replaced with a new "metadata" space, the latter is mostly transparent, unlike the former. You can read more about the change here: http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-8-permgen-metaspace
"Jobs" are highly overrated. I would truly push any older developer to consider consulting. So much freedom, I have more than quadrupled my pay, work is generally interesting and I have plenty of free time to work on what I want. I don't think I'll ever be able to go back.
foreword: this is not a statement of political or moral judgment. Just musings.

Part of the parcel of a dynamic competition based job market is that people get as much as possible of the total that others are willing to pay for their work. At present this means rapidly improving wages for certain categories of tech jobs where employees are scarce.

There are lots of ways this can go right or wrong. Here is a middle of the road story:

A family member of mine was a programmer in the mid 80s. By the 90s he had moved into management in a big enterprise software company. By mid 00s he was managing very big clients/projects that were billing for big software and thousands of engineering hours. The last time he had really programmed for a living, it was in COBOL and even then the tech was dated and very specialized.

At some point the clients he was working on went onto a different model handled by a different division of the company in a different country. He was offered a relocation, but it did not appeal. He had kids in high school, etc. About 50 years old.

He had made good money for years but not rockstar money. He owned a valuable house and had savings and investments so he could last a year or two unemployed. His first next job was at a startup-like thing that petered out. Then a long period trying to make his way freelancing and applying for jobs paying far less than his last. Now he runs a business. I still imagine it's far from his peek salary, but it's definitely not a bad income by general standards. It can just be tricky adjusting especially if you had to use savings to bridge for a few years.

There are all sorts of ways of looking at this. For me the lesson I got from it is that we have a strange assumption: your salary will go up over time and peek near retirement. Realistically one person might earn more in total by the age of 45 than his neighbor earns by 65, even in after tax earnings. I imaging you can find those neighbors in almost any street.

The richer neighbor could theoretically retire at 45 at the same retirement income the other would have at 65. On paper it might be easier even though the richer younger neighbor has longer to live of his retirement savings. He also had 20 year to spend out of his lifetime earnings so there would be more in the piggy bank if they lived the same lifestyle. At 45 it's a lot easier to supplement your retirement income and medical expenses are lower. Obviously this rarely happens.

Wealth is in a very real way relative to standards you consider normal. Part of that normality standard is an expectation for rising income throughout your life.
First, the US health care system is uniquely dysfunctional. But there are lots of mosquitos in Scandinavia.

For instance, the health care is a centralised system. Those never work. Doctors don't have time/incentive to diagnose problems unless they are obvious (or you're related to a politician -- yes, like in Soviet). Many Swedes (how many? No one knows) drag easily cured problems around for years and decades.

From my own and friends' experiences -- simple knee problems that stopped favorite exercise, lack of iron/vitamines that gave depressions, hard to recognize allergies that resulted in tiredness, thyroid problems etc.

I am here to tell you Scandinavians that it doesn't have to be like that!

If you go into a health care place in Romania, you are a valued customer they want to make happy. They will screw you over by giving you extra tests, not telling you something (anything) to get you out the door (because they only have minutes with any given client)!

You can't get that for money in Sweden. If you have health care problems, go to East Europe or something for the next vacation. (A recent article on BBC discussed that Polish doctors were working in Britain, because Polish immigrants were spoiled with the health care and the British system seemed similar to Sweden).

Please remember this when you're too chronically tired to make enough fuss so the doctors will try to find your problem to get rid of you.

(I have experience with the Swedish and partly with the Finnish health care systems, e.g. the Norwegian is a bit different but I don't really know enough to have an opinion.)
I think I see a typo:
'asVar' should be 'myValue'
An analytics tool you can use. At last.
You can send me an email and I can do quite a bit with it at that point, regardless of what you want me to do with it. That includes generating ads for me to look at to pay for my free email. You might have a copyright claim, but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far.
So, if I saw a job description like that I would smell BS and never apply. Maybe handing off a resume like that gives the same smell.

You don't give resumes like this, you tailor your pitch to the company which is hiring.

If you are applying to a PHP job, then remove all the fluff and tell the employer that you are a PHP developer. Generalists dont' get hired, then don't be a generalist. Touching up your PHP skills should take a couple of weeks. ;)
He may have been referring to "libertarians" and not "liberals", but I'm not sure it really affects the GP post's point.
A few of "Silicon Valley stories" that showed up lately (this one, the one about jobless Satoshi Nakamoto, the one about sexism and harassment in GitHub, or about Google/Apple wages conspiracy, or falling FX studios in Hollywood) got me wondering: why developers put so much faith into libertarianism, free market, and a good will of corporations and their HR departments; and/or are so strongly against state social protection, labor unions, etc. - basically all that uncool "heavy industry" stuff that could help in these and many other cases?

Are there any labor unions in Silicon Valley? I know about one in Apple, but it is (was?) formed mainly by the folks working at Apple retail stores, not the devs.
>Or do you want a more senior position?

From the post it doesn't sound like he's picky.
If I stay in the S.F. Bay Area, I think that a junior tech position here might work out. Above entry level and below lead. The trick will be staying above water long enough to find a good match.

I'd expand my options, both tech and non-tech, if I took the right courses and obtained certifications. I'm seriously considering doing something like this.

For example, the person who did my LiveScan recently (it was a background check for a tutoring job) teaches an EKG Technician class and said that it might work out for me.

A police detective who I phoned by mistake one night told me that I should consider getting a Digital Forensics certificate. He seemed to feel that I might be a match for that. Note: The story of the call is on the same weblog as tonight's post.

The medical care issue may be looking up. I had to go to the Emergency Room the other day. Didn't wish to, but no choice. I learned that the laws changed in January and that I might qualify for assistance after 10 years without care.
Inspired by the client side FRP library we use internally, I've build a small Haskell version as well: https://gist.github.com/sebastiaanvisser/9639321

Although the implementation is different, I tried to keep the interace similar in spirit. Building a Haskell version of a JavaScript library on the side really helps validating your design decisions.
one benefit is this seems to be, by far, the best hardware for augmented reality. aside... AR boardgames would be cool...

it could be good collaboration tool, many people touching/moving parts of the same application (or presentation, etc).

and as the video suggests, this interface makes more sense for something like 3d modeling (on paper).
According to globalrichlist.com, if you earn $300,000/yr, you earn more than 99.97% of people in the world. If you were to walk past a random sampling of 10,000 people on the street - only three of them would earn more than you.

It also happens that the same basic financial strategy one might employ whilst making $30,000/yr applies whilst making $300,000/yr. That is, spend less than you earn.

Or to put it a little more brazenly:

Debt to gross income metric? You fucking make $300,000/yr! Why on Earth do you need to be borrowing money? So you can afford to live in the bay area? So you can "put it all on black" investing in something-or-other? I'm not saying you're wrong to do it, but for Christ's sake don't complain about not having enough opportunity. Your problem isn't your leverage, it's your stupidity.

Spend less than you earn!
Nice wealthy people from nice rich countries are "Expats". People from poor countries are "immigrants". It's an interesting language hack society developed.
You can check out the mx settings for the domain using one of the free online tools.

Except that people who are on regular GMail will probably use e-mail forwarding provided by their domain registrar. Especially since the free Google Apps for domains is gone.
Small companies can be sued into bankruptcy. Why should large companies be exempt?
Europe gets rid of international roaming fees
Interesting. Some (if not most) of the problems author describes would be a non-problem should he live in some of the more prosperous EU countries, so strictly speaking they are not linked to author's profession.

Few hints he gives in the description of the interview process ("you'll be asked about algorithms", "you'll be asked why aren't you a CTO", etc) imply that he's interviewing for "Just A Programmer" positions -- is this the case? It looks like most of the difficulty in finding a job came from the disconnect between the position the author was applying for and his experience. JAP positions, even if they are advertised as "senior" normally require just the basic coding skills (i.e. you don't have to be really smart, mediocre is just fine) and therefore majority of applications will be much younger than the author, thus forcing the HR to ask the questions above.

In a broader context of discussion about older developers, what's more interesting for me are two things:

1. Why there are so few roles being advertised for truly senior developers? There are plenty of complicated commercial software around. For example, Apple works on a novel mobile operating system with its own set of technical challenges, so I would expect kernel specialists to be in demand, but those openings are rarely visible (even at apple.com/jobs).

2. What do truly senior engineers employed by major companies do on a daily basis? How mere mortals like us can get closer to their expertise set? I'm talking about Guido van Rossum at Dropbox, Brian Goetz at Oracle, Michael Stonebraker (though I'm not sure he hasn't moved to academia full-time), etc.
I think he means libertarians, maybe?
"but the implied license you give by sending me that email would go quite far."

There's nothing implied in sending an email beyond "I want you to read the contents". If there's more I want you to do, those wishes would be in the email itself.

30 years ago, if I wrote a paper letter to a company, I was not implying that I want them to build up a profile of me based on my stated info compared to the stated info of other people, where my letter came from, type of stationary, quality of my grammar, etc., then send me coupons that match the behavior they expect of people of my profile. I am implying that I want them to read my letter and take care of my request.
I'd love to see an honest comparison against RRDtool. You mention it once in "Support for sparse data (unlike the fixed-size RRDtool)".

What are the other advantages, disadvantages and trade-offs?
It is cloud streaming, this is because we do not want to be limited by the CPU/memory capabilities of the client. V-Ray is an amazing renderer, but for complex scenes it can require +32GB and use up to 40 cores or even clusters of machines. We want to virtualize that infrastructure for our users.