skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bob Martin gave a talk in NYC a few months ago, and addressed this point. His theory is that the software profession is doubling in size every few years, and therefore more than half of all software engineers have less than a few years of experience. Attrition out of the field isn't as important. He did a far better job describing the idea, but it was fairly compelling. Maybe I just want to believe that it is true, but it makes sense to me.

I do agree that there is a lack of a long term non-management career arc. I worked at a large mechanical engineering company and the titles were Engineer, Senior Engineer, Engineering Specialist, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer. Once you made it to Senior engineer you could split off in a management track that went Supervisor, Manager, VP. It worked out fairly well, because the higher level engineers (Principal, and certainly Staff), made well more than the early management track. Going into management was not the only way to get a raise. Obviously this made the engineers better, but it also made management better, because it seems there are a lot of reluctant managers out there that just want to get paid more.

edit: I found a blog post by Bob Martin that describes this in writing: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
I graduated with a BS in nuclear engineering (which at NCSU is very close to a mechanical engineering degree). I now work the computational engineering angle, working both the CS and engineering model side of things. I can show what I did, but I don't have a singular piece of advice that can act as a silver bullet.

- I was formally educated in FORTRAN up 'til the 95 spec. Many engineering codes still exist in it, so I've since rounded out OO Fortran. It helps me read legacy code, talk to the older engineers, and maintain it if need be.

- I built a computer with a nVidia GPU chip: It helped me appreciate the hardware side of things and enabled me to write and run CUDA (CPU/GPU) programs, which offers a window into high performance computing (HPC).

- I learned as much about the OSI stack as possible (I had the fortunate opportunity to take a week-long CCNA bootcamp training class) so I could have a rough mental model how networking works, which helps in distributed computing or HPC scenarios.

- I already knew C, so I spent time spinning up on C++ and its ecosystem, as it can be popular in engineering contexts.

If you are wanting to go the pure developer route then there are plenty of others who can provide better advice. I have come to enjoy the inter-discipline of CS and engineering.
I'm not really on board with either the doomsayers or their reassuring don't-be-a-luddite adversaries.

OTOH, It think statements like "capitalism itself may be under threat" are not necessarily nonsensical. Our world is changing incredibly fast. People in their 30s went to school without computers. People in their 40s started work without computers. People in their teens have grown up using the internet as a semi-integrated part of their brain.

That's slightly hyperbolic I suppose, but it isn't nonsensical. The impact of technology on labour markets is profound in a way that genuinely challenges primary cultural institutions, like the concept of your profession. If you are a social media manager in 2014 what will you be doing in 2044?

Who TF knows where cultural institutions need to go to keep up with the changing realities of this world. Capitalism, representative democracy, education, family. These are all institutions that will need to find a way to survive.
Nailed it, Jen. I think there are enough sextech startups cropping up to prove that things can be done differently. The industry has a storied past. That doesn't have to remain the norm.
The oldest dev I know still working is 70. He tells stories of working on PDP-8: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8

His company is unusual in that way: Average age of the devs is around 55. He currently writes test software and technical manuals for advanced control systems. They're hiring, if anyone is interested.
We've made a 10.9 build. If you want to test it, ping us @laplockapp on Twitter
I'm a software engineer. My degree was half pure engineering subjects (math, physics, signal theory, the works) and half computer science. While not all programming is engineering, whenever you are modeling complex systems, it is engineering as pure as it comes (in the sense of applied physics and applied math).

It is also (always?) storytelling, I agree.
I work for state government and we hire a good number of older developers (younger ones too). Because our projects are mostly dull (with a few key exceptions), the technology largely prescribed, and the salary somewhat low, we tend to get either the lower-quality developers, the very inexperienced developers, or the developers who value stability more than other aspects.

We hired one former consultant recently who basically told us, that at his age, nobody wanted to hire him for consulting jobs anymore. He took a (presumably) big pay cut to work for us, but at least it's a steady job as he approaches retirement.
For the particular tasks of "data automation tasks, manipulating sql queries, and data-munging for machine learning," Python is indeed better than R, especially with sklearn

For other applications (especially charting and data manipulation with ggplot2 and dplyr respectively), R has an edge.
GOG Galaxy is going to be a big deal. I think a lot of people underestimate the appeal of automatic updates, easy installs, etc.

Desura has a client too, but last time I checked it was terribly clunky to use.
Krugman's point is summed up in another quote from the comment you linked to: "Hachette failed to come to mutually agreeable terms with [Amazon]. That's their most important job as a publisher, and they blew it, to the tune of permanently costing their authors 50-60%+ of sales they'll never recover."

When one buyer represents 50-60% of sales, the "most important job" of any seller is to come to "mutually agreeable terms" with that buyer. Is Amazon's "most important job" to come to terms with Hachette? Not even close. One party to the negotiation can walk away; the other cannot. So "mutually agreeable terms" is kind of a hilarious phrase meaning, "we will state the terms, and then you will agree to them. That is now your most important job."

And Hachette is the largest publisher, with something like 16% market share (2010 numbers). That's why this negotiation is even happening.

When Amazon talks to smaller publishers, this isn't even an issue. They are your boss; they tell you what to do; you do it. Except they're a little different from a normal boss, because they absolutely do not care about you; it is actively in their interest to see your business fail. People who survive in Amazon's buying department have to be OK with that -- the in-house name for Amazon's Small Publishers Negotiation Program was the "Gazelle Project," before the lawyers made them change it.[1]

Support publishers, don't support publishers, whatever. If you think authors will be better off without publishers that's a separate conversation. But if there's any industry you do like, you should be very concerned about Amazon gaining market share in that industry.

[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/a-new-book-portrays...
MSFT is currently way bigger in the cloud business than GOOG (it's a lot behind AMZN though), so I'm not sure why you think that AMZN/GOOG is going to handle this better. Azure has a very strong momentum now and looking at how quickly that department of MSFT adapts, this is going to continue I think (they are really trying to accomodate all platforms, etc.)
Technology will hurt the banks, not kill them
This is still a thing, at least if the number of fireworks stores right at state lines are any indication. (I recently saw some along the Georgia-Tennessee border, although I can't remember which side they were on.)
Show HN: a type-agnostic wrapper of leveldb for Go
We're in England, the NHS pays for most of this stuff here.

Obviously no one is being forced to share their personal issues. All I'm arguing about here is whether someone's needs should be a part of the equation determining their pay.

There's a stanford case study on AES, an energy company that employed 40'000 people and had similar compensation practices. Here's one of their values, quoted in the study:

Fairness . . . the term `fairness' means `justice.' Often `fairness' is confused with `sameness' ... We don't mean that. AES aspires to give everyone special treatment. Everyone is unique ... And the effects of treating people justly in corporate systems and organizations can be profound.

They scaled that value to an international, public corporation with tens of thousands of employees. Worth pondering instead of rejecting outright, no?
> I saw the game for what it was early and got out of engineering before I hit 30.

What did you jump into afterward?
GLOBALFOUNDRIES to Acquire IBM's Microelectronics Business
Right Entrepreneurs in the Right Place Get Funded
Zuckerberg supposedly started writing code when in middle school, which would put him in the tech world in the mid-nineties (born in 84). Well within Netscape's run, so he must have had some amazing blinders on not to have been exposed to it.

This is one of those anecdotes people carry around that sounds good in interviews and/or illustrates a point but most likely got transformed over the years. Andreessen is positioning himself as an "elder" of sorts, one that has extensive experience (through multiple booms) and therefore wisdom within the tech world. This benefits him in multiple ways but the perception is the most important.
Hey Michael,

Thanks for the taking the time to give constructive feedback. I will try to make it more clear that the licenses are on a per-year basis, as well as visibly making the text on the homepage more clear. I have heard the term "on premise", and I agree I should use a more common phrase. I will update the language / terms later tonight. That will make it more official.

How do you think I should make it clear that you can create a free online account to test out the software yourself, or would you prefer a video?
Easyjet have always seemed low on the bullshit factor.
Shouldn't this line of work be some sort of grand meritocracy? Or at least be striving for such a thing? Shouldn't age be 100% irrelevant?

But of course it isn't purely a meritocracy, because social factors matter, too.

And of course careers and office politics matter, too.

And of course there are biological considerations, like family and energy and health.

And of course it is exhausting to frantically keep up with the bleeding edge of the technology du jour.

And of course deep, long-lived knowledge matters just as much as coding ability sometimes.

And on and on and on....
Small sensor hopes to detect serious concussions before they happen
An HR manager said this to my mother's face once. Please consider people's feelings before using it. It's likely to be interpreted as "you've wasted your career and/or life".
RWD Bug Tracking Extension
Skip to 35 minutes.

Edit: Skip to 84 minutes.
Raptor: a radically new Ruby web server
I could go on a tirade about nitpicking, but since I was actually wrong, and there were no insults involved, why bother?
Thanks for fixing that so quickly! Sorry if that came across as a bit harsh earlier but a lot of new sites start messing with this default behaviour (probably because it's part of some framework/theme) and it's a real annoyance.
Should people be eating more fat?
I am not really sure why networks would have to distribute a list of locations: the default for connecting is simply 'do not autoconnect or look for any network I have not already connected previously in this location'.

If the user does not want to incur the GPS battery impact triangulating with cell towers already should give you enough location information not to look for your home network at work, or the network you saw in Spain last month when you are in the Netherlands.

And finally obviously everything can be spoofed, however I don't think it's reason enough not to have a minimal set of protections: the user can decide how much battery to dedicate to the task (i.e. no checking, cell tower checking, gps checking in increasing order of impact)
HitRECord: A new kind of production company
> If you're using Git or another version control that can do squash/rebase, what would be the advantage of having a separate concept of "temporary commits" or something?

It'd be nice to be able to mark commits as "squashable" as I went along (without actually squashing them yet), rather than finishing my feature branch and then have to go back and remember which commits were the "good" ones.
I guess I have something to play around with the smilebasic syntax. I can't imagine that the language used will change dramatically to the new version..
As you seem to have a lot of insight into this topic: What do you think are the reasons for high abuse rates in foster families? I would think that the hugh number of resonable nice people interested in adoptin children in combination with the possibility to screen them would lead to an above-average care-quality in foster families. Why not? I could imagine that people apply for the wrong (financial) reasons (easy to fix), children that are difficult to deal with because of their history or a lack of social bond between the children and their parents (both hard to fix). Any insights on this issue?
Now you can perform remote cluster access on Rescale
Because it's funny. Don't be a grumpy programmer.
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/
I would like to commit on every keystroke + a mechanism to hierarchically group commits.
Neat project, although I am struggling with getting it working. Looking forward to installation instructions.
Disclamer : working @ovh

> "Looks too good to be true"

It's not :) we built a brand new network to be able to offer this at scale.
You can't do that in a closed envrionment
Oil price might be manipulated in current escalation of hostilities
netherlands is a good place to raise kids. by this I mean its the most boring country in the world and nothing ever happens here. pay is ok (3500-4500/mo for senior dev), however taxes are high and living is expensive. the maximum work week is 40 hours and many work part time, so i guess its not that stressful.
35 here with over ten years work experience.

I've actually been programming since I was six. When I graduated, I was programming in Perl. Today, I'm an Android engineer because I jumped ship to a startup and built up experience then left for a place that pays their workers.

I believe a lot of older developers struggle with redefining themselves as they get older. It's not so much "you can't teach an old dog new tricks," but rather complacency about the job market and dumb attitudes. If you've been doing well in one area for a long time, it can be difficult to make the transition to a current technology. HR doesn't usually think developers can learn new programming languages even if we do it every day. For example, I had to strip Fortran from my resume just so recruiters would stop assuming stupid things.

Then there are many who leave the profession, become consultants, or shift to management.
I'm guessing it's just one of those made-up stories by a journalist somewhere. According to Wikipedia Zuckerberg was doing programming in the 90's and would very likely have came across Netscape during that time. But, by the time Facebook was 'invented', Netscape had been basically non-existent in the market for a few years.
Brilliant, I can finally implement one of my bandwidth intensive ideas! Thanks Steven!
At Amazon, It's All About Cash Flow
I don't remember which talk it was but there was a talk where it was explained that the reason why our trade seems to be dominated by young devs is that it actually is: the number of software developers is doubling every x years and when you have such a fast growth it is simply not possible to not have many young programmers.

I think it was a talk by Uncle Bob where he talked about how many devs there were worldwide when he started programming, how many there were in the early nineties and how many there are today.

The question "Where do old devs go to?" can still be asked (and Ed answered that question) but I think the answer doesn't matter much with regards to the average age of devs during interviews.

A company is going to be interviewing way more younger devs than older ones simply because of the age distribution of devs.

Even if every single (old) dev was still developing software, there would still be very few old devs compared to younger ones. That's why the graph in TFA is shaped like that.

I may be totally mistaken here but that's how I understood that part of the talk and I think it makes sense.
Down here in Los Angeles the talent pool is very shallow, now we are starting to see the first companies offering equity down here that is meaningful since 1998, seriously. If I hadn't had to go the last 14 years without equity I wouldn't still be coding pushing 43, I'd be an angel investor, basically making a living helping to fund companies. With no equity life is a kind of living hell, no ability to have the normal human experiences of say starting a family, instead its a twilight world of paycheck haircuts and forced unpaid overtime, that leaves you feeling permanently like a zombie as everywhere you turn, its the same demand, everyone here wants 100-140 hours a week, offers you 40 hours pay then tries to haircut you back to 20 hours pay, management through extortion is common down here, either work 100 hours for free or you don't see your next check.
You, sir, have crafted a beautiful, wonderful experience. I was playing with ~700 people, a figure that jumped to nearly 900 before I turned back to doing real work for the day. (Your Reddit posts must be gaining steam.)

The thrill of messing with people on the level with the large spiraling maze with red blocks, the agony of waiting for someone to come relieve you on the "go out of your way to man button clicking stations" levels... It's almost shocking how much depth can be pulled from such an incredibly simple concept.

It makes one wonder if you've inadvertently stumbled across the Holy Grail of game design: Did, through the game mechanics themselves, you create True Art?
Show HN: LeanScribe – Mass email potential customers for cheap
We've been using Eventbrite for an event we're selling tickets for, and while the website has been fairly good to use, it's the customer service that has completely blown me away.

I never like to telephone a company, but my co-organizer insisted and put me on the phone... the customer support reps definitely knew their product, and they even guided us through some CSS tweaks to hide page elements. I almost wondered if I'd invoked Shibboleet by accident. Even their documentation used JWZ's DNA Lounge throughout the examples, making me feel at home.

I don't know how Eventbrite manage to do telephone customer support sustainably, but it's definitely been key in getting me to recommend Eventbrite to others (and indeed, to post here about it).
Part of it from my perspective is that a lot of organisations aren't inherently software businesses, but need developers to create and maintain tech solutions for the employees doing the "core" work of the company. I build and maintain systems that are used by several hundred core employees, but am paid less than them - I'm not bitter about that, I'm paid well in comparison to my circumstances, but it's unlikely that there'd be a business case to pay peripheral/support employees more than core ones, even if what we do impacts on the work of more people.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to hear something that sounds bad. Even after years on this planet people can rediscover themselves and start a kind of life they didn't even know it exists. Not telling people who are bad that they are bad is a concept I have a hard time to understand. Instead of worrying about feelings why not worry about really being this better person people can't complain (as much) about?
FYI - just got a signup email with my password included in it. Please do not do this.
Nairobi’s Latest Novelty: High-End Mac and Cheese, Served by Whites
> You can't do that in a closed envrionment

This is the real killer. Any leads on making it less closed?

Also, I'm unfamiliar with how pip works, but you can't even install into your local user profile (i.e. w/o root)?
The Green Party also holds all three of those views, if that's your preference.
Business Insider is pretty terrible. It's just a tabloid that hired some designers to make it look kind of like Forbes.
I had lots of issues using Day One with iCloud. I have the Mac app as well as the iPhone app, but they just wouldn't sync up correctly. Fortunately, after moving to Dropbox syncing everything cleaned up and I've not had a problem since.
Also education, printed books (Martin Luther), non clerical academia, new foods and farming methods (potatoes!), trade wealth. The invention of the company. Colonialism.

We feel a need to put a sort of narrative on these things, but thing develop as a mesh. There is a lot focus on labour replacement technologies this year. But, it could easily be that the technologies historian look back on will be communication technologies. The formation of a global human culture interacting more intimately with each other than Illinois was with Louisiana when the Beatles first said all you need is love.

Who knows what the future brings. Maybe it brings peace and brotherhood.
Show HN: Order an Uber with the Click of Your Heels
I was moreso trying to express a desire for better PR than criticizing the transparency of their efforts. I'll hunt down these elusive mailing lists and bug trackers and see if I can cobble together a TL;DR portal :)

Sorry if there was a miscommunication ;)
Yes, if you look at the https://github.com/rohitjoshi/lang-compare/blob/master/fibon..., it print fibonacci (50) = 12586269025
I'm 47 and in one of those weird spaces where I cannot find a job I'm happy with and I sure as hell do not want to wind up managing anything other than code. Years of contracting and not networking are starting to bite me in the ass, so I have to do the resume shuffle every time I look for more work. Keeping up with the latest tech is difficult when the paying work doesn't use it and all I have time for is toy projects that don't translate to real projects on the resume.

There's only about 18 hours in the day where I can write software and some of those are consumed by lunch and dinner.
Probably repeating what's been said elsewhere, but older devs are also less common because a lot move out of development and into management or other areas that are either less stress or more lucrative. A lot have kids and their priorities shift, taking large company pay and stability (such as is is) over startup lifestyles. Also, wisdom doesn't always come with age, but eventually you realize that being a developer at a startup is overrated financially - it primarily is a great professional development period. Once you've learned what you can from the experience, you tackle some bigger problems that typically cannot be solved by 3 guys working 24/7 on ramen and shoestring funding.
I have observed that being a large corporation is an asset unto itself, regardless if the company has any valuable product. I believe this comes from connections to people in other big corporations that will funnel you huge sums of money if you stroke them sufficiently.

I currently am employed at a large corporation that pays astronomical sums to IBM and SAP and who knows what other enterprise consultants for software that either doesn't work, or at best is significantly inferior to free alternatives. The view from the trenches is insane, but I am sure it's cushy at the top.
How many years of experience do you keep on your resume? I've been keeping 20, but it seems the bay area startups can smell that I'm old. (I've not met age discrimination outside of the bay area startups run by 22 year old type companies.)
Show HN: Unforgettable bookmarks in Google Drive