skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His problem isn't his age, it's his resume.

Here are the reasons I would circular file this resume

1) Fix your website. Leading (or including at all) the story about your family squabble makes me think you're a nutter.

2) Overview section is useless. I don't care about your Linux distro: I care about how your skills help my company. In the modern world, that means you should talk about the server code you've built, or the clients (web or native) you've developed. If you're truly a generalist, you've done these things.

3) Pare down experience/key points. I don't care if you used DOS or AIX. Only list things that matter now, and only list things you know well. When I see lists this long, I assume you've just written every keyword you can think of. Also, get rid of nontechnical crap. I know you can write, I'm reading something you wrote.

4) No one measures code in pages, which makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about.

5) Give me more information about what you did at more jobs. I don't care about what the product did, I care about what you contributed. For example, the Grumman job has a lot of fluff. I hate fluff. Distill it down to what you really did: "wrote a Perl simulator of the CRM-114 for automated testing" would be much more interesting then the paragraph you've written.

Fix up your resume, and cleanup or hide your web presence, and you'll have a better chance.
Yes I wish that would change too. A port I did of something ran well in Chrome and Firefox, but terribly in Safari
It's stated in the article that a couple of people had used the false value in code that was not distributed.
I would love to be able to support Linux and Mac but am not willing to dig into C++ / Qt or similar alternatives. It's a hobby project, which I should have mentioned previously, not a commercial work.

C# is great and WPF/XAML is OK; I can't really make any profound comments as I've only done web development previously and am not familiar with any other desktop technologies.

With regards to HTML5/Javascript superseding WPF in the future, I am not convinced - Microsoft should shed some light on their plans in the near future (the Build conference is in April I think) so we'll see.
Brewing beer.
Oh, so now you're going to pretend that there's no such thing as tone or context, eh?

Anyway, I answered you as to why there was so much speculation. You're welcome.
My instincts are that country->country specific forums are more valuable. Americans in Italy, like me, or Australians in Germany, or Canadians in Spain, or whatever. Because a lot of the value in these things is helping navigate the local bureaucracy, culture, and lifestyle for someone who is new to it.
You really can't play music in an environment where knowledge workers go about their day! That notion is crazy to me. That's like playing disco during a grandmaster chess tournament.

Personally I could work with or without the music. My office doesn't play music. If they did I would complain -- sometimes you just aren't in the mood for tunes.

That being said I've heard anecdotally that music without lyrics doesn't detriment productivity too much.
I believe it will let you as long as you don't modify the variable. Am I wrong?
I think this only applies to the iPhone. I don't think it has any affect on the iPad Mini.
That wasn't what I was discussing.
That looks really cool, though I think it would have a hard time navigating past the first few menus, and could hit features that are only rarely meant to be touched (e.g. "delete everything".) Perhaps a searching algorithm that intentionally tries to explore every menu and feature, navigate to them and then test them. Or intentionally tries things it knows are more likely to find bugs.
Secunia has a free Secunia Weekly Advisory Summary newsletter. You need to register for an account at https://secunia.com/community/profile/ and tick a box for a weekly summary IIRC.

But it's probably easier and more convenient to subscribe for announce mailiing lists for software you're using. Unless you can turn off affected services or scramble and patch before maintainers.
That's true. :)

Anyway managed to get to 1024 + 512 + 256 after that without random button mashing.
With groovy being pulled more into use with spring and great test frameworks like Spock, I see more groovy use paired with java not less.

Scala is the interesting one I'm interested to see if a simplified type system can be introduced ala http://www.infoq.com/presentations/data-types-issues
Hadoop 2.3 with docker
'the wealthy often "opt out" of depending on the NHS'

I don't know how practical it is to really opt out completely of the NHS - I'm not aware of much private emergency care and if you have an accident you'll almost certainly get taken to an NHS hospital. Also we had an experience where although we have private health insurance (I get it from my job) - when my son had a nasty eye infection we were actually better off going to the specialized NHS eye hospital rather than waiting to see the same consultant at a private hospital a few days later.
GitHub Selfies
This is becoming more and more apparent to me also (a sysadmin at 31, generalist). Independent consultant + some company selling a (web) product is in the plans.

The only route for keeping the same lifestyle I have at 50, in a corporation, is management. All that Y career talks looks just like words. I don't see anybody around old and technical, so I'm not counting on it as much as the HR dept would want me to.
Having been through recruitment processes in the recent past I totally agree that it's lousy. It can be hard for good people to get hired simply because of the hoops, nonsense and clueless HR processes.
John Boyd and the Origins of “Agility”
You sound like a "T-shaped" guy: Broad knowledge and skills, with actual expertise of a few areas. Some companies, such as Valve, actually seek that. Have you sought them out? (I'm guessing that you have, but who knows…)
Amusingly, I'm undergoing that transition right now from doing mostly JS to doing JS & Java professionally.

I'm not sure how I feel about Java so far, although there are problems that I want to solve in the Java backend at work for future scalability, since the quality of code is actually worse than our frontend code currently.
Beware of the "Peter Principle" though (people rise to their level of incompetence).
waypoints are thick as thieves, the odds of a flock of birds not hitting three of them are small.

Really? On a plane? On my boat they're typically within a few meters.
Google didn't used the word nexus during the announcement, then we use Nexus for this release.
vim + git + markdown

This, actually using vimwiki, is my setup for both my private knowledge management/kind of diary system and my lab notebook at work for quite some time now. Works flawlessly. See [0] for a pretty nice setup.

Doesn't solve your image issue, but for text-only it's a pretty nice solution if you're comfortably living in vim anyway.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4822796
It's interesting how corporations are only people when it's convenient.
I don't deny that getting older has an impact but your statements above are applicable to anyone and probably more so to older developers. Reading over your story the main thing that stuck out with me is that you've had a it rough for the past few years and its obviously had an impact on the career.

What I would add is to focus on your health. I don't know what problems you have but if you can work on the diet, work on the fitness, get on some kind of weight training program. The better you feel, the more energy you have will make you more effective everywhere else.
Fair enough, thanks for all your hard work btw!
Startups wasn't shut down because of the number of questions per day. There are no hard rules for that, and some sites launched with fewer than 5 questions/day.
How a laser beam could quadruple the speed of the Internet
I didn't mean "opposed to" in the sense that "extended family" excluded the nuclear family (if present) but just "opposed to" in that they are not the same concept. That said, as vacri suggests, it's possible for there to be family that does not have a nuclear subset (orphaned children live with grandparents, or what have you).
Project Morpheus
I second this. I've been struggling with this problem as well, and this is the only thing that's been remotely effective. Usually something physical and not at the computer (making dinner, clean up the apartment, get groceries, etc.)

My "nuclear option" is to go for a drive on some back roads. That works for me most of the time, but probably not many others -- you just have to find your own activity that resets your mind.
I'm around 40 and I struggle with the exact same issues, at least with algorithms (I'm pretty much OK with data structures).

Funny thing is, I've enjoyed doing things like Project Euler just for fun, and I can usually work out an algorithm given a little time and the ability to work on my own in an environment I'm comfortable in.

But put me in front of a white board, or phone interview, with one or more impatient interviewers in front of me? I'm toast. Many of these interviewers were studying these algorithms in depth in school only 4 or 5 years ago.

Anyway, I've resigned myself to the fact that I have to earn my own living by freelancing and side projects. I'm doing OK with that, and I hope that an upcoming side project will provide even more financial stability.

Have you considered starting your own company? These days, you don't need much.
To be fair, I had a similar reaction (still went ahead and subscribed, though) - I first had the impression I was signing up to receive information specifically related to this one product, and now don't know if that's the case or if I'm going to get a tonne of mails about stuff I don't care about while waiting for an update on this.
BTSync is an option.
Maybe because some people put morals over personal gain? 'Hey everybody vote socialist, you'll get free stuff!'
You are not a highly skilled generalist. That implies you are a master of everything. You are not because no one is. Being a master of a few things with experience with many things makes you a useful specialist. The proverbial T shaped person. This is a good thing.

Highlight the things you are actually very good at, put the rest as experience. It looks like you've written a lot of Perl, so you're highlight that. Highlight Linux package management. Despite what you think, these are specializations.
This is certainly more detailed than mine but I also have a blog post (http://lifebeyondfife.com/87-beauty-html/) documenting three different methods and the JavaScript code to make these in an HTML5 canvas on GitHub: https://github.com/lifebeyondfife/Sierpinski.

EDIT: After going back for a further look, saying that the original link is more detailed than mine doesn't do justice to the amount of content (images, animations, code, explanations) there actually is.
i think the same argument cud have gone for "making mobiles do more" in the pre-iPhone era. That "the idea is good in theory, but practically all implementations/executions suck"
This guy has to learn how to sell himself a little better. "Old Coder" and "70s" should not be the first two things on a resume.
Ask HN: My hackathon project, a polymorphic API?
Hi everyone,

To speed up the prototyping of my apps (and hopefully yours!), I would like to create a polymorphic API, i.e. a full feature API scaffolded from your requests.

In other word, like Elasticsearch, one will be able to throw any json to its face and store it. Also, one will be able to search by any field, and use some pagination and sorting automatically.
Also, unlike Elasticsearch, we would like to add authentication and authorization features, versioning, feature toggling (for instance, "this endpoint cannot expose this field or this sorting criteria"), Documentation & Swagger export, and so much more!

What do you think?
I have spent half of my career around developers in their 50's. It's true that in a lot of cases the work becomes less exciting. Of those who don't exit into management, many become "solutions architects" (i.e. the technical guy who tags along with the sales guy, and makes bad promises that some other developers have to deliver on later). Others tie their career to particular vendor products... and spend their older years tweaking Oracle Financials, SAP, WebSphere Commerce, etc.

However, there are also plenty who have kept their skills current along the way, and wind up coding on cool projects well into their 60's. They generally work for large companies rather than start-ups, and that entire world is a blind spot for most people on HN.

I'm going to go way out on a limb and assume that the original poster's REAL problems are:

* His resume looks terrible. It's a one-page bucket of random meaningless buzzwords (e.g. skills include "open source", "parser", "VPS"... wtf?!?). He puts more energy into highlighting his age than he does his relevant skills. If he wasn't constantly reminding me that he's near-60, I would assume at first glance that this was a junior-level recent grad's resume.

* His email, website, GitHub account, etc are build around his "brand name" of "OldCoder". That's a pretty horrible brand.

* He's blogging from the domain name "christfollower.me". Nothing against anyone's religion... but politics, religion, etc do not mix with professional career-related writing. Even if it is religion or politics that match my own, it's still a turn-off to see someone wearing it on their sleeve during the recruiting/interviewing process.

Nationwide, the United States has a NEGATIVE unemployment rate for computer programmers. Almost every large company is filled with middle-age and older developers. I'm not saying that ageism doesn't exist, but if you are a "near homeless" computer programmer then you are doing something very wrong. You might have a bad resume, or be a bad interviewee. You might live in a small market, and be unwilling to move to where the jobs actually are. Your salary expectations may be out of whack with your current market value, and you're not willing to hear that. Etc.
So you being condescending is fine, but me returning the favor is worthy of a snotty, feigned hi-brow response. You're a hypocrite, as well as condescending.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said, I think I'd just stress a different point than you responded to; namely that it's more about "not forcing it," "it" being whatever you chose to spend time on, echoing the "no template is right for everyone" sentiment of the grandparent posts.

That being said, I have some hand wavy opinions about the specialization/not specialization question being "at too high a level of abstraction", and that the focus should be on finding some way to impart "drive" (motivation?) into people, regardless of field and focus. I'd like to think on this more but I am currently late for work, so this'll have to do :(
Golden Magic Tricks That Can Drive Your Kickstarter Project En Route To Success
T-shaped is a good term. Thanks, I'll remember it.

I'm only now learning the ropes as far as some things go. I haven't sought out firms of that type yet and advice would be appreciated.
I personally leave out "I", but yes, I have seen HR professionals suggest that you leave it in for the reasons you just stated (lack of self-confidence).

This is why it's important for hiring companies to have an open mind, for both their sake and the candidate's. Yes, a resume should be well-written, to the point, and free of errors, but realizing that everyone has their own idiosyncrasies will go a long way.
Another hobbyist here. Back when I was a late teenager I might have contemplated doing it professionally but nowadays it would not my choice. Due to discovering other domains I am interested in along the years - like animation or game design - I chose to stay as a generalist instead of dedicating myself to one these 3 domains. Consequently I am at best average in all of them, programming included. The thing is, I may not be tackling very difficult problem like optimizing an emulator or a 3D engine but I still feel some satisfaction when fixing an issue in my code and more importantly, learning from it. In fact whatever your level is there are always new things to learn, be it in your field or another one.

On a side note programming as a hobbyist gives me sufficient technical knowledge to be able to communicate with developers using their own language, which can be very useful when doing the interface between a customer and a development team for example.
I'm a 53 YO developer who reads a lot of resumes.

You want to tailor a resume like this. Indeed don't mention essentially obsolete things like DOS or AIX unless they help you get the job you're applying for. I don't mention that stuff at all now.

"Reason for leaving" isn't necessary.

I also like to see metrics. "I did X, Y and Z and we got Q fewer support calls" or something like that.

I'd also like to see some evidence of teamwork ("worked with Frobozz group and got Z shipped with important feature F").
Were they thinking that, by making it harder to use the chrome to leave the site, the user is encouraged to and more likely to stay on the site...?

But this is Apple after all, one of the biggest adherents to the "fashionable minimalism" trend, so it's not that surprising.

Making good UIs on a small screen is difficult, but I don't think the "hide everything and make it non-obvious and hard to discover" school of thought is the right way to go. I'll gladly sacrifice a small amount of screen space to put some useful controls there (or a reminder that there are more controls), instead of trying to maximise the area the content takes --- which is very similar to a television where you can't change the channel easily, and are just being force-fed content to consume.
This is a statement on hiring and selection from the employer's side, but the advice about tweaking resumes and jumping through hoops is likely to help the job seeker. I don't think OldCoder is in a position to criticize hiring practices (beyond perhaps ageism) - he just wants a job. There are much better selection methods than resumes and interviews, but many companies have become quite adept at discovering what works for them. What works for Google may not work for the shop down the street.
Quoting from the article: "Apps for Education is used by K-12 schools and institutions of higher education throughout the world..."

Go to the Apps for Education page at Google, select "Customers", choose "K12" and it lists 10 primary and secondary education school systems as profiled "customer stories".

For example, "Saline Area Schools is a suburban/rural public school district of 5,450 students K-12 located in southeast Michigan, about 50 miles west of Detroit." ... "Encouraged by the success with faculty and staff, the Saline IT team will soon roll Google Apps out to their 3,200 students in grades 5-12."

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5AOHQcS-cAeODQ3MGVkNGEtNzJm...
Your thesis is that "StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward", but the statements you use to back that up have been part of Stack Exchange from the beginning. Also, the things you point out that are 'broken' are part of the formula that makes the network succeed.

Stack Overflow was not built for discussion. The FAQ says: "Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers." I understand that you may want those types of questions to exist there, but that's not the original purpose of Stack Overflow. (Sidenote: different sites, depending on their topic or maturity do allow more open ended questions, but I believe you may be referring to 'closing questions' on Stack Overflow). I sympathize with this point though because I believe that there are probably a class of questions that could exist on SO, that are currently closed, but may need to be treated in a different way than normal Q&A.

Your second point about closing sites that aren't working is also intentional. Some of your complaint was about the fact that the data dump was not available, which was actually not true. It's also intentional that the data dump exists so that if we decide the site is not a good fit for our goals, everyone else can still reuse that data ( i.e. http://www.brightjourney.com/ ) This might be related to your first complaint which boils down to 'It's not hurting anyone, why not just leave it there?' The answer to that is more complicated than I can summarize here, but there are many different things that go into making a successful community, and one of them is defining what 'successful' (and 'not successful') means. And there is a process for dealing with 'not successful' which is transparent. The criteria is not arbitrary. It's reasoned.

Joel Spolsky elaborates on this in the following talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

(I work for Stack Exchange.)
“You see this watch? That watch costs more than your car.
I made $970.000 last year, how much’d you make?
You see, pal, that’s who I am, and you’re nothing.”

— Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
T-shirt with a programming joke is the easy answer.

I go to tech events and I never ever see anyone dressed in t-shirts with programming jokes on them (1). It's mostly the same ole sloppy t-shirt with jeans or chinos. So no, I am not going to wear the dorky scarlet letter all by my lonesome, thank you very much.

An outfit tells you what someone's into, not how good they are at it.

You mean, like, someone in a sloppy t-shirt and jeans is into complete and utter conformity?

At a typical tech event, most of the black people you meet are programmers. Most of the women you meet aren't.

Oh please. Most black people you see at a typical tech event are security and catering. As for the 2nd part of your statement, holy guacamole confirmation bias!

(1) For science, I just googled images for pycon, disrupt nyc, def con and finally just "hackathon" and nope, not a single programming joke t-shirt in sight. So your "easy answer" is anything but - you are asking women, and women only, to jump through extra hoops in order to get a seat at the proverbial table. Talk about a privileged, entitled stance.
From his perspective, they are in the wrong in the first place for practising a religion other than Islam. Thus, they would not be right in applying this standard for Muslims, but must instead convert (interestingly, Muslims call this 'reverting') themselves.

I am not a Muslim, but grew up amongst many of the faith.
if crud developer,should easily create a generator.but user experince anf business knowledge quite hard to explain.
Aside from templates, this is the same as https://github.com/moot/riotjs
> I'm basically set for life; there's simply a comfortable lower bound on how bad things can get.

You are only set for life if the political climate in your country remains the same, and your country can afford the current model in the future, and so on. That is a lot to bet on, in my opinion.
Getting Functional in C# with Perhaps[T]
I've yet to see a single rasterised game come anywhere close to ray-tracing in the shadow department and that's what destroys immersion for me the most: low-resolution, aliased shadows crawling all over the place.
Yes; you're correct about the "highly skilled" part. I should edit the point. I'm a highly experienced generalist as opposed to a highly skilled one.

You're also correct about the fact that I do have a few specialties, including Linux and Perl. I'm pretty good at a number of languages, but Perl has been a favorite for 20 years.

Perl is friendly and fierce
Perl all problems shall pierce
Perl is the duct tape
That holds together all things
Of Perl we sings

Perl is all things beautiful and bright
Perl is a magical sight
Perl each day and each night

:P
You might like the open source Zim: http://zim-wiki.org/

It's completely replaced Evernote for me. You can drag and drop images from a browser or the file system.
Storage Pod 4.0: Direct Wire Drives – Faster, Simpler and Less Expensive
In this context, it's really a weasel term. He's functionally given no explanation.