Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding - <AUTHOR> https://belitsoft.com/php-development-services/top-software-developers-after-40-50-and-60#2 <comment><USER2> What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" Would anyone think it odd for a 60-year-old physician to still be doctoring, or a 60-year-old lawyer to still practice law. Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft.

Corporate culture embraces the notion of management as a profession. I think programming would benefit greatly from more of a tradecraft model, where leadership is provided by the master practitioner rather than the professional manager. In the alternate universe that's how we do it. The bottom line productivity boost is awesome. I don't know if it scales, but I don't care to scale.

\-- 63-year-old full-stack web and machine learning programmer...living the dream

<comment><USER3> There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone with 20 years experience refer to themselves as a "full-stack developer?"

<comment><USER5> By default, most programmers from two decades ago ARE full stack developers.

Back then, there was no separation of front end, back end or database - it was all melded into one, so if I wanted to write an app, I would have to learn the language, figure out how to display the data and collect user input from the screen, write the data tables and the code to update it etc. etc.

There was no question of learning SQL or raw file system I/O to manipulate data - there was no ORM or framework to fall back on. Until Windows came along, there was no standard on UI or UX principles. It was all 'build it as you go'.

Some of those older habits die hard. Though I use ORMs almost all the time now, I still find myself experimenting with queries in raw SQL before translating them to my ORM of choice. I still have a hard time separating my front end code, or the design elements thereof, for someone else to do, because I am so used to doing it myself.

Somehow, I still feel the need for ownership of all aspects of my application stack, and will often spend an inordinate amount of time learning about something that I am not familiar with. As I said before, Old habits die hard.

So, while I don't often refer to myself as a 'full stack developer', I do routinely say that I 'do it all, including making the coffee and sweeping the floor in the server room'.

<comment><USER6> Yes! Thank you. I never know what to call myself. I just signed a comment as "broad-spectrum software developer", but your description is more accurate.

We catch the things that fall between the cracks; we are the glue that binds together the things that fall apart; we are the toolmakers, the automaters, the pinch-hitter sysadmins; we are problem solvers, the ones that do whatever it takes - and if we don't know how, we learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 45\. Still coding, probably until I die. Light years ahead of younger developers in the following:

* Writing less code

* Writing maintainable code

* Re-using existing code (requires reading existing code)

* Know how APIs should be written

* Knowing how to properly map associations

* Know when or when not to use another library

* Knowing when to tell a product manager to go back and do some more product managing

* Knowing when to say "No"

* Knowing how to determine what a stake holder actually needs vs. what they think they want

* Understanding that 8 hours today and 8 hours tomorrow is 10x better than 16 hours today.

* Saying "I don't know" when asked "How long will it take" or "When will it be done"

* Fighting against shitty processes

* Fighting FOR processes

* Forcing PMs to use software designed for the purpose of creating software instead of accepting requirements through email/slack/invision/zeplin/google docs/tool of someone else's choice

<comment><USER8> > Saying "I don't know" when asked "How long will it take" or "When will it be > done"

~5 years experience speaking: How do you do this?

I have a very good boss and he knows things, objectively, like "estimates are very squishy," and "developers suck at estimating time" etc. But he still demands time estimates to give clients.

Our clients are often agencies, and they get it as well.

I do estimates like "10-40 hours, depending on XYZ (things I don't know)" sometimes and it doesn't really raise any eyebrows. That may as well say "I don't know."

Are you better than this? Do you just outright refuse or do you have some way you handle it?

<comment><USER9> > How do you do this?

Give half-order-of-magnitude estimates as confidence intervals. Avoid using "hours" or "days" as estimates. Story points work really well here.

Be extra clear on priorities and burndowns to make it clear that you're not just blowing them off. Give short but frequent demos (not just reports) of progress. If later they're concerned about progress, you can point back to all the times you reviewed the product, touched base about priorities, and agreed on next steps.

Make risk _really_ clear to them. If the project is 'get it done in three months or bust', then the payoff (ten times the principal?) better be high enough to account for the risk (30%? 50%? 70%) that you won't make it on time and on budget. That is, you don't want to wait until failure to discover a bad business plan.

At the end of the day, you need to be willing to be patient with and/or walk away from 'business people' that can't wrap their heads around the fact that 20% profit on a venture with a 50% failure rate is a bad business plan. Making employees stressed or overworked to compensate is not a humane solution to the problem. To that end, don't work crazy hours to meet a deadline. That is bad for you, bad for your team, and bad for management since it enables dysfunctional planning.

<comment><USER10> > Give half-order-of-magnitude estimates

My current boss likes to ask "is it a day, a week, a month, or a year" and while sometimes I just want to say "yes, it's one of those" I actually think that's a pretty reasonable way to ask the question.

<comment><USER11> I heard a saying once, "Deadlines slip by the units they're measured in." If you say three weeks, it will slip by weeks, not days or months. If the estimate is months, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "StackOverflow's survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?"

Not wasting time filling out online surveys?

I'm not even 40 yet and I realised online surveys were a waste of time years ago. :-)

A stackoverflow survey doesn't measure the answers of stackoverflow users. It measures the answers from the specific demographic of stackoverflow users who are inclined to answer surveys. Those demographics overlap but are not equal.

<comment><USER13> There is still some truth to it. I'm 37 and have had to repeatedly and forcefully turn down managerial roles. The idea of horizontal growth is a hard sell to people who've chosen the vertical path. It would be very easy to drift into a management role, and in fact it happened to me once and I had to take deliberate action to get off the management track.

I don't want to manage people. I want to build, and learn about building. And I hope to be lucky enough to do that until retirement age.

<comment><USER14> I'm 10 years older than you but feel the same way.

I would be interested in hearing from people that did make the jump to management. Why did you do it? How did it turn out? Any regrets about making the jump or for not making the jump sooner?

<comment><USER15> I manage a small team of developers and still do a lot of development myself. My reason for doing it is that because what I want to work on now is bigger than a single person. I have a vision of what I want to accomplish and I can't do it all myself.

So far it's turned out well and I have no regrets. For me it wasn't a jump at all, just a gradual progression of what I've already been doing.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for posting this point of view. I have a feeling there's plenty of people on HN like this, but I don't see others explicitly talk about it often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm 42, programming is the fun part of the job (meetings, nonsensical time estimates and travel tend to be worst part of the job). Had a computer my whole life (Vic-20, oh yeah!) I strongly agree with what others have said in the article: Keep learning new things. I did nothing but C++ for 13 years (console games) and felt like a dinosaur. Despite the fact that there are still (a few) C++ jobs out there, I made a point to avoid them. Did a python based app for a year (IPython is fantastic!). Did a GO app for a year (which was kind of interesting, only luke warm on the language for some reason). At the moment I am learning Elixir and Phoenix and still get the excited feeling when the program works. It is strange that such a well paid / interesting field has so few older people in it. One concern I have is that my hair is starting to turn grey so I think the HR process will get a bit trickier (planning on moving to more remote work so they can't see the grey :)).

<comment><USER18> > One concern I have is that my hair is starting to turn grey so I think the > HR process will get a bit trickier (planning on moving to more remote work > so they can't see the grey :)

I'm thinking of dyeing hair before interviews when I face the same problem.

<comment><USER19> I don't think you want to work in a place where they care about such things.

<comment><USER20> Not all bias is conscious, or intentional. The hair dye may not be a bad idea, just temporarily, during the search. Get a pro though, obvious shoe polish color is, er, obvious.

<comment><USER19> As a 48 year old developer with a lot of gray hair...I've never seen anyone with dyed hair where it wasn't pretty obvious. To me it makes you seem a bit desperate.

<comment><USER20> That's the thing though, if it was done well, you didn't see it. Ask a few women, that already trust you, if they dye their gray... especially the ones you think don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm 71, I wrote a best-seller in the early 1980s (Apple Writer for the Apple ][), I still code regularly but not for income, so my circumstances might not be what the article focuses on. I write a lot of Python, JavaScript, some Java, I have a number of Android apps listed at the Google Play store -- all of them free, no ads ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus&h...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus&hl=en)).

Why do I still program? Because I like programming. I never experienced serious burnout, probably because I didn't have to program for anyone else -- I was always my own boss.

Apropos the article's topic, I often visit StackOverflow but I never post anything there, I only read the inquiries of others, which invariably provide the information I need. This practice might make people like me essentially invisible.

<comment><USER22> Paul Lutus, you a mith of my Apple ][ times. cant believe (and SO happy..) you online!! IIRC you were programming in a bungalow out of nowhere at that time.. right?

me, 50 yo, still coding embedded sw..

<comment><USER21> > IIRC you were programming in a bungalow out of nowhere at that time.. right?

Yep, that be me:

[http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...](http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php)

<comment><USER22> really, you made my day^W week!! honored to be chatting with you, really.

BTW it's amazing this "virtual gathering" happening online in 2017. who could have been thinking, 30 years ago, this to be possible this way, so smoothly.. can't imagine where we are headed in the next 30..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> ".. However, StackOverflow's survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?"

Obviously not on StackOverflow. Perhaps they have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site because they either know how to read tech books and sites to get the info they need when they have a problem using pre- existing docs, or conversely, are fully able to debug issues themselves.

That's what I do, anyway. (I'm 46)

<comment><USER24> I don't understand how someone can _" have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site"_.

I use StackOverflow practically all the time. I always think to myself, _" yep, this (Wikipedia, YouTube and... yah HN) is what the internet is for"_.

But maybe I'm just too young. (I'm 47 ;) )

<comment><USER25> > _I don 't understand how someone can "have enough experience and knowledge > to not need the site"._

If you've been programming for a couple of decades and you don't follow the trends du jour it's actually quite easy (note: I'm not at that level myself).

Seasoned C and C++ programmers, for example, don't have much to learn from Stack Overflow in the same way a (1) new programmer, (2) 0-20 years programmer who constantly juggles languages, APIs and frameworks etc depending on the job and the fads of the season.

You think someone like Linus checks SO to get his answers?

There are tons of programmers with such levels of experience (even if somewhat less so than Linus).

Let's put it another way: before 2008 NO programmer checked "Stack Overflow" all the time. Before 2000 they didn't even have Google, and before 1995 or so they didn't have much (if anything) in the way of online documentation and similar resources.

That's not ancient history: a 20 year-ish programmer has managed for 10+ years of their career without Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER26> Windows programmers had the MSDN, or whatever it was called.

MS provided lots of example code and docs.

<comment><USER27> As many companies did. It came on discs. In the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Software development/engineering is still a young industry, most developer jobs really came about with the internet in the mid-90s on up and increasing every year. So the numbers will skew younger at least for a few decades.

The bulk of people that have been coding since jr/high school and college are around or in their 40s now. C++ was invented in mid 80s for instance and not really fully in taking over desktop apps for a few years, combined with the internet then browsers, from that everything today + mobile which is another growth area. People were pushed into management because there were minimal veterans in the early 90s/00s, and you could be a senior coder within a few years.

The ages will eventually skew up especially with GenY/Millenials being greater in numbers than Gen X who were really the first generation to fully have internet jr/high school/college on, and many went into development, older than that some switched but most had their path in life already going. Ages will skew older with the next couple generations as they age. When radio started everyone was young in it as well for many of the same reasons.

</comment><comment><USER29> 68, coding since 1965. There is no better job. I hope to be coding the week I leave.

(Note: there are more useful jobs: doctor, nurse, farmer).

<comment> charles-salvia Doctors rely on software a lot to do their job. One day they may even be replaced by software.

<comment><USER30> I hope that day never comes.

<comment><USER31> I hope it does. If doctors are replaced it's because medical care has improved beyond their capabilities. How could you not want better medical care?

<comment><USER5> If I had to have someone operate and suture a ruptured artery inside me after a terrible accident or something - I would rather a human doctor be able to do it. Also, a human being would be better at doing that in a non clinical environment (such as road side assistance at a vehicle accident scene etc.).

Also, as the son of a respected doctor, I see other aspect of 'doctoring' that extend to far beyond technical or diagnostic skills. Hardly a day went by when we were out in public when a former patient of his would approach us and thank him for safely delivering their child or saving their lives. I don't think that an email thanking AutoDocBot3000 v2.33 for diagnosis & drug dispensation # 288374 would have the same impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the thread here, but I'd like to point out that we shouldn't limit our check on ageism to the people who are "still coding".

If we want people in dead-end jobs and failing industries to have a chance to move forward in new ways, we need to willing to accept _qualified_ "junior" engineers of all ages and backgrounds.

I have seen this sort of ageism in the interview process and it's tricky to constructively correct people in having different standards for 22 year-olds than they have for 32, 42, or 52 year-olds.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm 52, started writing code professionally in 1985. Started my career on 68K assembler. In the 90's I was a Windows SDK developer (then COM/ATL, etc.), In 1999 started a company but chose Linux and embraced FOSS and built a company on a Lamp stack (sold it in 2014).

The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every month. Pick something cool, learn it. This industry changes too fast to stick in one area of technology. Two years ago, nobody was talking about Node.js as being "important", now you can't see a company or startup not looking for Node/MEAN stack developers -- that's how quick this industry moves.

But hey. I am old... I use Emacs (still), but have moved to Visual Code on my Mac (with Emacs bindings of course...). I do most of my work in the ZSH, but use Bullet Train and Powerline Shell... So I embrace "new" and am open to things that make it easier and better.

Personally? How do I keep pace being the old man? I take 3-6 months off and learn a new technology. What I mean about "learn" is that I actually build an app that's useful or used by customers (people). I don't just play with something, I learn it to become productive and then move to the next thing...

Right now, I've just got to the point of feeling "productive" in Elixir. Which I think is going to be the "game changer" on the full stack side and love functional programming (after being an OO guy for what, 25 years!?)... Elixir is my new love and haven't been this excited about a stack in a long time.

Learn, learn, learn... write code, keep your brain active. Age means nothing in this field other than when you show up for an interview and the rest of the employees are wearing Skinny Jeans and you've got Dockers on.

I like to call it "Dad coding".

<comment><USER33> Can you tell us a bit more about 'taking 3-6 months off' to learn new things. I'm thinking about doing that myself.

Did you take a sabbatical? Is your current company ok with this? What did you work on?

<comment><USER32> When I say "take 3-6 months off", I mean from distractions of life around you. Most people working, it's not reasonable to take that much time off. What I mean is, focus for 3-6 months on something new, spend 3-4 hours a day -- even if you have to box out some time at night to learning something. Often times over my life, I've told my wife, "OK, I'm going into hunker down mode..." which she new that I wasn't going to be counting on me for "free time" all that much for the next several months because I'll be in a mode of heads-down and learning. Like going to the gym or class, you need to carve out time and make time (weekends, nights, etc.). Make the time mandatory in your day. If you DO have the luxury of taking 30 days off (I know people who do have that), use that time for possibly going to an on-site bootcamp. Another thing I've done is take that 3-6 months and attend a class or bootcamp. With Bootcamp's becoming so much the rage these days, you can go 2 or 3 nights a week and learn a technology in 3 months. It's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wait what?

39 and I consider myself just getting started.

<comment><USER35> I second that. Things began to get much funnier when I started learning additional languages beyond the first one (:Java, that I still like very much).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm 50 and still writing new code and launching new apps. In fact, I've probably release more apps in the last 5 years that I did in my previous 25+ years of programming (started when I was about 18).

While I concur that I am not as energetic as I used to be in my 20's and 30's - i.e. I cannot do non stop 12 hour code marathons etc., I think my code these days is a lot more disciplined and well thought out, and better organised.

I will happily spend time to look at the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology or framework, but when it comes time to write 'money code', I usually fall back on tech that has been around for 5+ years.

My passion for coding has not diminished - I am still excited every time I sit down at the keyboard. As long as I feel that, I will keep coding or working around software.

</comment><comment><USER36> Dave Cutler - 75.

Lead developer on VMS, NT and Azure. Working on the core of XBox up to couple of years ago (still is?).

I won't say what age I am when the article seems to think that 45 is relatively old, but Dave Cutler shows that there's no excuses. If you're good, you're good, young or old.

<comment><USER37> What will Microsoft do without him? All of Cutlers former team members that worked on WinNT series kernel retired long ago. Less and less devs understand the internals and the Win32 userland. You see new bolted on frameworks, and new apps instead of extending older one. Newer devs want to create new things instead of msintaining decade old code. No one wants to pay QA... the user is now the alpha/beta tester.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The idea that 40 is "old" is hilarious to me.

<comment><USER39> This is the same industry that calls people in their late 20s "senior".

<comment><USER40> _Late_ 20s? I've seen title structures where the first promotion is to "senior" and that is often granted ~18 months into working. It's early enough that it can be ambiguous as to whether it means your working title or your year in college.

<comment><USER41> I saw someone get promoted to a "senior" for rolling his own logging framework. And then starts arguing with me about how long functionality will take when he clearly hasn't got a scooby of what's involved (me 2 months, him 2 days, 2 weeks later and he's still trying to pick apart how the code even works).

One of many reasons I bailed from that gig asap.

<comment><USER42> At a previous gig, I had to explain to my CTO what JSON was and why it was better than the ad-hoc serialization format he made up where every field was delimited by multiple dollar signs. I _interned_ there, and I was probably twice as old as everyone else.

Oh, and that JSON was supported natively in PHP. The language they were using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I expect one contributing factor to this statistic is the proliferation of software development over the past decade. As millennials get older, so too will this generation of coders and hackers. The mid-twenties image "software engineer" conjures, will keep getting older. I'm fascinated to see how this will make software engineering a less sexy job / will change tech culture among deveopers

</comment><comment><USER44> I'll be programming until my head doesn't work anymore.

</comment><comment><USER45> Keep in mind that the industry is aging as a whole (and hopefully maturing in the process). So if you ask the question 10 years later, there will be a lot more developers in the 40+, 50+, 60+ buckets than today.

</comment><comment><USER46> "The median U.S. worker is 42. However, StackOverflow's survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?"

I think most of this is due to the simple fact that software development has been a steadily growing profession for decades. Thus, the "population pyramid" of software engineers will very much be a pyramid and older developers will be proportionally scarce. If you want to make meaningful predictions about your personal likelihood of staying in software development beyond a certain age, you'd need to slice the numbers differently.

I believe that once the number of software engineers stabilizes, the age distribution will become more similar to other fields. Some will leave the field during their career due to changes of interest or due to life throwing them curveballs. But a lot will stay.

I'm 43, BTW. Still find software development and tech enjoyable.

</comment><comment><USER47> What about Linus Torvalds? Born: Linus Benedict Torvalds, December 28, 1969 (age 47), Helsinki, Finland I guess he's still coding, right? Does it count?

<comment><USER48> Fabrice Bellward is 45, John Carmack is 46. Michael Abrash is probably in his mid-50's. Rob Pike, Guido Von Rossum, and Larry Wall are all still programming and they're in their 60's.

I think it's safe to say you won't magically lose your programming ability as you get older.

<comment><USER49> But you do lose the patience to keep using what amounts to the reinvention of the wheel and having the same problems over and over, and you do lose much of your free time to other responsibilities, which manifests itself in not having the time to play with every new tech under the sun.

<comment><USER50> I agree, but I think you lose that patience for reinvention in about year 6, not year 21. So, dealing with it becomes part of being a software developer. If you can't, you won't get to year 7.

And yes, there are more responsibilities with age, which means you also have to improve your time management. But, that's not unique to software developers. Waiting to see how new technology evolves before jumping on the band wagon is a good time management strategy for software developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I turn 50 this year. Learning clojure and competing on Kaggle. :-) Just completed a Machine Learning Engineer nanodegree on Udacity.

</comment><comment><USER52> Lot's of scientists and engineers and physicians are still doing what they know best. These kinds of knowledge and skills do not go away with age, and since practitioners of these arts are constantly learning new things, and looking for better solutions to problems, people in these fields often work until the very day that death catches up to them.

Programmers tend to be just like these other STEM like professions. Although with age we tend also to broaden our horizons a bit, perhaps into genomics or massively scalable systems or new approaches to cyber security.

</comment><comment><USER53> "Over 30 years, I had to relearn almost everything about every 4 years more or less. I work with a team of six developers from ages 48 to 56. All of us have totally retrained our skills from 3 to 8 times." . I have been doing embedded coding for years, which does not need train myself every four years, but still, keep learning is the key, age plays its role, but not as important as keeping learning.

</comment><comment><USER54> 45, self-employed. I create and sell an iOS/Android plugin for use with Cordova, React Native and NativeScript apps. I love my job.

</comment><comment><USER55> My father-in-law retired at 75; he was writing embedded systems for machines involved in chip manufacture.

I'm 56 now. I'm just going to go until I can't do it any more; 75 would be great. Writing software and working with hardware is pretty awesome.

Consider how fortunate we are, who have found successful professions that we enjoy -- many people don't get that opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER56> 57, I build and maintain 911 (911, E911, V911), Telematics, Alarm, PERS and custom SIP programming systems. On any given day my job is a software developer, dba, systems analyst, process analyst and data analyst, sysadmin. Not mention fire putter outer and consult with outside companies to best implement their requirements.

But I'd rather be out riding my motorcycle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Eh? 40?!

Most of my developer colleagues are over 40. No one thinks less of them for it.

On the contrary, an experienced developer is someone who has at least a good fifteen years under their belt. That usually mean "over 40". That experience manifests in ways such as not reinventing the wheel (a favorite, unintentional pass-time for the young and inexperienced).

</comment><comment><USER57> This whole topic is so interesting to me. Software programming is actually, in reality, a mind numbing process involving extremely repetitive actions. Thanks to Hollywood and the fact that technology is transforming our world (not programmers... technology) the myth of the programmer as an intellect has flourished. That is true for _most_ programmers; there are brilliant programmer of all ages who make the tools the rest use, and that's another topic altogether.

The reality is that young programmers are popular not because they're brilliant, but because they are more willing to engage in repetitive tasks for long hours. The idea that older people don't have the intellectual chops is total BS; it's rather that as people get older they lose interest in unrewarding endlessly repetitive tasks. That is to say, they become more intelligent about how they are going to spend their time and their life.

</comment><comment><USER58> I am early 40s and have been coding professionally for 25 years; I will never stop doing it as I like it and it keeps me up to date with my colleagues/employees so I can help them and support them where needed. I spend a lot less time worrying about frameworks, programming languages etc then I used to. I practically deliver things my companies need. In my spare time I program as well; working on formal verification, development tools & games. For me it is just creating something from nothing that drew me into programming the around 34 years ago and I have not found anything that works that powerful on me.

I notice, with every year passing, that I need less and less time actually behind my computer and typing to write more and better software. Which is great as I don't like the typing part all too much :)

</comment><comment><USER59> 52 here and code everyday, some for work, some for personal development, but most because I enjoy it. I am also manage a security engineering team for a living. I've been coding since I was 12ish. Most of what I code in now is Python for work and Swift and Java for mobile development, which I find a hell of a lot of fun. Mostly making tutor apps for my kids studies.

What I find interesting is that when I walk into a meeting with younger developers they immediately assume I only know cobol or rpg and not the various stacks I work with. Once we start working with them on securing their code they realize what experience brings to the table. It's hard to believe that there are still some programmers out there that don't know what cross site scripting is, or how to prevent SQL injection etc.

</comment><comment><USER60> 42 Still coding and loving it

</comment><comment><USER61> Am I in the top 13% at Stackoverflow? I had no idea, but I'm going to use this as a new source of pride, just because I can.

I don't consider 40+ very old for a programmer. My father was 65 when he retired from professional programming, and at first continued working on an open source project (though that now seems to have stopped). I've always seen plenty of older programmers. Only at the few startups where I worked was I one of the oldest programmers, but even there the demographics get more balanced as the company grows.

The weird stories about Silicon Valley's love for inexperienced programmers where 30 is apparently old, sound weird and alien to me. I get better as I get older and more experienced.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm reluctant to weight in as I'm only 36 and well not terribly impressive. However as the owner of a company I must say programming is so much more relaxing than dealing with people... well mainly just people external of our company and family.

There is something extremely cathartic about programming. I'm not sure I can ever fully describe it. All I know is when I have to talk to a customer or partner I occasionally think... god I wish I was programming right now... even in Perl or PHP... anything.

The irony is I actively seek conversation as I always want to improve our company but about 20 minutes in and I start feeling uncomfortable.

The thought of never programming again is a scary thought to me.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm 57 and I "Can't Stop Coding" as I'm still having too much fun. Whenever I stop having fun... I change programming jobs. I wrote about this in a blog post ([http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in- tech...](http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech/)) that was widely read. I will say, however, that I have seen a lot of developers become obsolete mostly because they stayed with the same company (and programming language) for too long or ignored opportunities to stay abreast of technology.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm 57 and I "Can't Stop Coding" as I'm still having too much fun. Whenever I stop having fun... I change programming jobs. I wrote about this in a blog post ([http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in- tech...](http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech/)) that was widely read. I will say, however, that I have seen a lot of developers become obsolete mostly because they stayed with the same company (and programming language) for too long or ignored opportunities to stay abreast of technology.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm 51, still codeing almost every day and I use SO a lot. I used to contribute more, when it started, but lately use it more as a reference.

Didn't know about the survey - would have probably filled it out, actually.

I feel it's pretty easy to keep up with new technologies when necessary, since I don't have to relearn the basics and almost always have a reference point as in "oh X is similar to what we used to call Y in Z".

One huge shift for me is distribution - as the browser is now almost capable as a general UI it's easier to not worry about OSes, installers, versioning, etc. This is true even for people who primarily don't work on web apps.

</comment><comment><USER65> I have to wonder how well the SO survey reflects the overall dev population. I could imagine, for example, more experienced devs spending less time on SO, or being less likely to respond to a surveys in general.

</comment><comment> castle-bravo 60 in 2017 => 20 in 1977. How many programming jobs were there in 1977? Plenty, sure, but not to the extent we see today. Is it really suprising that a brand-new industry is also full of young people?

</comment><comment><USER66> creak. 69 here, still employed and coding etc, started in 1967, spent too many years having to make it up as I went along to specialize. If anything that specialty might be embedded systems, but not only. I would definitely guess my demographic is small. I find SO sometimes useful where my Google-fu fails me, but every so often I also get to ask the developer of the language/whatever directly instead. We're all about that age now, and it's a small and shrinking community.

</comment><comment><USER67> For anybody who attending a community college or University for technical courses, you would have realized that overwhelming majority of your Professors (aka computer scientists) are 40+ with a large chunk being 55+

I think human beings have infinite capacity to grow intelligent - that is until our bodies start shutting down (e.g. Alzheimer) but nobody knows at what age that happens (it can happen when a person is in their 20s or 80s or may never happen until one day the person simply stops breathing).

</comment><comment><USER68> 50 and coding. There's nothing more satisfactory that carefully crafted code. Or maybe just releasing something and mostly never looking back because it. just. works.

</comment><comment><USER69> 41\. I learned programming when I was 8 (basic on a C64) and I have as much fun programming today as I've ever had. Besides, there's no doubt I'm a better programmer today than I was 5 or 10 years ago and I keep learning new things.

Actually, I'm more worried about ageism than about the decline of my abilities. I work in academia, but I wonder if I could get a software engineer position if I wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER70> "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" \- Aaliyah

Anyone who is willing to learn and accept new technologies, the above quote holds true.

<comment><USER71> "Remember that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability." David Brent

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Logical analysis of a problem and its implementation into a computer system is a "high skill". There are programmers who can do the job and then there are people who actually innately think logically.

I'm betting the older devs (like myself) are the ones who have had that innate logic skill since they were born.

Everyone else moved on to management.

Just a theory.

</comment><comment><USER73> Hey... I'll soon be 50. I've been an engineer, architect, and a VP. I still write code. And why would I stop? Writing code is fun.

Does a driver stop driving at age 40? Or a Dr. stop being a Dr.?

I can identify bad patterns both in code and designs as well as teams that escape many younger engineers and managers.

</comment><comment><USER74> Putting aside the question of what reality the 13% statistic in this survey might be representative of... When one looks at how much this industry has grown since today's 40 year-olds entered the job market, my surprise at the 13% number is at how high it is, not how low.

</comment><comment><USER75> My goal is to be the last programmer standing who started on IBM punch cards ;)

By the way, I was at an Azure Bootcamp on Saturday (great event!) and there was a 70+ year old there with his laptop doing the labs.

Programming and exercise are two of the three best ways to stay young.

<comment><USER76> > Programming and exercise are two of the three best ways to stay young.

What in your opinion is the third one? (Starting curious?).

<comment><USER75> Sex

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I'm 38 and have coded ~30 years, professionally for half that. That's 15 years into a career of perhaps 45 years. A third! I can't believe I'm even worrying about being "old" in the business.

It's not a young man's game.

</comment><comment><USER78> I started coding after 40, as I needed the skill set to do my other job properly (molecular biologist). Love it, with the added advantages my job is more secure and higher paying.

Don't think I'll be stopping any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER79> 49, write code every day. The whole SO thing mistifies me. I really think the survey skews, because "graybeards", don't waste time filling out surveys and they know how to RTFM to get answers.

</comment><comment><USER80> 50, and still programming on the same codebase I started when I was 18.

</comment><comment><USER81> I'm 33 and don't really like the idea of going into management. This is an encouraging article (and comments).

</comment><comment><USER82> 46 this year and still happily coding.

</comment><comment><USER83> I read the title and call only think of Frank Reynolds.

</comment><comment><USER84> 40s, and programming a bit better every day! :-)

</comment><comment><USER85> I came across a graybeard in an interview recently who refused to take a coding challenge and cited his experience instead. He did not advance through the interview process.

<comment><USER86> A "graybeard"?

I think he made the right choice there.

<comment><USER85> I'm a graybeard so far be it from me to pass judgement. If you're applying for $300k/yr architect level job, then you should be good at every level of software development, including writing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Experience + Passion = Invaluable

</comment><comment><USER88> in 2017 are there 60 yr old front end devs?

</comment><comment><USER89> isnt this all just an artifact of the exploding popularity being in the 90's?</comment>


Hoaxer confesses to IE users are dunderheads prank - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2099307/hoaxer-confesses-users-dunderheads-prank

<comment><USER2> Same story, much discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840626>

Documenting the re-submissions: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840900></comment>


Facebook Says the Phone Number Is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.thememo.com/2016/01/08/facebook-says-the-phone-number-is-dead/ <comment><USER2> [https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=187344078272613&...](https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=187344078272613&substory_index=0&id=100009910657085)

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=187344078272613&...](https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=187344078272613&substory_index=0&id=100009910657085)

</comment><comment><USER2> Gan

</comment><comment><USER2> hiIm'Gan</comment>


HAKMEM - <AUTHOR> http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/hakmem/hakmem.html

<comment><USER2> EVERYONE should read this MIT memo. And then go on to read Hank Warren's Hackers Delight. Knuth's Volume IV of the Art of the Computer Programming also has some interesting material. If this does not fascinate you, perhaps you should consider another profession.

<comment><USER3> The site as a whole is interesting too.

HAKMEM might have focused interest for those involved in computing history and Lisp.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently not on Hacker news ... possibly should have included "in <language du jour>" in the post title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original's scan: [http://w3.pppl.gov/~hammett/work/2009/AIM-239-ocr.pdf](http://w3.pppl.gov/~hammett/work/2009/AIM-239-ocr.pdf)</comment>


Windcatcher: air multiplier fills matresses instantly - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1484284472/

<comment><USER2> looks like kickstarter links will redirect to /profile/ if you don't include the entire uri.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1484284472/windcatcher-i...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1484284472/windcatcher- inflates-in-seconds-with-no-power-or-p)</comment>


The Feed Is Dying - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/the-feed-is-dying.html <comment><USER2> I recently got the algorithmic timeline for one of my more popular Twitter accounts. The algo has rendered it completely useless - it prioritizes all the wrong stuff and the lack of chronological ordering made it literally _impossible_ to use during the debates. I wanted the sharp minute by minute commentary of my friends and news outlets but instead I was getting memes and dumb retweets from days ago. At least give the users the option to have a full chrono timeline - I can handle the "information overload" just fine on my own TYVM.

<comment><USER3> On the web version go Settings -> Account. Under the "Content" section uncheck "show me the best tweets first". iOS app has a similar setting, and it stays synced with whatever is set there so however you disable it.

<comment><USER4> I don't know... I unchecked that a while back and I still get annoying "while you were gone..." curated shit. Maybe I have to log out/in or something?

<comment><USER5> While you were gone is different from the algorithmic feed. It's a short section you can easily scroll past to get to the main feed. The algorithmic feed re-sorts the whole thing.

<comment><USER6> I think FriendFeed got it right with "Best of Week" and "Best of Month" that you could visit when you wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Feed is fantastic for live, on going events. I don't see how it can be replaced. Of course Twitter has meandered in using an algorithm in their timeline, which is just a huge mistake. The entire point of Twitter is that it's the world as it is happening now; it's still shocking that Jack, etc don't understand this fact and are continually trying to take the very things that made Twitter unique out of the platform.

<comment><USER8> It can't be replaced but it can be made easily mutable.

For example, imagine a quick-switcher that flips the feed from algorithmic to time based with a single tap. That's a powerful feature and adapts twitter to different use-cases fast.

I think the key here is to give users options instead of trying to shepard them into a particular direction, especially with their bipolar userbase (e.g. people use Twitter for various, seemingly disjoint use cases)

<comment><USER7> But making the algorithmic feed the default, alone, is enough to kill the platform. For the mere fact of nudging, and human laziness. It will just make the shit rise to the top, instead of the hidden gems that make Twitter golden. Twitter has to be one of the most poorly run tech companies, outside of Yahoo. They changed their API token limits, and destroyed 3rd party clients. They bought TweetDeck and then utterly destroyed it.

Live data is their product, but they bury it with stupid business decisions; utterly baffling. They tout MAUs during their conference calls (which they always miss), but that has nothing to do with their product. Their product has some of the top content providers, providing unique content in real time. Facebook can't say that, no other platform sans Snapchat can say that. Facebook has figured this out and that's why they are rolling out offerings like Paper. Twitter doesn't get it.

<comment><USER9> _Did_ Facebook figure it out? Because I don't see people actually browsing the homepage anymore. What used to ne an exciting way to explore stuff has turned into a bunch of pictures and a couple of Facebook videos ripped off from YouTube. I haven't seen anyone browsing through their homepage excitingly in a very long time. Now it's just a chat platform.

<comment><USER7> I see people every day going scrolling through their timeline on the Facebook app on their phone. Maybe it depends on your what your timeline's algo is showing you. I will say that I see much less Facebook engagement on the whole from people ~28 and younger, even in chat; people have shifted to Snapchat. Of course I'm a Windows Mobile user, so I am totally in the dark in that area because their CEO hates Microsoft.

But that doesn't really have much to do with what I'm saying, Facebook has figured out that original content is important (something it now lacks; if you don't include Instagram), that doesn't mean they've found the solution. Twitter doesn't seem to know that is important, but they already have somewhat of a solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've really felt like there's been a large decrease in feed quality of the last six months to one year on Facebook and Twitter.

Feed is now dominated by adverts, endlessly shared click-bait, repeat content (especially if conspiratorial/shocking/fake - a variation on click bait), and the "you interact with this person sometimes, here's everything they ever do". And begging me to follow Zuckerberg. Compared to a couple of years ago it seems boring and shallow.

FB is particularly bad, but partly seems my friends are part of the problem (and/or click bait is hugely on the rise; it works). Twitter maybe a bit less so, but this out-of-sequence stuff is terrible. Also miss the early Twitter days when I found interesting randoms to follow from the public firehose, now all celebrity focussed.

<comment><USER11> It would be nice if they could prioritize things by letting the user indicate "I want to see more/less of this stuff" and then build the algorithm based on that. I bet they did their testing on that and realized that users never end up doing that so they're going to try to come up with their own strategy. I agree with you, my feed has really dropped in quality even after blocking clickbaity sources like BuzzFeed and other content farms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When users don't own their technology, they get jerked around by whoever does until they jump ship for greener pastures.

You can claim the market will solve this (users will sell their time and speech to a higher bidder, now that Twitter's prices no longer seem competitive), but if people were empowered to have their computers do what they want, it never would have happened in the first place.

<comment><USER13> What user owned communication network ever caught on en mass and is used by most of the establishment?

<comment><USER14> Email.

<comment><USER15> Not even close - at least not for consumers. See: @aol, @yahoo, @hotmail, @comcast, @gmail etc....

Enterprises usually own their servers, so I would grant that caveat, but even that is going away with cloud providers.

<comment><USER16> Email is an open protocol that many providers have implemented. That's an important distinction.

Try sending a tweet to a Weibo user and see how that works out.

<comment><USER17> A year ago I would have agreed with you, but it is getting to the point where it is very difficult to run your own mail server (I still do).

In the name of fighting spam, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. have made it a real chore to get messages delivered to their networks. I still haven't figured out how to get messages delivered to AOL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Twitter rolled out the algorithmic TL to my account the other day. Of the first 12 tweets on my TL, 8 were really badly targeted ads,[1] and the other four was one of my friends liveblogging a TV show I don't care about. Twitter shuffled the order of her tweets in doing so, of course.

The promise is that algorithmic TL will show you the best organic tweets, and relevant ads. In practice, the ads are trash and the organic tweets are just as bad as usual, but in the wrong order.

1: Diapers, cars. I don't have kids, and while I've been looking at cars, I sure as hell won't buy a _new_ one.

<comment><USER19> Oh wow, your recall rate is excellent. Thank you, Citizen! The advertising is working!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _" Enter the curated feed"_

We could call it a "blog", and the people who curate the feeds could be called "bloggers".

<comment><USER21> Inevitably there will be too much content to digest, though. At that point we might create services that offer smaller "blogs," with limited-length content. Maybe call them "microblogs."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hmm I don't understand the point of this article.

A feed is a feed. It doesn't matter how it's created. There is utility to the chronological feed as there is the the algorithmic.

Curation has been happening for a very long time. The problem is that it's not enough even to curate.

For those who experience the problem, the issue really is that they have so much information of potential relevance but still can't read more than one feed item at a time (unless it's just pictures)

[http://000fff.org/wp- content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png](http://000fff.org/wp- content/uploads/2009/12/model_01.png)

This wont be solved by it being curated because that introduces another problem which is whether you trust the curation.

Not sure it can ever be solved. But the feed isn't dying. It's fundamental.

</comment><comment><USER23> The "X is dying" article is dying. But seriously, I know every journalist wants to be the first to call the end of a trend but this is like calling the end of sentences or puppies. Time organised lists are here to stay.

<comment><USER24> Any journalist that "wants to be the first to call the end of a trend" has ceased being a journalist and has become a marketer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >Unfortunately, chronological order doesn't scale well.

True, I guess, but what if my feed is already curated, by me. Facebook, for instance is annoying to use, because it can't seem to remember that I just want everything, in chronological order. I don't have a ton a people on Facebook, nor do I care to, but I do want to see everything these people post. It won't amount to more than 30 minutes of content a week anyway.

If you had to enable "curated feed", would you turn it on? For most people, even those who have a large number friends or follow a ton of people/companies, I suspect the answer would be no.

</comment><comment><USER26> The other thing about the transformation of my Twitter feed is it is now mostly oriented toward images - photos, dancing GIFs, videos, or logos associated with accounts being retweeted.

Sometimes the people I follow append the images, but most of the time Twitter attaches the images to individual tweets or RTs. It's possible to disable most of the images on my phone (via the Twitter app settings), but on the Web the images cannot be stopped. Even if autoplay videos are disabled, the preview image will still show up.

It's irritating and lowers the value of the feed I have created on Twitter. Most of the time I just want to read opinions or retweets of the people I follow without an image or logo getting in my way.

<comment><USER27> Filter out the images. They don't fit in 140 characters and thus shouldn't even be there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I see two big problems with algorithmic/curated feeds: * conflict of interest between reader and (algo) curator. FB (as an example) wants reader to stay as long as possible on its site and to make the reader to regular comeback to FB, including preferring by the reader FB and not others. This is done by (algo) curator playing with our dopamine levels (read novelty seeking preference of human brains) presenting things which create 1 (stay) and 2 (comeback). In fact feed is curated based only on 1 and 2 with constantly run A/B experiments by FB. This is WRONG to reader. * all this 'feeling connected' being 'within circle of similar to you people' etc, puts you in a closed circle of opinions/views. This cramps critical thinking of the reader. Whats' more dangerous, it distorts (humans are really weak on this) our view how world is composed. We see too much of sth, and dont see (curator removed them) things we don't agree with. We conclude how world is constructed (e.g. everybody supports some presidency candidate, because 80% of "likes" and "shares" in my stream are about him (concluded by curator because I clicked on some of them). This has WRONG influence on our learning and critical thinking and forms untrue perception of world impairing our reasoning.

p.s. sorry for my english.

</comment><comment><USER29> There is a giant possible Game Of Thrones spoiler from last night's episode in the image of this article. Be warned. I haven't watched the episode yet but now I'm rather annoyed.

<comment><USER30> Thank you for this, I haven't clicked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I disagree, the curated feed sucks and spending time on facebook proves it.

</comment><comment><USER32> All the more reason I've felt better about closing my "social media" accounts. The little that was useful, has been rendered worthless.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think there is a place for both chronological and personalized feeds. Chronological works well if the realtime component is absolutely essential to your app. For apps that have a lot of content or users visiting infrequently you will often want to show the best content, not the latest content. That's where the personalized feeds come in.

I believe Twitter and Instagram are doing this because the chronological feeds don't work well for a large portion of their users. You do wonder why they don't disable it for their most active users. (why try to reorder something if the user sees it all anyway?)

We provide both chronological, ranked and personalized feeds over at getstream.io

Demand for personalized feeds is definitely picking up rapidly, also among smaller apps.

</comment><comment><USER34> It'd be nice if there was any form of data to support the position of the article. I know that among my non-technical friends there seems to be no worry about algo feed vs time-based feed - and there doesn't seem to be any slow down in their scrolls through their Facebook/Instagram/Twitter feeds. I get wanting to call a change, but lacking any data it's hard to take seriously.

</comment><comment><USER35> Going to use HN for some quick market research... would anyone be willing to pay for a human curated news feed? Say $10 or $20 a month for someone to go through news sources and pick out the stories that will be interesting to you, and potentially summarize them?

I'm thinking of curation based on a personal relationship instead of an algorithm. You would indicate that you're interested in machine learning, libertarian politics and cooking (or whatever), and people would check hn, new york times, etc and compile lists of those items. I know it's not the same thing as this post, but it's a problem and I'm wondering if anyone else feels it strongly enough to pay for a solution.

<comment><USER36> FYI, this is what Jason Hirschborn does with a number of verticals (fashion, media, tech, etc): [http://recode.net/2014/05/01/read-this-jason-hirschhorns- new...](http://recode.net/2014/05/01/read-this-jason-hirschhorns-newsletter- business-just-raised-a-seed-round/)

I personally have unsubscribed as I favor RSS feeds, but I recommend them highly for people looking for someone else to weed through the crap for you. He does a great job.

I don't think he's begun charging yet. I wouldn't pay. I suspect he could get a decent niche to pay though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is get for having psych majors optimize the feed for an optimal mix of reward/stale to achieve maximum addictivity. Skinner box, now available in Facebook

</comment><comment><USER38> How about time being the best curator? I see what is live. I have a choice to see the past by scrolling back. I can't see the future, well for obvious reasons. For news/event based content, chronological is the best bet, IMHO. For content of archival value, one can apply various curation techniques. So the assertion that the feed is dying is wrong. It can't and it won't.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wish services would be clearer with how much of content the user I follow produces on average. Let's say, I consume 1000 tweets per day on average, therefore I shouldn't follow someone who produces 500 tweets per day, and really think about following someone with 100 tweets per day.

</comment><comment><USER40> I actually get confused when I see something on Facebook which has been posted three days ago. Also I'm not really sure Facebook knows what I want to read. There is no "I don't want to read those posts right now" button.

<comment><USER41> What's even better is that I've almost always seen the 3 day old post (and often even liked it) 3 days ago, but it's apparently still the "most relevant" thing for me to see. I do wonder if I'd appreciate the algorithmic model better if the algorithms weren't just so damn bad

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The algorithm is an idiot.

My social medium of choice is, despite my many and loud gripes about it, Google+. It's not even nearly awesome (none of the major options are), but, for a while at least, it offered two compelling features.

The first is Notifications. Action on your own posts, posts with which you've interacted, and (selected) people mentioning you, will show up in your Notifications list (which ought be a stream in its own right). This is, if you think about it, one of the highest possible signifiers of relevance: something you've _already indicated an interest in_ in which _others are interacting, often directly with you_.

The other was Search. After a couple of years, even the vast wasteland of G+ had accumulated a catalog of interesting posts, and via Search those could be found. Search was always a bastard child, and it's considerably worse now than it had been for a long time, but given a keyword signifier, it would, sometimes, return relevant content.

I actually wrote a really embarassing mash note to G+ management -- Vic and the project's then product manager -- highlighting this.

The response of Google was, of course, to kill both features, or attempt to do so valiently.

The problem with the algorithm is that at best it can _guess_ or _assume_ intent. _But it never fucking bothers to ask you directly, or to allow you to indicate your preferences._

I've likened this to a _good_ salesperson. These exist, and I've on occasion, despite my anti-commercial tendencies, encountered and _appreciated_ them. The good one will size you up as you enter a store, _compose a good idea of what you 're looking for_, consider elements (say size or measurements for clothing), and match these with stock. _Then they 'll ask you what you're looking for._ They'll return with a selection of items and, often, a few others. _They 'll read your responses, even subtle, on what's been offered and take a "no" as a "no"._

That is the one feature that is missing from virtually _all_ current electronic information interfaces. I wanted, an hour or so back, to tell Amazon to show me _only_ books published matching a subject from 1990-1999. Actually, filtering by cover colour would also have been useful. No can do.

For media streams, the thing I most want to do is _filter crap_. Again, G+ offers no such capabilities. There are websites I never want to see (say, WSJ at HN), topics or people I don't care to hear about, etc. The best option I've got is to uncircle or block crap, which actually works quite well. But finer controls would be hugely useful.

Twitter's experiment seems to be headed the same way. And it's not going to work.

Because the algorithm is an idiot.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've seen a lot of this recently yet I find myself using and enjoying Twitter and RSS more than ever, not saying it's wrong - but it is an interesting outlier if correct en mass.

</comment><comment><USER44> So feed is dying or not? Seems it is thriving with curation?

</comment><comment><USER45> This is not news. We feeble humans cannot continue to drink from the ever- growing reverse-chronological firehose. Algorithms will only get better. Progress marches on.

</comment><comment><USER46> What other ways are there to present content to users if it's not through a feed?

<comment><USER47> Topic hierarchy involving either vote based sorting, temporal sorting, or personal relevance sorting. e.g. forum -> subforum -> thread; HN's comment system.

You can extend it to allow multiple topic parents via a tagging system, but this usually seems to complicate things.

facebook has wall -> post -> comments, but could add richer hierarchy above post

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> [DELETED]

<comment><USER49> Ask your friend if they have a patent.If they do not - tell them to get it first. Then try to do something with it, they can always sell it if that does not work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Search Engine wars are incoming. End of 2017.

</comment><comment><USER51> If The Feed dies, will The Seed supplant it?</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Asserts Control of Facebook, Pushing Aside Dissenters - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-asserts-control-of-facebook-pushing-aside-dissenters-11588106984 <comment><USER2> Board of directors are like courtiers of old in a monarch's court.

They are there for the proximity to power. They scheme, connive, and work to improve their own position.

In the court of Zuckerberg, the courtiers exist at his behest, and his only. The directors who forget this are banished.

In other courts, the courtiers have more power because they can remove the CEO.

But even in courts where all of the power isn't concentrated in the CEO, heads can roll, and sycophants can be installed. Steve Jobs' return to Apple comes to mind.

<comment><USER3> I mean... this is an extremely negative connotation. What is it based on.

More generally, you could say that board members are just representatives of blocks of shareholders (sometimes representing themselves). ...and that all of them are in the same financial boat, and so work towards a common goal.

We can use all the same facts to paint a much more collaborative and friendly picture.

Which is more correct? Well, I suppose we'd need some facts, right? It's emotionally easier to imagine a sinister group if you're not part of that club, right?

<comment><USER4> > I mean... this is an extremely negative connotation. What is it based on.

It is a negative connotation, but that could be because it is negative[0].

[0] [https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/private-government-how-employers- ru...](https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/private-government-how-employers-rule-our- lives-and-why-we-dont-talk-about-it/)

<comment><USER3> This philosophy article doesn't even mention the board in question. You seem to be making the assertion now that ALL boards are evil.

wow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I often read about the divides between Zuckerberg and other decision-makers in the company, but I'm always unsure what the divides revolve around. Could anyone in the know clarify what the stakes are here? What is Zuck's vision? What are dissenters unhappy with?

<comment><USER6> I think the writers know these stories get traction so they just keep doing a variation on the same theme. They're not really in it to explain anything. They just want the clicks and the engagement numbers to go up.

Speaking of which, I don't have a subscription and I think they paywall these things. Does anyone have a summary so we can figure out why it's on the front page?

<comment><USER7> [http://archive.is/R3ij5](http://archive.is/R3ij5)

<comment><USER8> Appreciate it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How did Zuckerberg maintain his majority voting power throughout every funding round? VCs have to look at that very suspiciously.

Is it possible for founders today to retain the same level of control, or do VCs outright refuse to fund such companies?

Are there good reading materials or strategies for maintaining control all the way through possible IPO?

How did Travis Kalanick and Adam Neumann get removed? Did they not have the same level of control that Zuckerberg did? Couldn't they have told their dissenters to fuck off? Or could the same fate befall Zuckerberg should he fall out of good graces or become involved in some controversy?

<comment><USER10> _> How did Zuckerberg maintain his majority voting power throughout every funding round? VCs have to look at that very suspiciously._

MZ didn't actually have majority control through _every_ funding round. They key is that other investors (e.g. Sean Parker, Accel Partners, etc) _gave voting control of their shares_ to MZ.[0]

So the ingredients to maintain control (or eventually consolidate majority control) is to have _leverage_ in some way. Multiple forms of leverage:

\+ startup has real revenue and is cash flow positive and thus is not desperate for VC funding: Microsoft profits in 1981 would be an example. They didn't actually need David Marquardt's VC money before their IPO in 1986.

\+ startup has exponential growth: Facebook is an example. Facebook was so popular that Accel Partners sought out MZ and not the other way around.

\+ demonstrate amazing management skill: Jeff Bezos would be an example. He doesn't have majority voting power via dual-class share structure. Instead, other investors let JB control their votes. Even his ex-wife who he cheated on recognizes that her Amazon shares she got in the divorce settlement would be worth _less_ if someone else besides her ex-husband ran Amazon. So she signed over her voting rights to him.

Another thing that worked out for MZ was the older Sean Parker acting as a defacto "consigliere" to warn him how VCs strip power away from founders. And as noted earlier, when Sean was kicked out of Facebook, he turned over his voting rights to MZ.

[0] [https://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power- play/](https://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power-play/)

<comment><USER11> You don't know that he cheated on her. Bezos's statements say that they were already separated. Please don't malign either's reputation in a public forum.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/business/jeff-bezos- wife-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/business/jeff-bezos-wife- mackenzie-divorce.amp.html)

<comment><USER12> The cheater said he didn't cheat so no issue, gotcha.

He got caught texting his girlfriend while having a wife, his wife divorced him and took $38 billion.

Call it whatever you want but he smeared his own reputation.

He made one of the worst social, moral, & financial decisions you could make all at the same time.

<comment><USER13> On the flip side, $38B is a great deal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a small part of the article but the whole "wartime leader" trope is starting to wear thin.

Can we please acknowledge it for the euphemism that it is: Total control by the executive to enable a narrow set of goals while tolerating greater losses for those at the bottom of the chain, in order to achieve a narrow, high priority objective at the expense of everything else (like "don't be evil" or "ethics")

<comment><USER3> "while tolerating greater losses for those at the bottom of the chain"

Who are you referring to here? Employees? Americans? Everyone in the world? The poor?

<comment><USER15> All of the above?

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death- was-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death-was- suicide.html)

<comment><USER16> What exactly are you implying by linking this article?

<comment><USER15> That Facebook has worked at least one employee literally to death.

<comment><USER3> This basis of that claim is so laughable...

> There are rumors that Qin may have endured bullying at Facebook, Young said. > However, Young is not an employee at the company and he said that most of > the protesters did not work there, either.

<comment><USER15> I don't really want to debate the case out of respect for Mr. Qin, but it was easy to observe that he was a SEV owner at that time, and due to present at SEV review, and fighting against a nag robot constantly enforcing a "due date" a week ahead of what he needed and tried to configure in the task tracking tool. Anything beyond that is of course my own speculation, but I feel comfortable saying it is an extremely stressful and unhealthy environment. Even more so when getting a bad performance review could cascade into you losing your job, losing your visa, and having to wrap up your entire life and GTFO within 30 (iirc?) days. Or find a new job within that short time frame that will sponsor your visa. I don't think you should be so quick to dismiss such a case as merely a personal matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Considering that he alone has the majority of the votes, I don't see how any of these board member departures change anything (nor does the linked text make any attempt at explaining this.)

<comment><USER18> It is beyond outrageous that it is legal to have corporate structures other than 1 share 1 vote.

<comment><USER19> Why? Not only is nobody forcing you to buy shares, but you have to pay to join in. It's also often legal to sell your voting rights (by handing over a proxy statement) anyway. What's the problem?

Having a 'visionary' in charge is often a benefit, so I would imagine many would prefer to have Zuckerberg in charge rather than a board of activist investors.

<comment><USER20> > Having a 'visionary' in charge is often a benefit, many would prefer to have > Zuckerberg in charge rather than a board of activist investors

Of course but not necessarily because he's 'visionary'. Rather he's shown a considerable willingness to put any moral concerns aside in the interest of increasing profits. If you have any doubts think of how many times he was forced to come public with statements like "we'll do better" without actually doing better. So it makes sense for many to hitch their wagon to him instead of some dissident who may alleviate some of the moral issues at a cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale [http://archive.is/R3ij5](http://archive.is/R3ij5)

</comment><comment><USER21> Why doesn't Zuckerberg make his goal the core functionality of his platform?

> My goal for the next decade isn't to be liked but to be understood.

<comment><USER22> I like that. It sounds like a much more useful Facebook.

<comment><USER23> runedog understands your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Non paywall: [https://archive.is/R3ij5](https://archive.is/R3ij5)

</comment><comment><USER25> Non-paywall:

[https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg- repor...](https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-reportedly- overhauled-board-to-assert-more-control/)

<comment><USER26> This says that Facebook have built a test facility and if they detect the virus then they do a full genome sequence. Facebook are doing genome sequencing, this seems less than ideal.

<comment><USER27> What? Am I missing something here?

EDIT: I see, you fell victim to CNET's "infinite scrolling." You scrolled into another article. Furthermore, they're not sequencing human DNA in that article you stumbled on, they're sequencing the virus. Furthermore, Facebook doesn't own this, it's a group funded by Mark's charitable donations.

<comment><USER28> > Furthermore, they're not sequencing human DNA in that article you stumbled > on, they're sequencing the virus. Furthermore, Facebook doesn't own this, > it's a group funded by Mark's charitable donations.

AFAIK it's the group led by Joe DeRisi[1]. For those interested in further details, there[2] is an absolutely fantastic interview with DeRisi that's worth every minute of your time.

[1] [http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/](http://derisilab.ucsf.edu/)

[2] [https://www.tested.com/old- categories/podcasts/854328-scarie...](https://www.tested.com/old- categories/podcasts/854328-scariest-episode-yet-still-untitled-adam-savage- project-103018/)

<comment><USER29> That podcast show was excellent, thanks for sharing.

Very relevant discussion of viruses with his snake story and randomly finding Ebola variations and referencing his work on coronavirus (show was from 2018).

Id love to hear his views on the recent stuff that's happened.

This is the perfect kind of guy you want to give lots of money to do random research and see what he comes up with. I'm happy Zuckerberg found him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shouldn't hackernews have some policy of marking paywalled articles? Something like:

[paywall] Mark Zuckerberg Asserts Control of Facebook, Pushing Aside Dissenters

It would be very helpful to avoid getting irritated by the paywalls. And maybe collectively we could ignore paywalled sources.

<comment><USER31> The HN FAQs [1] state that paywalled articles are OK as long as there is a known workaround so everyone can read it, even if it takes a little effort.

Someone usually posts a link to the workaround in the comments, i.e.:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030502)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23028577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23028577)

It's not ideal, but better than banning every site that might ever have a paywall, which, aside from leading to the loss of a big chunk of quality content, would create confusion relating to the fact that paywalls behave differently based on regions, previous site visits, click origins etc.

So it's the least-worst solution.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><USER30> Still, it would be useful to have an indicator like [paywall], so that it's easy to avoid paywalled articles.

<comment><USER31> I think Dang has long ago decided that wouldn't improve HN, and I tend to agree.

Tagging an article as paywalled would imply that it's inaccessible to non- subscribers, which isn't true; inaccessible content is banned from HN.

Paywalled content is only allowed if the paywall can easily be bypassed, so tagging it as paywalled would just cause more confusion, not less.

Everyone accepts it's an imperfect situation. But it's still the least-worst situation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


V8 JavaScript Engine: Digging into the TurboFan JIT - <AUTHOR> http://v8project.blogspot.com/2015/07/digging-into-turbofan-jit.html <comment><USER2> Interesting to see them moving away from AST-to-ASM and building an IR, which looks to be a CFG.

When V8 was first released, one of the selling points was that it would directly translate JS, which is why it was fast and why it couldn't be retargeted.

<comment><USER3> > Interesting to see them moving away from AST-to-ASM and building an IR, > which looks to be a CFG.

V8 actually has been using a compiler with a proper IR since 2010 when Crankshaft[1] was released.

[1] [http://blog.chromium.org/2010/12/new-crankshaft- for-v8.html](http://blog.chromium.org/2010/12/new-crankshaft-for-v8.html)

<comment><USER2> Oh my, I'm quite behind. I feel embarrassed now :)</comment></comment></comment>


A little bit of the one-time MacOS version still lingers in ZFS - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSDTypeAndMacOS <comment><USER2> I shared an office with Noel Dellofano when she was porting ZFS over to the Mac. It was definitely an uphill battle but she got through it small piece by piece, with patience. I originally was hoping to get the project, but in retrospect she was much better at it than I ever could have been.

As far as I remember, there was too much licensing uncertainty around it for it to be give the green flag. That said, from my ancient memory, it began as a side project for Don Brady (one of the core file system team members). So it may have fared better if it had top down support from the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone who is unaware: you can add ZFS support to macOS by installing OpenZFS [0]. If you have homebrew you can just run: `brew cask install openzfs`.

While I believe it's possible to boot from ZFS, I'd suggest sticking with APFS.

One of the ways I use ZFS is with external HDDs, so I can easily move em between computers running Debian, FreeBSD, or macOS.

[0] [https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Downloads](https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Downloads)

<comment><USER4> I tried zfs on Mac a while back. A few years I think. My trial was with external disks. It seemed super easy to basically lose the disk by forgetting to export it or whatever the terminology is, before unplugging it.

Probably just my lack of understand, but for something that was supposed to be all about not losing data, it seemed very fragile in that use case.

Again, it may have just been my ignorance and I didn't lose anything, but I couldn't figure out how to recover.

Maybe it's more forgiving now.

<comment><USER3> I haven't experimented much with this, so perhaps someone with more experience can confirm. There's a lot of ZFS options and features which I don't fully understand.

If your pool consists of a single drive and it was not exported correctly before being moved to a different system you can still import it by running `zpool import -f pool_name`. I've had this happen previously, and it hasn't been an issue. The zpool man page says the following:

> If a device is removed from a system without running zpool export first, the > device appears as potentially active. It cannot be determined if this was a > failed export, or whether the device is really in use from another host. To > import a pool in this state, the -f option is required.

If your pool consisted of multiple drives, I think it would vary depending on your configuration. It seems like at worse you'd have to use the -F flag when importing, which would cause some data to be lost due to incomplete transactions:

> Recovery mode for a non-importable pool. Attempt to return the pool to an > importable state by discarding the last few transactions. Not all damaged > pools can be recovered by using this option. If successful, the data from > the discarded transactions is irretrievably lost. This option is ignored if > the pool is importable or already imported.

However I haven't encountered a scenario which caused me to have to use the -F flag, so I'm unable to speculate further. As I understand it, it still provides stronger guarantees than alternatives.

<comment><USER5> Can't comment on the original macos version, or zevo version, but you will not lose a pool by "just unplugging it" or rebooting without export.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did Apple abandon efforts to use ZFS? Licensing?

<comment><USER7> I always assumed it was Oracle buying Sun and Steve Jobs NOPEing far away from the prospect of putting an Oracle filesystem at the heart of their then- largest product. Oracle is _really_ good at using their products as beachheads to vampirize large companies. I hesitate to even imagine what would have happened to Apple had they gone forward with ZFS.

<comment><USER8> Actually the opposite is true, Jobs and Ellison were notoriously great friends - they were from the same generation, the "pirates" usurped by Gates. They just made sure to swim in different seas, as big sharks do.

Apple simply gave up on Sun, seen as a losing bet, and abandoned Java too.

<comment><USER9> The Apple/Java story is still interesting. I now personally don't care much about Mac OS and Java anymore, but I remember me being pissed when Apple abandoned shipping Java, Cocoa bindings, native LaF for Swing and other integrations around 10.7 and leave the field for Oracle, after SJ had promised to deliver "first-party, best-of" Java dev experience years earlier. Oracle had also published a dev build for the Oracle RDMS on Power-based Macs, but then denounced the Mac as a serious platform. Maybe a back-deal or bet was in effect here, or Apple figured they'll never get into datacenter and enterprise anyway?

<comment><USER10> That's interesting, to me it seemed the other way round - it was good for Oracle to be responsible for their runtime. The integration was always a really terrible fit and without it, Oracle could ship current versions of Java. The Apple/Java thing was just a bad idea with a long lifetime and somewhat sluggish death.

<comment><USER11> It was the plan B in case Mac OS developers wouldn't be willing to use Objective-C from the new shinny OS X stack.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>