skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That makes it far, far more likely that they're stuck on IE6. Last time I went to the doctor's office, I saw a lot of very old Windows machines. You may wish that the world was a certain way (and frankly, I do too), but that won't actually make the world a certain way.

If you want to win this technical battle, your best bet is to say "I'll implement it in ActiveX if you really believe it is necessary for the business. However, Microsoft ended support for WinXP and IE6 in 2014. They have been actively campaigning to get their customers off of it. There are A, B, and C startups out there with competitive offerings that work on the iPad. iPad market share among healthcare organizations has gone up from X to Y% in the last 3 years, while IE6 market share has declined from Z to W%. If we implement this software as an ActiveX control, we will lose out on $M in sales, with the worst-case scenario being that our userbase upgrades from IE6 and we find ourselves out of business with zero market. It's happening already, as you saw from the market share numbers I just shared with you."

Basically, put the fear of going out of business into your management chain, with the data to back it up. (And if you can't find that data - then your management is right, and you shouldn't bother upgrading.) That goes over a lot better than "I read you should never use IE6 for HIPAA data on the Internet."
I speculate - I'm not actually certain of this - that I would do better by sending a dead-tree letter and resume via snail mail.

What leads me to believe this is that I never had much trouble finding jobs before it became common to apply for them online.
Drosophila synthetica
I don't know a single software dev over 40 who isn't employed, and I know many that age. None of them had to change fields. Some are managers, but most are "senior" devs. Many of these guys have been programming internet technologies since the later 90's.

It seems in the places I've lived (LA, DC) the salaries are pretty squashed together after 5 years experience. Basically anyone with that experience is getting a similar pay check +/- 15%. For many after 28 you are close to being maxed on your pay which would put you in the same spot this article plops the 40 year olds.
Less "flexible" with salary and benefits, presumably.
Software development as a profession hasn't been around for long enough to draw any generational conclusions from.
Most Wanted Terrorists: Daniel Andreas
It's interesting that you say the transition has happened between web and mobile, because of a lot of people I know are getting up to speed in HTML 5, and are betting the next few phase of their careers on it. Maybe it's because South Africa is a few years behind the curve, but is there evidence that the share of web-based jobs is declining enough to be concerning, in the first world?
Exactly. This needs to be emphasized.

Whether it's Russia and its politicians and its speech laws, or it's Iraq or Libya or Syria or whatever, those people need to figure it out for themselves. Maybe they can use the USA for inspiration. Maybe they can use the USA as examples of what not to do.

We can't wish our values and our culture on them. It needs to come from within.

Of course, this shouldn't apply to external affairs. It shouldn't be OK for Putin to invade Ukraine or threaten the Baltics. That band isn't getting back together.
I just had dinner with two other devs tonight I randomly met at PyCon. Both of them do contract work, and have to turn away work. Neither of them ever specialized in any particular language; they both just focused on using code to solve problems.

There's always going to be a need for people who can walk in to a new situation, diagnose what's going well and what needs to be fixed, and carry that out.
I would be interested in working with remote front end web developer. Can you share your email?
Ask HN: Need help with sales and marketing
I have a SaaS.

I need more customers.

I want to outsource marketing and selling.

Should I create an affiliate program? Or is there a genuine way to oursource outbound lead generation?

Also is there any consultants that will help you with finding targets and sales?

tldr: I've built it. I need more sales.
A Look at the Tefifon, Germany's Doomed 1950s Music Player
Yes, it has nothing to do with productivity but definitions. After 30 programmers see more options and its harder to keep them as cubicle/hipster drone.
Same here, and having "something to lose" gives you a sense of responsibility. If you can never lose, i'm not sure what message you are sending : like, being lazy and unwilling to be productive is an OK attitude ? in the end it basically defines your values as well.
OS X is hardly free
The Flir FX is a security camera with bigger ambitions
WebGL-accelerated JavaScript molecular graphics library
This looks awesome. I really like the look of ChromeOS (and ChromiumOS), but it's a pain in the ass to de-Google-ify, install new packages, and use on non-Google approved hardware. This looks like a good, actually open source alternative.
When I was in my early 20s, did consulting stints while in grad school. One of my jobs, the senior engineer was a former Bell Labs white beard (literally) with his first 'program' hanging on his office wall :)

I remember most of my age group had enormous respect for the older engineers. But then, we didn't have Google and Wikipedia and entirely too facile access to information that lends the patina of 'knowledge' that is so easily obtained these days. So a lot of the aggressive posturing these days is really a symptom of the not knowing that you don't know that much yet ..
> is a myth

... perpetrated by breakfast cereal companies. That's a 43B market right there.
I don't buy it. There are people of all ages on my team, and the same has been true at several other jobs I've had in the past few years. There is not even a particularly strong correlation between age and seniority.

My second observation is that in all the jobs I've had where this was not true, the company has not been particularly successful in the long run. It's unclear whether this is related, but it's interesting.

However, I can come up with an alternative statement that may be a better explanation of what some people seem to observe: if you are not a really good engineer by the time you turn 40, and you expect to be paid based on your "years of experience", get a plan B.
> I get up at 4:30am

Are you single by chance?
Colombia: Home of the perfect cup of coffee?
Competition is also motivating. After all, what fun would football be if nobody kept score?
> So after confirming the suspicion of it not being something that would actually allow to run some essential software we still don't have replacements for (AutoCad, Native Instruments stuff, Ableton Live, etc.)

Because the average user totally uses those programs...

Anyhow, I've installed Ubuntu for 'average' users with old, virus riddled machines and they love it. I use Linux every day for University stuff, and have for nearly 4 years. My wife uses it for her computing needs. Linux, any Linux distro, is 'enough' for the average user. Elementary OS is enough too, just a little prettier out of the box (I don't use it, my laptop has openSUSE, but eOS does look pretty).
Teenager Charged with Felony for Changing Teacher's Desktop Photo
How Julia implements Fast and Flexible Linear Algebra
Yeah, that's my understanding too. It's not "math is hard let's go cooking" it "fuck this nonsense". It's not math problems that are the problem here, it's inconsistent execution in the name of performance.
The annual threads on HN about, "What was the best book your read in $YEAR", tend to have some brilliant books that I would have never encounted any other way. Bill Gates annual list tends to be solid as well, but only a handful of books each time. Mark Zuckerberg's reading club could potentially be useful too.

I still find a lot of success in just going to a second hand book store and finding gems in a fairly short amount of time too. But obviously more niche books are unlikely to be there.

Goodreads, does tend to be fairly good at identifying authors of a similar theme, but that has only been of limited usage to me.
We work in a, relatively speaking, very young industry. It's very hard to draw conclusions by looking back at 20 years ago. Being in a young and highly-demanded industry pushes a lot of us into managerial positions earlier than normal. But essentially, I believe that a developer's age doesn't matter if he/she doesn't stop learning.
Using SMT Solvers to Analyze the Premier League Table
Yes, but how do you know you're looking at the correct payment page?

The page that sends the POST request should also be verifiable as owned by the domain, otherwise I could inject a different "payment system" library, that looked like stripe to the user (unless they analyzed the traffic), but actually sends me the CC details.

From https://stripe.com/help/ssl

> Do I need to use SSL/TLS on my payment pages?

> Yes, for a couple of reasons:

> - It's more secure. In particular, it significantly reduces your risk of being exposed to a man-in-the-middle attack.

> - Users correctly feel more comfortable sharing their payment information on pages visibly served over SSL. Your conversion rate is likely to be higher if your pages are served over SSL/TLS, too.
I'd be interested in reading about pork production. I'd guess that large scale industrial hog farms probably have similar problems.

I think beef is going the same way. When I was a kid, about 50 years ago, someone I knew raised beef cattle. These cows wandered around in fields all day for over a year. They slept in the barn at night. I think the word "pastoral" fit perfectly. Then the cattle were shipped off to be fattened up in feedlots shortly before they were killed. But now the same industrial farming practices are also coming to beef. Or have they already come?
> At 40 you should be experienced enough to handle up to mid-sized projects, alone and on a reasonable time-frame

At 25...
pay squash is why you should get out of field. engineering is the new proletariat, working at companies that rake in millions for pennies, while all managers above you get twice your pay just by organizing your time.
Basscss – Low-level CSS toolkit
That guy's whole website is incredibly interesting. I may not agree with all of his viewpoints, but it's hard to deny that he argues them in a more unbiased and rational way than almost all writings I've encountered.
I can't tell you what you should do. I can say for myself, what matters the most to me is what looks back at me in the mirror. If I felt my former employer had done something for which they should be held accountable, I would testify. I would not worry about future employers who would discard my resume over my choice...I would instead welcome the benefit of their filtering action, which would lead me away from companies that are intent on breaking the law, leaving only companies that are lawful and ethical as potential employers. Companies who would view my actions as those of someone with integrity. Because the bottom line, the only company who would pass someone over for something like this is one that operates on legally shaky grounds to begin with.
UN Women and Uber = a Vision for Equality
Fair enough, they're too busy being poor to care about anyne else.
I don't see the managers above really making that much more. In fact I made less when I was team manager than half my team when I worked for a big public corp. The C level does make a lot more and/or the owners do but not all the management in between. With tech knowledge, though, you can escape the squash by starting your own business fairly easily. Not necessarily easy to create a successful business but easy to give it a shot.
To me, as an Arch user, sytemd has been responsible for a series of btrfs kernel panics. I'll probably switch to Gentoo just to not have to deal with working around journald the next time I have a choice of distribution.
Fair enough - the original inventors of gesture typing on keyboards, of which swipe is a later and derivative example.
> This is derivative of daemontools from DJB

I am not sure I understand your statement. Anopa is built on top of S6.
Thanks for sharing that my answer doesn't contribute a thing for you! I invite you to create your own answer which does, so we can learn from you :)
1976: Apple Releases Its First Computer
C++ in a lot of places. And systems programming is a much smaller niche now than it used to be.
Ehhhh. I'm 40+ and I've never had so many opportunities. Then again, I love this stuff, so it's not really work to keep up. I still love the shiny new thing, and my ramp-up is faster since I've seen most of it before. It's just another language, platform, what-have-you. I worry more about the income plateau. I wouldn't leave because I'm tired, slow, or specialized. I'd leave because the market wouldn't bear my rate growth.
OSX.
HN tends to be populated by people who either are or claim to be very successful, and are very confident they will always have well-paid work.

But many other people have to pay their bills and exist in a hiring environment which is somewhat hostile - maybe they can't move to the Bay Area, they are not very outgoing and networked, rumors have been spread about them, they are old - this industry is punishingly picky and hiring managers like nothing better than filtering you out. So, bottom line, a lot of us don't have leverage and do have to play stupid corporate games (and work at shitty and occasionally unethical employers) on pain of losing our livelihoods. It's all fun and games until you have to stop writing code and go work at Wal-mart.

If this issue is of Schindler's List magnitude, I guess you have to bite the bullet, but if all you're doing is making a law firm happy by being a +1 that might not be worth the risk of self-destruction.
> but I'm running into adults who have trouble reading.

Yes, but unless you're in Finland, what this suggests is that you should move to Finland's model, not away from it. Finland has a 100% literacy rate.

> The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for hours is a skill that should not be forgotten.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with Finland's initiatives.
》We’re not building an entire desktop shell from scratch – we’re building a Wayland compositor using the QtCompositor APIs, which takes care of most of the work for window management and compositing.
A big problem was that most bright engineers were promoted into management, so the ones left programming at 40 weren't so bright. So not so much that age killed the skills, it's just a selection bias.

I think we've got better at that and bright engineers are just being promoted into senior engineers, so hopefully it's fixing the selection bias.
Atlassian just released a "host-it-yourself" HipChat.
Worth noting that the style of C++ most common (in my experience) in game development is pretty far from what is considered "modern C++11 best practices", and the modern C++11 style tends to be frowned upon.

Thats not ubiquitous, but it indicates that despite the upswing, hitching yourself to that language is easier said than done.
At 38, I'll admit that the general atmosphere of ageism in tech--whether real or not--scares me a bit. I guess I can take solace in the fact that, as a Data Scientist, I'm in a field that's too new to have rampant and widespread ageism.
Interestingly nearly all the guys over 40 I know who are "senior" devs never wanted to go into management. They just said "no!". They are solid reliable devs. They are all doing fine. But then again so are all the guys who went into management. (Sorry, I write "guys" all the time 'cause I grew up in the midwest - not trying to make it all about males)
Those packages haven't been in Debian for that long but I'm sure as hell glad they are.

Cross compilers are still really difficult.
Seems one can have a variant of Java where everything is marked as volatile.

And vola! I mean voila
Engineering is certainly not a proletariat. Engineers make more money than most professions and have more interesting jobs as well as lots of respect from other professions (I am not an engineer and I can tell you lots of people admire engineers). Also, many professions experience "pay squash".

It's a myth that most managers make much more than programmers and that they "just" organize your time. Let's have a little bit of respect, not just for our own professions, but also for the people we work with.
Other 'sticks with what they know to a detriment' are devs that stick with SCMs such as svn or cvs or even rcs when things like git or mercurial are out there.

Younger devs who do have experience with this stuck in their ways behaviors and it can be frustrating and they try to side step it by not engaging the older devs.
I'm approaching 50, am employed, though I've found that the job search is a bit harder now-- particularly with bay area startups I saw a %100 correlation: If the interview as on video (eg: they could see the white in my beard) I didn't get a second interview. If by phone (no video) I'd get offers.

Also, last year in Austin I made exactly %20 more than I did in Seattle in 2000. Kinda sad-- up %20 in 15 years-- that doesn't even cover the inflation over that time period. (and I was making more than everyone else there, including some senior people.)

I've decided I need to switch to management, as it's time. In fact it's past time, but I have found that too many companies-- particularly startups-- don't promote managers from engineers, they want "biz guys" who don't understand software to be the "managers" way too often. (at least outside of silly valley.)
what about the Apache license? this seems to be the go-to for this particular issue, and is widely used by Google and MS as well as about a billion other projects. it directly addresses this issue. to me the biggest red flag initially was just the fact that they decided to create a new 'variant' for no obvious reason:

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt

IANAL but Section 3. definitely seems to cover exactly the same thing, with quite clear, and moreover long established language:

> 3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
(except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made,
use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work,
where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable
by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their
Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s)
with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You
institute patent litigation against any entity (including a
cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work
or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct
or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses
granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate
as of the date such litigation is filed.
Germanic languages have a peculiarity in the words eleven and twelve, they stem from "one left" and "two left", respectively [0]. Cognates in German elf and zwölf, Swedish elv and tolv.

[0] "Cardinal Numerals: Old English from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective", http://bit.ly/1HhPzOB, page 161.
Or buy now and sell in 15 years or so. Move to Boise Idaho. 15 years of equity (ignoring appreciation) means you can buy a house twice the size outright.
It is somewhat likely that once we get to the point of mining 100+ trillion dollar asteroids that we will be in a post/near-post scarcity economy.
CERN researchers confirm existence of the Force
Generally no as people typically spam their CV, especially when I'd had a job advertised to contact HR and people guess me as the hiring manager. This will work against you most likely.

But really it would depend how you make contact. If you simply send a CV saying I want a job, you'll get the brush off.

The exceptions are;

1) If I've worked with someone even if it's not a close relationship. Then I'm much more open to chatting about something coming up or sending someone to a colleague as a recommended known quantity.

2) Send useful information. e.g. Send a document saying something my business is currently doing that I am responsible for and you feel by doing XYZ you could improve this. If its a good idea with realistic implementation I'd likely chat and consider a contract which might lead to something more permanent. This I feel is the best way to approach someone if looking for a job.

Edit: Fixing embarrassingly bad grammar.
"most bright engineers were promoted into management so the ones left programming at 40 weren't so bright."

Just wow. Quite a bit of agism there. In my experience most CEOs are not technical, and thy want "business guys" in management. This ranges from big companies (my manager at Amazon had a criminal justice degree and could barely operate a computer, and his IQ was less than 100) to startups (often the CTO will be technical, but also a founder, so there's not a lot of opportunity to become "middle management" during the startup phase.
Yup, and they're likely to go the deposition unless he's a "star witness" they rather have for the dog & pony show in court.
Skimming that release that seems to be nothing much new, other than the adding of a third branch.

It is certainly important software, but why is this announcement on HN?
What are the advantages of PapyrOS versus say elementary OS?
> How would you find (n-1)! given n!?

If you want to think a little more:

You are given a value v, which you are told is n! for some n, which you are not told. Find a general algorithm to produce (n-1)!.

I have an algorithm which, I fear, may not have the most efficient running time.
"If elected." Right, so there you go.
I get the impression that this varies considerably with the local tech culture. Apologies for making this about me, but has anyone encountered this problem in the Seattle tech market? I'm 36 now, and I'm thinking of moving there sometime soon. As a coder/sysadmin/general tech guy, is this something I should actually be worried about?
Turn 38 on Monday. I turn down work regularly (and I've been guilty at times of not turning down enough work). At the same time, I look much younger than I am (I get carded regularly), wear mostly conference t-shirts and hoodies, wear "hipsterish" glasses, and have a stickered-up MBP, so maybe I fit a stereotype not becoming of my age.
I've known people with nest eggs happy to take cuts for something interesting.

But I also know with experience comes a skeptical eye for being asked to carry extra load for less upside (yet same or more risk).

A story from some time back told to me. Founders had a UI, an algorithm, and an idea. It had merit. They sought someone out to build and run the actual service. The funding was angel, the role was senior to C-level, but the salary offered was 40-60k cut for a senior engineer at the usual suspects, equity capped at 4% assuming a trade off in salary.

Risk and reward to build out infrastructure and productize someone's idea? I could certainly get a couple of people to build it out in a "get us to a-round funding" in those guidelines, maybe even beyond. But as expectations on a non-founding senior/early member, one would assume way too much risk for the potential upside.

It isn't non-technical founder seeking technical co-founder waters, but damn close.
Find a vagrant Debian image and it doesn't much matter what you run.

Cross compiling is such a pain that it is worth avoiding it if at all possible.
I saw today on HN PapyrOS. Anyone can explain the difference between the two? (leaving aside that PapyrOS is still unreleased)
If you testify, a company that is good and wants good people to work there might see you in a more positive light. This can have positive external effects.
I don't get it when people say Java will be less popular. Today it is in most cases, my platform of choice. Modern Java is a damn fun development environment. You just need the right tools like Maven, IntelliJ Idea, Spring Loaded and so on.