Old Geek Jobs: fighting against ageism in the industry - <AUTHOR> https://oldgeekjobs.com <comment><USER4> I think that the "Bay Area scene" is different from much of the world.

I think that part of human nature is that people like people who are like themselves, so you sometimes get these insular / discriminatory sub cultures that judge people on superficial traits instead of the quality of their minds. From both this article and the tales of many friends, San Francisco strikes as one of these low-tolerance / high-discrimination places.

I live in NH, on a farm and work (mostly) remotely. I've got a network of contacts, I get pinged w requests for contracting work, I do the job, I get paid. No one asks me about my age (45) or judges me because of it.

Personally, I dislike places where people are provincial and close-minded, so I'll stick to the rural countryside and leave SF to the bigots.

<comment><USER5> Problem with your solution is that you already now people, if you don't you have to rely on websites like freelancer that pretty much are the same as paid-to-win-the-bid in modern mobile video games and it's sad when people all over the world bid really low those making the website effectively racist regarding devs that to this for living instead of side jobs.

<comment><USER4> Also, the way to compete with someone who's charging $10/hr for crappy code is to do what they can't or won't do:

* be an excellent communicator * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. * be a whole stack developer * manage "up". Think of things before your manager does, alert the manager to dangers and problems, give expert advice, avoid the problems. Managers love people who solve the total problem; they hate people who solve one very very narrow niche problem and then leave them (the manager) dealing with a leaky bag of shit. Saying "well, that wasn't in scope!" does not make them happier about holding the leaky bag.

I guarantee you that no one bidding $5/hr and working on a timezone 12 hours away delivers this.

So, to recap:

1) work in a city when young 2) make contacts 3) be good at what you do 4) manage up ; solve the REAL problem

Do that and you'll have lots of work and make good money.

<comment><USER6> > * be high bandwidth. F2F, skype, etc. *

I agree, and I hate it. What happened to the days when I could just be productive? Now, I have to spend hours "working as a team" (ie, socializing) on Slack. I hate it so much that I've dramatically cut down on the work I do. It's not that I'm asocial, it's just that I don't want to be exchanging memes when there's work to be done. I want to do the work, and do it well, so I can spend time with my wife and kids. Work for work, socializing for after work.

Even with IRC, it didn't use to be like this. What happened?

For the record, I'm not talking about being responsive, or good communications. That's critical. I've always responded to client emails within 2-3 hours (I break up my day into 3 email checks). But I find it impossible to get much done with teams that expect me to hang out in Slack or Hipchat all day long. But the younger kids love it. Maybe they code and chat at the same time, I don't know. I can't do it.

Doesn't anyone just hire people to do a job anymore? Are even contractors doomed to spending their days "meshing"?

<comment><USER7> Ask your manager to have a couple days out of the week where you can "go dark" and focus on projects.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I did that when I worked remotely as an employee for a company. They didn't like it, particularly my boss's boss, and it definitely only served to make the younger developers who quite literally live and socialize on Slack more wary of me (because of course if you're not online, you're not really working, right? Even if you're producing results.)

What I'm talking about now is working _as a contractor /freelancer_ for short- term projects, like even as short as 3-4 week projects. Most of the good freelance jobs expect you to be on Slack coordinating with their team in Eastern European country X. It really didn't use to be like this, I used to be able to make good money as a freelancer just coordinating with other freelancers and the contracting company/individual a few times a day. And in my opinion, it worked a lot better. Yeah, the irresponsible devs can't screw around as much if someone's keeping tabs on Slack, but the productive ones are significantly less productive this way. And why would you hire a remote freelancer you didn't trust to do the work?

And jobs that are paid per job and not per hour aren't any better, in my experience. Everyone has to be online, checking in, chatting, exchanging memes.

Maybe I've just had a streak of bad luck this year, but it definitely seems to be a significant trend.

I don't know, maybe I need to make a concerted effort just to work for small businesses, and not start-ups or mid-sized companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi Everybody,

I'm the creator of the site the down blog in the OP links to [https://oldgeekjobs.com](https://oldgeekjobs.com). I developed it as an MVP last night in one hour.

The blog looks like it's getting crushed under load, so here's the content of the post:

Check out [https://oldgeekjobs.com/](https://oldgeekjobs.com/) if you're over 30.

In the software development industry it's hard to get hired when you get past 35 and are still "just a developer". Employers look down on you because you're too smart, or they think you're too stupid because you never wanted to be a manager. Employers will use the excuse of "culture fit" to exclude you and get you out of the hiring pool. You're too smart to be tricked into working 60 hours a week for zero equity and zero bonuses. You're too smart to be working on a legacy code base that has low quality and will hurt your future career prospects. Employers know that which is why they love to hire fresh faces out of school and under 30s; give tech companies your young and naive to burn them out and make them piles of cash. You're experienced enough to avoid that demoralizing burning out.

Check out [https://oldgeekjobs.com/](https://oldgeekjobs.com/) because there may just be a job for you, a place where you won't be discriminated against just because you're getting older and wiser.

<comment><USER9> Be careful to not discriminate against young people either. Assuming developers in their 20s are naive and underpaid is just as insulting as attitudes towards older developers.

This isn't necessarily an indictment of you. I'm just a little sick of people stereotyping younger developers on Hacker News when the truth is that most of us get great value for our time and are well aware of the choices we make.

<comment><USER10> This is the equivalent of someone making a job site for black people to get jobs, and saying "be careful not to discriminate against whites!".

<comment><USER11> Except old people are objectively better off in the US.

It must be such a hard life, not having huge student debt and already having equity in a house so you can afford to turn down the 60 hour jobs. If only everyone understood how much you deserve it better than those young people.

<comment><USER12> I mean we're not talking about Baby Boomers here, chief.

There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now. People who graduated college in the late 90s/early 2000s are in their mid- to late-30s. The guy who posted this site is one of those people (though I think he misses the "millennial" cut off by 1 year).

Those of us in this age bracket are "old" by startup standards/stereotypes. I promise you college and home-buying wasn't terribly different 15-20 years ago than it is now. Still plenty of opportunity to go into incredible debt. And hell, 2016's 45-year-old who bought his first house in, say, 2000, may just have watched his home's value crash in 2006/2007.

So maybe just tone it down.

<comment><USER13> _> There are millennials staring 40 in the face right now._

i'm one of these, and i don't consider myself a millennial.

anyone who's legitimately used a rotary phone (or even just seen one in use) in a non-ironic way should not be considered a millennial.

<comment><USER12> Why?

<comment><USER14> Rotary phones are from the 70's and earlier.

<comment><USER15> and people born in the 70s aren't millenials.

Really, the oldest are mid 30s, and I think even that is a stretch.

<comment><USER16> Yet rotary phones were still very common in the 80s, and my grandparents still had one in the early 90s. So people born in the early 80s, which qualifies as millennial, very likely used them.

<comment><USER17> Until 2000-something (and they might still have it) the Harwich MA public library had a rotary phone that patrons could use to make calls. The typical use case was middle schoolers who's parents forgot to pick them up (the middle school ran a bus to the library) when the library was 30min from closing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Old (40) geek here. I think I have two pennies-worth to share here. I came to the industry at 38. I left real estate development when I couldn't overcome the unemployment history gap in my resume, despite working for KB Home, Toll Brothers and on the largest redevelopment project in Chicago history (Stateway Gardens housing project to Park Boulevard). I was living in the Bay Area at the time I made the transition (finally). I can tell you first hand - <USER2> culture fit thing as a means to discriminate is real. I will say that I at least had interviews. Interviewing felt good after not even getting an email for - any - job applied for in real estate. I got a response for - every - <USER3> applied for the in Bay (minus FB and Pandora, you guys suck).

After 6 months of interviews in the Bay, I gave up (due to cost) and decided to try another market... less than 6 weeks and I had a job in Charlotte. I had my first iOS role at a startup another 6 months after that. Even after the startup coughed me up (thanks again Zomato), I was able to get another iOS job in a month. I won't mention (any other) names but I can say that the culture fit issue doesn't really exist outside the Bay.

And to any decision makers out there, you are making a mistake if you assume someone like me can't fit on a team of 18-30 y/o. I fit in so well, in fact, that almost all of my new connections on LinkedIn are these same 18-30 y/o. I have made more friends with interns than I did when I was the age to intern. And my 20 year-old friends have no fear in making fun of my age just as I have no fear in making fun of theirs. We even talk sH$@! about race (oh yeah, I'm also black).

The experience has been awesome for me as well as them (I believe). So, the next time you have a chance to hire an old dev who just wants to be a fu$!@E~!! DEV - just hire her.

<comment><USER19> What a great story. Also, I believe that geek fellows here and HNers shouldn't be concerned about switching jobs, as they're immersed in this industry all over their heads. It's folks who do coding just for living and don't really want to invest in new technologies, or have early stopped trying out new things that might have more issues finding new prospects.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. I got into the industry with the expectation that I would launch a startup. Yet, I starting really writing code and decided that I wanted to do something really novel and killed my original real estate domain related ideas. Once you learn to write code you realize how weak your ideas really are. Since I love coding so much, I don't mind improving as a dev because novelty and quality my ideas seem to be improving as well. My experience is unusual but I encourage anyone I met to try it because you never know if software development might change your life's trajectory.

<comment><USER20> How did younger started? Did you go back to school or use online resources etc?

I'm really interested in hearing more of your story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think that age is correlation, not causation.

What's really happening is two things. First, companies typically don't like paying _people_ lots of money (even if they are great at blowing millions on other mindless things). Second, these companies do not understand that their unwillingness to hire expensive people is _causing_ months of bug-chasing and monkey-patching in their products.

When your organization is under the impression that "a developer is a developer", new college grads willing to work for peanuts are very attractive. It takes a good manager to understand that someone's decades of experience or advanced degree really is worth a lot more money, and not just in the long run. Experienced people have seen more programming constructs in more languages, they have encountered more examples of APIs in more libraries, they have made more mistakes and learned from them, they are more likely to be able to apply suitable algorithms and data formats to problems, and so on. Also, having experienced people on staff actually gives your new developers somebody to learn from.

<comment><USER22> This matches my experiences well. Many of the people I know who are devs in the Bay Area that don't work at Google/FB aren't making more than $80k. The companies pull in grads who couldn't quite make the top companies who don't realize that they will never get a raise or promotion, and many of these people stay for 5-6 years before they realize how hard they are getting screwed.

These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because they know they wouldn't be able to retain them.

Its worth noting that I work on a dev team where the average age is about 40 (I am 27). We have multiple members of the team nearing retirement. Having the older guys around makes my job much easier and gives me resources that I wouldn't have otherwise. We are able to keep these guys around because we work on interesting projects, don't work more than 40 hours a week, and have a great manager.

<comment><USER23> > These companies would NEVER hire an older, experienced developer because > they know they wouldn't be able to retain them.

Not only that, but they don't have to retain them. . There is a large supply of "~20 year olds who aren't quite Google material" lined up to take on those $80K developer roles. The "churn and burn" strategy seems to be working for these companies so why change?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I worked at Microsoft Redmond in 2009. They have a private uber like transport system. Around once a week the driver would hand me their resume and ask that I pass it on to my manager. It turns out that many of them had worked in the industry and were trying to get back in. They had a lot of experience and big important job titles etc. Mostly from the 2001 tech boom. That was my wake up call. If I'm not careful someday I will be the one handing out resumes to passengers.

So I focused on skills and went into contracting as soon as I could. Now the reason I don't work for startups is that they keep trying to pay me with a mystery box of stock options and I'm not buying it.

Another bonus about contracting, apart from the money and flexibility, is that you get left out of company politics.

So tl;dr... Life doesn't owe you anything. And I recommend contracting as a career / lifestyle choice.

<comment><USER25> > you get left out of company politics

And if you work 80 hours a week, you get paid 2x as much.

<comment><USER26> And if you work 10 hours a week, you get paid 25% as much.

This isn't a dig at freelancing / contracting. I did it for a while and it was great. But you have to be realistic. Also, billing 80h per week would be near impossible unless you had someone else managing your business for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's too bad that many of us(in general, not on HN) are too lazy to judge a person based on what they actually offer vs a number attributed to them. People who are 50+ are perfectly capable at learning and writing good code, and it really isn't hard to recognize someone with a sharp mind.

However, lots of people allow their minds and bodies to rot as they get older. My parents, as much as I love them, are not very employable at this point(at least not when compared to a younger candidate). They don't get much exercise and spend a large chunk of the day sitting in front of the boob tube. They are smart people, but their ability to learn new things has gone way down, and I have noticed they are a little more gullible than they used to be. Meanwhile, I have friends who are in their 50s and they have the energy, motivation, and learning abilities of someone in their 20s.

I wonder if this has something to do with the exercise they get, and the lack of TV watching. The calorie defecit from both those things probably slows their aging a tad too. I think if you want to be programming at age 50, you can easily add years, perhaps decades to your youthfulness by taking some basic care of both body and mind. It may seem like an obvious statement, but most people don't actually do this, and it shows in people my age who have the habits of my parents while also drinking heavily and smoking way too much. It's kind of spooky when I see people who were once youthful looking, in their 20s, quickly start to look like they are in their 40s because they don't really take care of themselves beyond basic hygiene.

<comment><USER28> I never exercised or ate well, even as a child and adolescent. I look better now at 30 than I ever did at 18 or 20 or 25.

Exercise and physical activity are supremely important.

<comment><USER29> Did you forget to mention that you do exercise now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements. In other words, "having experience in the industry". Or "domain-specific knowledge"

Back in the day, there were different industries to have experience in. Jet engines, medical devices, etc. Beyond that, nothing had/needed/understood software. For better or worse, it was a pinnacle.

These days "the industry" is "teens using snapchat". The further you are removed from that, the less valuable you are as a coder.

There are still of course jet engines and medical devices to be built, but (as a statement to our society?) those products and thus those skills are not as valuable as advertising.

Even more sadly, this trend is just the start. The current 40's-ish coders have their own industry experience to fall back on. The next generation of coders that will have nothing but 15secOfFame-centric jobs will have nothing to fall back on as younger 15msOfFame-centric things come in.

At some point we'll have to recognize coding as an NFL-style career. Get what you can while you can; you'll be a car salesman soon enough. Granted NFL players have 100x the pay plus public visibility that can help them after they retire.

None of this matters because the Earth will be sand in 20 years anyway. (Sorry I'm still digesting [http://xkcd.com/1732/](http://xkcd.com/1732/))

<comment><USER31> I kept looking for the /s tag but couldn't see it.

> Half of a coder's value is understanding "unspoken" requirements.

Certainly a great deal of what you pay for in a more senior engineer is that ability to see around corners. I disagree entirely with your assessment that this ability is anything narrower than domain-specific (i.e. it extends only so far as 'an experienced software engineer' not so far as 'an experienced photo sharing app engineer').

> The current 40's-ish coders have their own industry experience to fall back > on. The next generation of coders that will have nothing but 15secOfFame- > centric jobs will have nothing to fall back on as younger 15msOfFame-centric > things come in.

To assert this with any credibility (the assertion: previous generations software engineers can fall back into 'steady' jobs because they have expertise in staple products; new generation won't be able to because they don't) you have to have some sort of evidence. Plenty of junior and midweight engineers hop from bank => startup and vice versa. Why would the same not be true of senior engineers? If you specialise in cryptography does it matter whether you're applying it for British Airways or Snapchat?

> At some point we'll have to recognize coding as an NFL-style career.

Why? What evidence supports this conclusion?

> Get what you can while you can; you'll be a car salesman soon enough. > Granted NFL players have 100x the pay plus public visibility that can help > them after they retire.

If you fail to keep your skills current then yes, you will have a short career. I know many software engineers who are three decades into their career. They're hard-working and enthusiastic. They keep their skills up to date.

An adjacent point: having read The 100 Year Life, it's clear to me that in 20 years our job market will be different to the one we see today. Salary will likely be heavily decoupled from age and closely linked to merit. As older people get healthier relative to previous generations, they will be able to work productively for longer. It's therefore both more necessary for them to keep current and invest in themselves in order to maintain income parity, but also more possible for them to do so (because instead of having hip operations at 60, they can attend J2EE2: No This Time We Mean It, It's Going To Be Huge summer camp).

<comment><USER30> > Why? What evidence supports this conclusion?

Because in the deluge of this style of post on HN lately, the most common counter has been "well we elders know the game so much better". Sounds exactly like sports. Yes you can pick up new skills and what-not, but "the game" has changed and the kids at a very fundamental level "get it" and you don't.

> having read The 100 Year Life

Okay....

> it's clear to me that in 20 years our job market will be different to the > one we see today. Salary will likely be heavily decoupled from age and > closely linked to merit.

Exactly. But merit at _what_? Old-school coders are the best there are. But they're getting kicked out because they're the best at stuff that nobody cares about. You know, algorithms and correct coding and what-not.

Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company. It's already happening / happened. There's no point to your book. If you "get" the latest social media craze and can figure out the best way to incorporate it, you're way more valuable than someone who knows 100 programming languages, wrote ten, and can solve the entirety of Project Euler in an hour.

Okay maybe the Euler guy might be worth something. (the /s you're wanting). But, given most of us, even if we're above average, _aren 't_ that guy, what does that leave? It leaves an NFL-style career. At 1/100 the salary.

Anyway I have two kids. I love programming. I'm good at it. I'm 40. I will steer them away from that as a profession. It's an NFL-style career.

Addendum:

> Ultimately, salary is going to be linked to how much you make the company. > It's already happening / happened.

And don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. I guess. Anyway, fits in with the ideal of social Darwinism, and capitalism in general. Which, I guess is as good a thing as any, and likely unavoidable regardless. Nonetheless, it has to be taken for what it is, which is a pretty awesome career thru your early 30's followed by a never-ending gray cloud. Which is great if that's what you want. However if you're expecting a long-term career like I'd assume most are, you really need to plan out your career path in more detail. Most people going into CS don't recognize that, and it really needs to be made more plain.

<comment><USER28> > _Old-school coders are the best there are._

Looking at all the programmers I've worked with I see zero correlation between age in skill. None in either direction.

You assertion that programming is an NFL-style career is one devoid of any merit of substance. There is no time clock on a programmer's career the way there is in any professional sport.

<comment><USER32> He's saying it's highly paid and skewed to the young. Statistically, thus isn't false.

It also gives those who fit the profile to think about the bigger picture, which can't hurt.

But I'm a manager now so feel free to ignore my advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The sad part is that when you reach that age (31 here) is you start looking at the "new trend" (ex Angular, React and NodeJS) as unnecesary and the "new devs" that doesn't have any experience on making and maintaining long term projects (> 5 years) look at this as the holy grail technology and if you aren't using that technlogy it means you aren't as efficent as the "new guys" so you either migrate to management (which sucks), change industries or became a private just another entrepenur.

<comment><USER33> I'm considerably older than that, and would argue from experience that the mistake is in regarding _everything_ new as just another fad.

Often it's good to wait a while and see how things play out with a new technology before deciding whether to invest in it. But you don't want to fall into the bad habit of making such evaluations on prejudice, rather than merit.

<comment><USER34> Exactly. Use your experience to judge a technology on merit. Does this solve a pain point in a new and interesting way, or is it the same approach in a different language?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> alex-yo Well, a funny thing, I'm not old, I'm just 37. In my country I need to work for the next 30 years to retire.

However companies don't want to talk with me about getting a job regardless my 14 year of commercial experience. Sometimes I hear during an interview "oh, you did so many things, I wish I could have the same experience". And then I don't get this job.

And no, I'm not expensive. I usually don't get to the point where they ask me for the money.

I'm thinking about starting my own company with my own products. This will be much harder, but it's better to have this kind of job than none.

And I just stopped replying to the job adverts with "young team".

<comment><USER35> No joke, I'm 31, only 2-3 years ago the companies were all over me, I would get offers right and left. Now, not so much, I've noticed a pretty huge difference.

<comment><USER36> So you're saying you post your age in your profile?. This has no correlation

<comment><USER35> I usually mention it in my cover letter. I wouldn't want to work in a place that discriminates based on age (or on any other factors, for that matter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The person who wrote this is 37.

Imagine how much harder it is for a Guy I know. He's in his early 60s and has been looking for a job for over six months. Every interview he's had goes really well until they realise he's not 23. Then it's all 'Err, we want someone less technical.' Or 'Err, you're too technical for the role.'

This is someone with over 40 years industry experience, from designing and building mainframes to working on cutting-edge image processing, to managing teams of engineers and more.

Incidentally, if anyone knows of a role which may be suitable for someone like him he'd be really interested.

<comment><USER38> Interested. Can you shoot me an intro at firstname.lastname@example.com ?

<comment><USER37> Thanks for your reply! I've just sent you an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Could be just me but it seems to me that for some jobs (Architects, tech leads) in enterprise-ish industries (Big data / Java / Spring / Cloud) they look (at least from job posting) for ridiculous years of experience. I for one (nearing my 40's) didn't see any problem landing any job (non SF area, mostly Java/Scala/Spring and Spark/Hadoop on AWS). I get tons of LinkedIn recruiter spam, and it's easy to tell my age from my work/education history.

I did feel really a bad vibe interviewing for a couple of SF based startups, got rejected once for being "to enterprisy, won't fit our startup culture". I think it was because I mentioned using an IDE, God forbid.

So it might be a big issue in some cultures / areas. I don't see it in the Enterprise world at least.

<comment><USER25> > they look (at least from job posting) for ridiculous years of experience

Yeah, they want 20 years of experience. But they still won't hire anybody over 25. Start young, kids!

<comment><USER40> Actually we did, but nobody is hiring for C64 Basic and assembly anymore.

<comment><USER25> Right, I forgot: 20 years of experience with Angular.js.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Honestly, I feel like ageism as an industry social thing doesn't properly reveal the details behind why businesses make the decision to get rid of or stay away from the greybeards.

In reality, greybeards are harder to manage, command higher salaries, and don't put up will bullshit. Basically, managers want a young pliant fool willing to spend three years putting in 60-70 hours a week before he realize he is fucking himself over.

So in this case, I would argue ageism in the industry is mostly about money and business-culture, not techno or geek-culture.

One lesson I learned early in life was to listen to the old timers, It applies here as well, we spurn the oldies at our peril, for they learned lessons we have forgotten and are trying to resolve.

</comment><comment><USER42> When you are young you can get by as "just a developer". Luckily, for most of us, you end up honing into a specific technology given enough time.

Employers are willing to go great lengths to find the right kind of experience. Combine this with 100% remote jobs and you don't need to worry about getting old in this industry.

</comment><comment><USER43> If your company doesn't have older geeks or is explicitly excluding them in the hiring process, it is missing out. Having worked in an environment with engineers of all ages, I learned a lot from older experience engineers.

Over the years they've seen and accumulated a lot of experience related to how systems work, how code works, domain knowledge. You'll never get that if you hire only college kids.

Someone I worked with just retired last year. He was perhaps not like the famous (infamous now) 10x programmer, but he was easily a 5x programmer. Because he learned how to learn better, he was also faster at picking up new technologies as well.

Also startups and many companies simply don't want to pay market rate for what an experienced engineer would demand. Also mature people are not as easy to bully and push around. It is harder to force them to work till 8pm every day.

</comment><comment><USER44> Coding a long day in and day out at 55 yrs old, I've been at it for 30+ years. Maintain and upgrade 911/Alarm/PERS/Telematics systems.

Self taught. I've never taken a computer course in any school. I do it because I love it.

</comment><comment><USER45> As someone who entered the industry at ~32 and was immediately hired into Amazon to work on a team in AWS where I am around the median age, I find this conversation peculiar. The job I worked myself through a second college degree with was on small software team that was all older than myself. I went on a round of interviews recently and got an offer from all of them... I definitely don't feel like I'm going to expire in 5 years.

Then again, I won't be an "SDE II" or whatever I am now in 5 years, I'll have started a business, gone into consulting, or gone back to school for a Ph.D (pick 2?). So I don't know.

I have yet to hear anyone I've worked with say something ageist or fearful about age at work. Everyone is very cheerful about their careers.

And to be clear, I'm very, very blunt with management and co-workers about work-life balance. I work 35-40 hours a week when things are slow and step it up when things get hot two or three times a year. I think it's irresponsible to work more hours (it stunts growth, limits productivity, and makes me unhappy).

I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it. Then again I've always been sort of disgusted by gaggles of squirming kids, so I've probably self-selected where I've tried to find work. Why in the hell would anyone want to move to SV in their 40's+? That's like going to a college party to make friends or find a romantic partner in your 40's... the prospects are much greener and more attractive elsewhere.

This whole conversation strikes me as very odd.

<comment><USER46> >> I don't think that ageism isn't a problem, I guess I just haven't seen it.

It can be difficult to see it for what it is because its most common form is as a bias, which can be very difficult to discern, even within ourselves. ( Daniel Kahneman and many others have done amazing work about unconscious / barely conscious biases ). I never saw it when I was younger because I didn't think about it; I didn't even know that it was something I should be thinking about.

I'm somewhat ashamed to admit, but I've felt it myself. I remember when I was still very young, maybe 20 years ago, we had a "much older" guy join my team at work. At first, I felt a pretty strong internal resistance to working with him, never mind that he was brilliant and deeply experienced... he didn't even play videogames! But he was funny too, and he taught me a hell of a lot. He managed to give me advice that really helped my career, plus he knew tons about money and credit and investments.

It took me quite a few years to realize that the 'internal resistance' I felt was solely due to his age. It's a good thing my Mom taught me to respect my elders. Those lessons have served me well.

<comment><USER45> Your post is illustrative of a more general point, which is that in my limited experience, the devs I've worked with have been consistently more self aware and open to self criticism than the mean, and have on the whole been lovely human beings. It's a very welcoming culture. I'm sort of dreading the day I stumble into the snake pit of ageist, sexist bro-holes that supposedly makes up startup culture, but something tells me no one needs to...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is a good start (in fact I debated doing something similar after seeing all the recent articles on ageism).

But I think more than this, people need to understand why experience counts. Here is my opinion on the matter:

You can hire somebody young and they will probably be willing to work longer than an older person and probably get the job done sufficiently well, at a cheaper rate.

For many one-shot jobs, this is fine. But if you want to build something at scale, and have it be maintainable, and reduce your long term technical debt, you should get someone who has fought these battles before and understands the best way to take them on.

I'm speaking from the same experience that many others will: when we look at our younger selves, we realize how little we knew about organizing and maintaining a large project. Even as I age, I realize the me of just 3 years ago was relatively naive with regard to certain high-level tasks.

So, its not just about the hours you put in, how fast you can do competitive coding, and so forth. It is about the more nebulous parts of coding, the larger scope, the organization of a complex system. There is only one way to learn these things, the hard way: lots of time, lots of scars, etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> Last time I read about age discrimination in software development, 40 (years) was the number. Now it seems it's 30. In 5 years I suspect that anyone above 25 will be considered "too old" for this profession.

Not so crazy if you think about it: right now, 30-year-old people have about 8 years of experience (assuming a 4-year degree) and, as this post suggests, are being discriminated. Now, imagine an 18-year-old guy that study a year (code camps?) to become a software developer and after that starts to work as one. At 25 he would have 6 years of real world experience (let's assume this guy likes the profession so he taught himself while working, in order to compare both developers). Who has more chance to be hired (under the assumption that age discrimination is still a thing in 2021)? 2 more years of experience doesn't seem too much and a 25-year-old guy seems to be more suitable to be tricked into working 60 hours a week for less money.

Update: grammar fix.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sometimes I suspect we go from being too young and inexperienced to being too old and over-qualified without going through the Goldilocks sweet spot in between.

</comment><comment><USER50> Building from scratch since the early 80s. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that i've never really looked at my industry as a young man's sport. Young and dumb get chewed up and spit out on the first funding down-turn, which is about to happen again. They go out chasing shiney things, abused by ivy-leagues, and since they never had it to begin with, they don't come back. Seen it more that a few times so i'm not worried a bit.

So if your old and wise and still working congratulations! Maybe look back, if you can remember that far, and realize you've bern employed this entire time doing something you'd do for free if they didn't pay you.

Damm I love my job!

p.s. Remember the golden rule: Wait for critical mass, hijack, then do the same thing you did last time.

:)

</comment><comment><USER51> Started coding 35 years ago. Started some great companies in VRS(40 employees ), later internet(30 employees). Never left coding. Said goodbye to it all and became a freelance programmer. Love what i'm doing and i will still be coding in the future.

</comment><comment><USER52> If I compare my me-now with my me-20-something I would definitely hire my me- now. I am now very productive b/c I've developed high focus, I make less mistakes, I've committed to a stack that solves most problems, I reuse my own code, I can see the big picture b/c I started coding in the mid 90's and I've developed the people/comm skills to actually understand what is required and translate that to code.

Experience matters a lot. I would also choose experience when selecting a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, etc.

We have a saying in Spanish: más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> The ageism trend isn't supposed to live on. The average developer in the US ([http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer- survey-2016#age-...](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer- survey-2016#age-country)) is 32. To young devs/execs employing someone who isn't close to their age range, may seem as not being the right culture fit. However, there are/there will be so many older developers, companies founded by older folks who will not shy away from their same age peers.

</comment><comment><USER34> One thing that may help is for those with experience to do a lot more teaching and mentoring. A lot of the evangelism of new technology is done by younger, hungry people looking to advance their careers. The more experienced devs sound like complainers.

The people I respect and aspire to be are those who are currently in their late 40s or 50s talking about Elm and Elixir. They were the ones in their 30s and 40s telling me Ruby was it. They were right, because they used their experience.

</comment><comment><USER53> Meanwhile in another thread [1]

California Today: San Diego Struggles to Keep Its Young Tech Talent [2]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12506131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12506131)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today- techie...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/california-today-techies-san- diego-bay-area.html)

</comment><comment><USER54> I wish companies would post a spread of their developer ages on their careers page so we would know which ones not to waste time with. Because mere lip service about hiring solely on merit, even if the hirer somehow believes they are, really just wastes everyone's time.

</comment><comment><USER55> But don't ageism always happened to be reverse? I still roll my eyes when a early 20's try to sells me idea of marketing - and although you can have a lot of good ideas at that age, you still don't have life and work experience that is needed to go trough massive amount of stress or unknown situations. I think it's fine that kids who run new business don't want old folks in there. It's a bit of a return of the balance. If you're too old to get hired, how about starting a new business with other oldies?

<comment><USER15> > I still roll my eyes when a early 20's try to sells me idea of marketing

Why should I hire someone who would treat other employees this way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The sword cuts both ways. Meanwhile I'm 23, working in a webdeveloper job (not in the US, mind you) and housing is completely inaccessible to me. It seems like real estate owners value age over anything. I've been looking for 4 months now, been to 20 apartments, almost every time they chose someone else because they were older...

Both sides of the age spectrum have their merits. It sounds idiotic to me to argue that older people have it worse. Maybe in Silicon Valley they do, but I can't see that happening where I live (Netherlands)

</comment><comment><USER57> Don't believe the lies a single second.

The truth is, it is NOT tough being 3X-4X in silicon valley.

What is tough is accepting to put up with startups about to fail, long hours, mediocre pay, little benefits and immature coworkers. That does limit the size of the job market.

That issue is faced by everyone, independently of their age. The youngers selves just happen to have lower standards in average

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm no quiche eater, I will code until I die

<comment><USER33> Perhaps you mean "quiche"? A guiche is a genital piercing. It would be an odd thing to eat.

<comment><USER58> lol thanks :) now fixed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> That's absurd. Most other industries, people get some respect for experience. I'd understand not hiring someone who had not kept up but people of any age can stop learning. If someone's on top of things, why would their age have anything to do with the hiring decision? Not being "into" the same things is flat out childish.

</comment><comment><USER60> Ageism is a clear and present bigotry. Just like racism, sexism, and etc.

And ageism was really born in Silicon Valley, of all places.

</comment><comment><USER61> The only way to fight ageism is with reverse-ageism ... you can't meaningfully change the overall statistics without "penalizing those young'ins".

Disclaimer: I've got an AARP card so I'm obviously on the right side of this discrimination!

</comment><comment><USER62> Is "cultural fit" a euphemism for age bias now? This is not the fist time I have her it used in this unfortunate context in the last few months. I feel bad that this happened to this person but I applaud his idea and hope it gains traction.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think it would help alot to build the same stock of myths about old guys, who where let go and then had a come back on the youngsters. Most of this social machine is build from self-propelling myths, so if you would keep that up, agism dissolved.

</comment><comment><USER64> [http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25...](http://www.meetup.com/DenverIPhone/messages/boards/thread/25461812)

<comment><USER64> "There are tons of federal acts trying to make everyone equal but at the end of the day companies know exactly what they want and will say "their personality doesn't fit the culture" or "their experience isn't a match" when in reality the individual is too old. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I wish more websites were this clean and simple. I'm not being sarcastic but its genuinely nice not to have 10 million ads, banners, and tracking cookies load every time I refresh (and nice idea for the website too.)

</comment><comment><USER66> I suppose senior means something different on this job posting board.

</comment><comment><USER67> Funny, I know a lot of greybeards who stay in San Jose because they can afford to. They bought their house when prices were a lot less, and thanks to Prop 13 their taxes are low.

</comment><comment><USER68> Come work for the government. Help to save tax payer's money and get paid well. Yes, the pace is slow but you can get lot accomplished in-between things.

<comment><USER69> Post or email more info? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I think there's a fair amount of reporting bias in this issue, personally. I'd totally non-scientifically split older (over age 35) engineers into three rough categories. This is not meant to be comprehensive or empirical, it's just mirroring my anecdotal experiences as someone who has been in tech for 20 years:

\- Average or better engineers. Between the facts that they are competent and have 10+ years of experience, they tend to have zero problem finding and keeping good, well-paying jobs. If they run into ageism, it gets lost in the flood of other offers they're likely to get in the same round of interviewing.

\- Below average engineers. These may be the source of some of the ageism complaints, but it's missing the forest for the trees. They are a common sight in government/non-profit orgs or old first-mover companies: folks who may have "senior" in their title but have been doing simplistic work on the same outdated project for their whole career. Have trouble finding new jobs when they are inevitably laid off not because of their age, but because they simply aren't good engineers.

\- Dinosaurs, ie- people who were good or even great engineers ten or twenty years ago, but have not kept their skills and knowledge base current. These are the people who are most likely to be affected by legit ageism, in my experience. A slightly fictionalized representative scenario from hiring a position at my last job, for work on a Java webservice: "Well, the 50-year-old blew through the whiteboarding in textbook C and can concisely enumerate the advantages of different caching policies off the top of his head, but has never used Java, worked on a web service, or used an RCS more modern than subversion. The 25-year-old struggled a bit in the coding exercise and gave an imperfect answer in the theory questions, but his resume has a link to his Github, which includes a RESTful webservice he wrote in Java. And the 50yo asked for the tip of the salary range, about 20% more."

I've faced that sort of decision quite a few times, and it's not easy. I could see why the older candidate would suspect ageism played a role if they didn't get the job. But the power is in the candidate's hands to create the better outcome: if the 50yo spends some time familiarizing themselves with marketable modern technologies then they get hired over less experienced candidates the vast majority of the time.

On a personal note, in the above scenario we did end up bringing on the 50yo with amazing fundamentals, and he was a total dud - possibly the worst hire I've ever made. Bungled almost every Git interaction, couldn't work in Linux and frequently screwed up deployments, great imperative code but all his architecture was early 90s-style spaghetti. The important takeaway that I tried to stress with the team wasn't that older devs can't learn and shouldn't be hired, just that THAT dev couldn't learn and shouldn't have been hired.

</comment><comment><USER71> 62-year-old developer here. I was at a small company until it lost funding and went under five years ago. At the age of 57, I was freaking out about finding a new job. Three weeks later, I was hired at my current company. Obviously this is a single data point, an anecdote, etc. However, I have seen the same scenario for several friends my age.

The place I work at needs to find and hire exceptionally talented people (embedded software in life-critical medical devices; sloppy or buggy code, someone could die.) It knows it does not have the allure of big names such as Google. So, it does something like the Oakland A's, and plays Money Ball. It goes for the pudgy, dumpy, overlooked players who always seem to get on base somehow. It knows it has no chance at the golden children, the 27-year-old Stanford PhD's who are perfect in every way. So, it casts a wide net, and looks closely at people who might be overlooked by other organizations.

I managed to luck into finding a great, well-connected recruiter. He was instrumental in helping me get placed quickly. And, as you've heard so many times you will probably scream if you hear it once more, "networking". A friend who already had a job at my new company put in a good word when I was going through the recruiting process.

I heard a great line about mathematicians: "Mathematics is a terrible profession. The only people who should do it are people who can't not do it." There are people out there who feel that way about programming. My daughter teases me that when I retire she knows exactly what I will do: spend more time hacking on open source projects.

The core truth of your inner being at some point overtakes you. If you live and breathe to code, if you still secretly wonder why people actually pay you to play all day with computers, you will be fine as you get older continuing to be a programmer.

One thing about getting older: You begin to realize, "Now is the time." No more resume padding, no more attempts at strategizing to optimize career moves down the road. No more doing things you hate in order to lay the groundwork for that ineffable special something that seems to beckon from just over the horizon.

Older people don't need to be told, "Be honest with yourself, find your passion" etc. Been there, done that. Life will do that to you. Expect that when you are in your 50's or 60's, you will have settled in to what really does work for you. For some, it is software development. For others, it is full-time church work. (My wife.) For others, it is gardening. (A retired former executive I wave to every morning as I'm heading out to work.)

Bottom line: You would not want to work at a place that is too arrogant and stupid to consider older job candidates, or that turns its nose up at anyone who does not fit a preconceived template, or that looks to monetize the naivete of young developers. Their loss. They are doing you a favor by passing you over. Screw them.

</comment><comment><USER72> What geezer configured this webserver? Link is down >:(

</comment><comment><USER73> I'm in my mid 40s and have not had any problems getting interviews and job offers. It might depend on your attitude and your skill set. There might be a time when my age will become a factor but not yet.

I've more than accepted that kids half my age are very talented and I need to prove my worth. Boy there are 26 year olds that I work with that are so mature and intelligent that it makes me worry. But my experience does buy some benefits, namely in how careful I code and being able to spot architectural and code issues well before most of my coworkers.

Meanwhile I'm spending 1-2 hrs every night reading and programming and learning new tech so that I don't fall behind. And it's not easy to do this, believe me but if it keeps me employed then I have to do it.

<comment><USER74> Thats very much the same approach I take. As long as I can keep learning and expanding what I know, I don't think I will go to wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Can someone state honestly and pseudonymously why they don't hire oldz?

Speculating I would say:

\- chose younger hire because cheaper and can be moulded into company specific role. \- younger candidate more easily managed by less experienced (cheaper) manager. \- wants to keep culture "pure," and needs kids to drink kool-aid. \- values power and control over less experienced technically acceptable candidates. \- get extra effort and all nighters out of people who think they need "experience." \- want to leverage kids love of novelty to react and respond to developments that seem like minor details to people with experience. \- younger people have less sensitivity to change. \- early stage companies want to reduce exposure to risk from having to re-negotiate once key developer has them by balls.

If you are old, present as harmless. The more hippy dippy and spergy you come off as, the less threatening you will be, the more you will disarm clients/employers.

<comment><USER73> I'm in my 40s. I interview frequently and the problem with most devs over 40 is that they are slow or dont keep up with technology.

I interviewed one guy in his 60s who went to school at MIT for his phd. I was excited. And then when it came to the coding exercise not only was he using perl, which had no relevance to our stack (which he was informed about) he took 3x as long to complete the question. I interviewed another older person who had no idea what JSON was. "Oh it's like XML, I get it."

It makes them look like a weaker candidate when they are slower or less knowledgeable. If you keep up with technology and trends it really makes a difference. It doesn't matter that "I can pick it up quickly" because as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the knowledge?

<comment><USER76> Note: JSON _is_ just like XML in that it's a horrible data interchange format ;) And if "knowing JSON" is a key skill you interview for... You possibly might want to ask different questions. Unless you repeatedly build the same thing - see below.

Any decent developer, no matter their age, should be able to figure out what JSON is in about as much time as it takes to have a coffee. If they can't do _that_ , you have a real problem.

> as a hiring manager why take the risk when someone already has the > knowledge?

As a hiring manager: Because we're not redoing already solved things, we solve new problems. The person with the knowledge holds the advantage for a few months. And then the person with the problem solving skills catches up. Of course, if you keep building the same type of app over and over - which is fine, and equally necessary - those months are never made up for, and experience matters more than problem solving.

Ultimately, you hire for the jobs you need to fill. For my part, I'm happy to take anybody who understands CS and is able to learn over somebody who already knows my tech but is stumped by new problems. (No matter the age)

YMMV.

<comment><USER77> JSON is really just like S-expressions, of course. It's trees all the way down.

(At least until you have to process so much XML that you have to do it sequentially, rather than parse it into a tree in memory.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I'm 46 now and holding out until I get to 50, at which point I fully intend to promote myself to employers as a token they can put in their diversity promotional material they promote as an antidote to criticisms.

</comment><comment><USER79> Unlike most engineers I want to be a manager. But it seems there is no opportunity for that. It seems that the non-engineers who are in the executive positions want non-engineers to manager engineers perpetuating the problems startups have.

There are few engineering management positions listed. The few I saw in the bay area resulted in excluding me because of my age (Stripe, I'm looking at you.)

It's frustrating to keep being pushed into individual contributor roles and then have low quality engineering managers hired in above you. (And I know I can do it because I end up leading teams all the time, they naturally form a round me. The members of the team are very happy with me- I have no authority but I end up leading them anyway.)

So I think the route for "old" folks is blocked also by the desire of non- engineers to make engineering management be done by non-engineers.

<comment><USER80> I did a Masters in Management of Technology, that opened up several recruiting opportunities.

I ended up not getting a management position however (they're extremely hard to get here in Uruguay), I believe it was because, like you, I didn't have a formal management position (I did end up having a lot of informal authority at my last job, and I've already won a lot of trust at my current one 3 months in).

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I think a good path, not often discussed, is for older developers to dedicate some portion of their time developing side-projects that can create a passive (or not so passive) income stream.

Being "old" gives you a lot of time to try various ideas. Eventually some should stick if you're truly pushing your skills; not just programming skills but product/marketing skills as well.

</comment><comment><USER82> You know what? I worked for a large tech company (unnamed) a few years ago. There were tons of old people who viewed the younger folks in contempt. It can happen both ways.

<comment><USER83> Absolutely; I made my entry in to Fortune XXX level companies by way of my tech skills doing basic things with Word that SVPs & MDs couldn't be bothered to learn, yet were critical to actually driving business. The hostility was palpable sometimes. There were a slim few senior staff workers who genuinely expressed gratitude for filling in for a very large, important skill-set they simply didn't grasp or feel compelled to learn during their professional careers. Being on the same team, I appreciated that, certainly not put-downs and disrespect during the process because of my seniority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I am 30 and I recently changed my apartment because there were simply too many old people in the complex. I want to live in apartments where there are plenty of girls who just crossed the legal age limit to drink.

We all love youth and there is a good reason for why so. But at the same time because we are older and we tend to have more money and control more stuff. Most of the 30 something coders will rise up to the higher positions in next 10 years.

<comment><USER85> > I am 30 and I recently changed my apartment because there were simply too > many old people in the complex. I want to live in apartments where there are > plenty of girls who just crossed the legal age limit to drink.

That sounds like the opposite of what I want so I'd say we don't "all love youth."

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end.

If you are a young programmer and your salary merely covers your costs of living (including leisure etc), it seems to me that you need a plan.

<comment><USER4> I've been a coder. I've been a manager. I've owned a firm that had 15 employees.

Of all of these, I prefer to be a coder.

I'm just 5 years away from 50, and let me tell you: not only do I want to be a developer at 50, I want to be a developer at 70.

Being a developer means getting paid good money to work on problems that are perfectly suited to my INTJ / spergy personality. There's nothing else I'd rather do with my (work) time.

<comment><USER87> What did your firm do?

<comment><USER4> I owned two businesses:

* SmartFlix.com (dvd rental business) * Heavyink.com (comic book ecommerce)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Build a streaming app streaming unfamiliar gems curated by digital crate-diggers - <AUTHOR> https://whohears.com <comment><USER2> Interesting concept, thanks for sharing! What constitutes a "gem" ?</comment>


In your opinion did Mark Zuckerberg deserve "Person of the Year"? - <AUTHOR>

I know this is old news, but I wonder if I'm the only one appalled by this title given to MZ, considering wikileaks' contribution to the world vs. FB's.<p>Also, do say why or why not and if you think the movie "the social network" played a part in the attention MZ got from the folks at TIME? <comment><USER2> The best thing this guy did was nick someone else's good idea. I do not really follow WikiLeaks or its movement, I think they do some good but at the same time endanger peoples lifes by their work.

I have no real input on who should have won it but I would rather see Mark eating pot noodles in a skanky apartment somewhere.

You may call this mis-placed jealousy on my part, I call it an undeserved win for a spotty teen. I doubt he has any real input in Facebook, rather it's run by the people who know what they are doing. Serious amounts of delegation.

I have real respect for companies like Google. The guys there worked hard to get where they are and have some real brains. I read their paper which they published at Stanford on page rank, incredible stuff. They built their own db and servers. That's real talent. He made a website and got some people going to it. Suppose I could say the same for YouTube and eBay but I really don't think Mark deserves even 1% of what he has achieved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chris, what you're saying is: not that MZ is awesome, he is super awesome! Because he is a billionaire without any talent or vision, and if you and I think we have talent and vision and got beaten by him, then who won?

An idea w/o execution is worth $2, and great execution on a semi-foolish idea often results in a hit! Also, no idea is original; it's all iteration on what exists already - like the saying goes: if you want to make apple pie from scratch, you'd first have to invent the universe. ;)

I think what you're suggesting is totally true about Google dudes having brains, but Zuckster has brains too, he tapped into the human psyche, like myspace, orkut, hi5, friendster etc couldn't. Apples to apples you read a PhD thesis (guessing) and are comparing that to a u-grad.

And finally, you cannot discredit him for not working hard (enough), that actually makes him smarter not dumber. ;)

<comment><USER2> I appreciate no idea is original and there was a hole in the market. Friends Reunited has taken their position of power as a given and not done any major updates to the site in years. Plus their paid business model was obviously a failure.

I am not really saying he is not that clever, don't get me wrong, I bet he has far more credentials than I ever will. What I am saying is, he doesn't deserve what he has. As you can see, I look at Google and appreciate their position and how they got there, I just don't get it with Mark.

The question really was, do I think he should have been made "Person of the year", the simple answer is no, I do not.

I like your objective comments though and can totally see where you are coming from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No, Assange dide.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't really get worked up over stuff like this this, it is just an arbitrary title assigned by one publication owned by a massive conglomerate. These are time waster debates. Any time spent debating whether Assange should have won it could just be spent actually helping the Wikileaks movement. Fighting actual problems > fighting for worthless awards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, Mike. This is not a call to action. Not sure if we share the same idea, but person of the year used to be a big deal. It reminded me of Pres Obama's Nobel Prize, until which it used to be a deal too. Talk about brand value dilution.

<comment><USER5> To clarifiy: the Times person of the year award has never been something that indicates praise. Hitler got it after all.

Similarly, the nobel peace price was worthless long before it was awarded to Obama, precisely because it was being awarded to people that had not earned it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Person of the year is not the same as "hero of the year". I think it has to do more with who wielded the greatest influence on the world that year (for better or for the worse). Iranian president was considered as well sometime ago (and he is a nutty boy!)

Also, I don't think it has to do with greatest number of people impacted, rather the avg impact multiplied by the number of folks affected. Wikileaks impact on say 30 million people * how much the average impacted individual's life has changed > Zuck's impact on 600 million people * the very marginal change in the life of average user. I also wonder if this change need be 'real' or 'perceived'.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I get people that reacted positively to use my product - <AUTHOR> Short intro: I'm loosely following lean startup/customer development strategy, but I'm bootstrapping so my focus might be on making money a bit earlier than VC backed products. I have a MVP/Early Access/beta product (not too good with exact terminology, it is in a state that it can used from start to finish and adds value). Hoping to be able to get my first sells over the coming couple of months, but before testing that I'm trying to get a couple of not-(yet)-paying users first.
The product is a time saver for video-editors creating low/med budget content (think social media stuff, company videos etc). Also good to know is I'm a solo tech guy, learning business/marketing on the fly (dangerous I know).
I have around 40 people who have shown significant interest (about 50/50 my own network and a post in a FB group explaining the problem I'm solving and my solution). I've visited some to ask questions about their workflow and show my product on their computer on their projects, with very enthusiastic reactions. The fact that I got 20+ beta signups from one simple post also makes me feel the problem I'm solving is worth it.
But somehow I have to struggle really hard to actually get them to use it, with multiple follow ups after their initial expression of interest, except for the time I'm sitting beside them. I'm trying to remove as much hurdles to starting as possible, but often the download link isn't even clicked.
So any advice on what I can conclude from that, or how to get more/better info, without pestering them too much? <comment><USER2> [random advice from the internet]

Ask people to pay. If they are really interested, they will pay. If nobody will pay, then either the product doesn't really solve a valuable problem or you haven't found the people who actually have the problem the product solves.

Asking people to pay usually means hearing "No, I won't pay" a lot. "No, I won't pay" is the best answer if the problem is not real. It is a good answer if the problem is real. Not as good as "Here's my money" but better than "sounds interesting" because "sounds interesting" doesn't split the world into valuable and not valuable products.

Anyway, if you're bootstrapping then learning to ask for money from customers is valuable right now. One technique for dealing with the discouragement of hearing "No" I've heard about is to make the primary metric the number of people per day who say "No" rather than the number who say "Yes."

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Serious advice: Learn to live with it.

It's so much easier to say "oh yes, sounds like a nice idea" than to actually sit down and try things out. How often do _you_ act like this on your own?

The most difficult things to deal with as a founder / creator IMHO is not to deal with criticism, but to deal with indifference. People just don't care. You can't change this.

Hence, learn to accept it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > not to deal with criticism, but to deal with indifference

Thanks for reminding me, I'm not sure where I read it, but indeed the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference...

Still I want to get my product in the hand of users, so can I interpret your advice then as: look for enough people and focus on the ones that _do_ use it, don't spend too much on the rest?</comment></comment>


Why place matters and possessions don't - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/placed/201710/places-influence-wellbeing-more-possessions <comment><USER2> Varnish is tripping... "Error 403 CDN not permitted"

cached, working version here: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fEGCne...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fEGCneKDAtoJ:https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/placed/201710/places- influence-wellbeing-more- possessions+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie&client=firefox-b)</comment>


ODNS: Oblivious DNS - <AUTHOR> https://odns.cs.princeton.edu/ <comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741031)

</comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping this would be DNS with oblivious transfer, but its just a silly proxy.

If you can snoop on an authoritative dns server then you can probably just snoop on the authoritative odns server and break the scheme with no real cost.

For the odns server to scale it would probably be implemented by the same people implementing dns servers, like ISPs and governments, the same people doing the snooping.

It just looks weak in theory and broken in reality.

<comment><USER6> It still seems to have the same problem as DNS over TLS - that is that _someone_ in that pipeline sees your query.

In the case of 'standard' DNS (unencrypted port 53 traffic) - anyone can 'snoop' (ISP, internet routers, etc) and the resolver can retain that information.

In the case of DNS over TLS - it's the box the performs the decryption that can retain that information.

In this case, the ODNS Stub can retain that information.

The only question is _who_ do you want to be able to view your queries. AKA who do you trust the most (or possibly, who do you trust the least).

<comment><USER7> That _someone_ in the case of the stub could be your local machine or a trusted router though. If your operating system environment knows ODNS, it doesn't even have to be an extra piece of software.

<comment><USER6> Let's take the case that it's a local machine - on your local network - <USER2> as the ODNS Stub. The DNS request is then encrypted from your machine to the trusted ODNS Stub - but then from that ODNS Stub out to some resolver on the internet, there exists the DNS query (whether encrypted or unencrypted) - sourced from your same public IP that your machine would have sourced it from in the first place, correct?

I'm certain I don't understand the entirety of ODNS - but the basics still have to exist - something still needs to make a query on behalf of the initial user to some authoritative server (unless the answer is already cached). I guess, what I'm picturing in this case, is that if the trusted resource (ODNS Stub) exists in your local infrastructure, then the source outgoing to the internet might as well just be your local machine in the first place - <USER3> that's how 'the internet' sees it anyway.

Anyway, I'm all for making DNS more secure...and this seems to be one way to change where your trust lies, but not a definitive solution, to me.

<comment><USER7> > _The DNS request is then encrypted from your machine to the trusted ODNS > Stub_

No. The stub is doing the encryption and sending the encrypted query to a resolver in the internet.

> _but then from that ODNS Stub out to some resolver on the internet, there > exists the DNS query (whether encrypted or unencrypted)_

Yes. But since it's encrypted, the resolver only knows that I have made a DNS request, not what the query is in it. The resolver can't decrypt it, it can only pass it on to a server that can decrypt it, but won't be able to see your source IP then.

I think they overstate the usefulness against the kind of attacker they describe though, since such a powerful adversary could correlate across servers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is quarentine selecting for more deadly strains of COV19 - <AUTHOR> Is quarentine selecting for more deadly strains of the virus? It seems the people leaving quarentine(to go to hospital) are those with deadly symptoms whereas milder cases stay at home.<p>Could someone who knows what they are talking about answer this question? <comment><USER2> The opposite. There is a hypothesis that, by quarantining everyone with symptoms, the milder asymptomatic versions are allowed to spread

<comment><USER3> Not sure where you are but in New Jersey everything in the state is shut down, not just to people with COVID symptoms

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really interesting question that I don't pretend to be an expert on.

It probably comes down to what causes the difference in reaction to the infection. It could be that there are differences in people's immune systems that cause them to have a much more severe reaction. In this case the quarantining wouldn't have an effect.

If people who are having a much more severe reaction are getting a strain of the virus that has mutated to cause these more intense symptoms then you would see the issue you are talking about.

My uneducated guess is that it is the former, but I'm really not sure.

</comment><comment><USER4> The opposite.

From the evolutionary point of view, a virus has no interest in being deadly: if it kills its host, it can't reproduce itself.

When social distancing (quarantine and lockdown) is enacted, it is harder for a deadly strain of the virus to reproduce and hence survive, as we react to it by putting into place stricter countermeasures. Which strains will thrive? The ones that able to "sneak around" unnoticed, by causing only mild symtomps.

<comment><USER5> I hear this a lot, but isn't evolution trial/error? Just because we can say it's not in an organism's evolutionary interest to evolve a certain way, doesn't mean it won't "try" it - at any stage in it's evolution. Also I don't think an organism has any active role in deciding what mutations occur, regardless of it's interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are you perhaps misunderstanding something? Everybody with confirmed symptoms should be in quarantine, which you do from home unless you are so sick as to need hospital care.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps the more deadly strains are infecting people in hospitals (health care workers and other staff and patients)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Best way to test that would be to use different countries' death totals over time, and compare that to differences in quarantine policy.

By the way, you misspelled "quarantine".</comment>


Reforestation effort could capture 205 gigatons of CO2 in 40-100 years - <AUTHOR> https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76 <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical that this will even happen but if so, hopefully it's done with an eye towards restoring some semblance of biodiversity rather than just a climate change mitigation technique. The road to hell is paved with good intentions

</comment><comment><USER3> We could even mobilize some military aircraft for the effort:

[https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green- scienc...](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green- science/aerial-reforestation2.htm)

This should be less of a labor saving method and more for accessing difficult terrain. Would probably be more successful with human labor.

<comment><USER4> It looks like that article is 10 years old. Has anyone done this at scale? A more recent (this year) talk advocating for similar, but using drones [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQvfaW54NU)

<comment><USER5> Unless the area is very remote and hard to get to I think it would cost less and have a higher chance of success if they are planted the traditional way manually

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is good news since it really doesn't look like we'll manage to stop our emissions in time to prevent catastrophic warming and we'll need additional measures that actively remove carbon from the atmosphere.

But I fear that this will just be used as excuse to do even less to reach reduction goal.

<comment><USER7> If effect, your comment reads 'we could stop emissions in time to prevent a worldwide catastrophy but have decided not to do so'. Imagine a similar scenario replacing CAGW with an asteroid on course for Earth!

The reason is simple: governments (the only bit of the 'we' who can actually implement significant measures forcibly if necessary) don't actually believe in CAGW though they (and just about everybody else and their dog) pay fulsome lip service to the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360513)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey @dang,

I wasn't aware of these two recent postings, thanks for sharing them.

It could be useful when submitting to HN to see whether there have been similar or identical stories submitted recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At a constant 2014 level of ~35 gigatons CO2 per year this would slow down the process by 7 years. Better than nothing but this is still far from a cure.</comment>


Sold My Side Project - <AUTHOR> It's been 3 months since I launched Open Startup List, what an incredible milestone, a time in which I built, marketed and now, sold the project.<p>I'm currently writing an ebook on my journey of building and growing my side-project. You can check it out on gumroad: https://gum.co/side-project <comment> doopy-loopy2 how much did you sell it for?

</comment><comment><USER2> How did you decide to sell so soon rather than building it up further?

Is this the first one?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've decided to sell since I wanted to work on other projects but didn't have enough time to invest in all of them. It's the first side-project I've sold.

I will be releasing my ebook ([https://gum.co/side- project](https://gum.co/side-project)) at the end of this month sharing my experiences of building and selling this side-project along with actionable advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Arduino-Org: "Rename this fork and use less confusing versioning" - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arduino-org/Arduino/issues/2 <comment><USER3> This has been a fascinating story. As someone who has been an arduino user/fan for years I knew very little of what was going on till Hackaday started covering it.

The 1 minute primer:

"In short, there are two companies calling themselves "Arduino" at the moment. One, Arduino LLC was founded by [Massimo Banzi], [David Cuartielles], [David Mellis], [Tom Igoe] and [Gianluca Martino] in 2009, runs the website arduino.cc, and has been directing and releasing the code that makes it all work. Most of these folks had been working together on what would become the Arduino project since as early as 2005.

The other "Arduino" used to be called Smart Projects and was the manufacturing arm of the project founded and run by [Gianluca Martino]. Smart Projects changed their name to Arduino SRL in November 2014. (A "Società a responsabilità limitata" is one form of Italian limited-liability company.) They have been a major producer of Arduino boards from the very beginning and recently registered the domain arduino.org."

Read more at HAD ([http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part- ii/](http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/))

For background (before the recent turmoil) there is a documentary about arduino. [https://vimeo.com/18539129](https://vimeo.com/18539129)

<comment><USER4> How was this allowed to happen? It's like Dell renaming itself to "Microsoft SRL" and then selling "Windows 9000" to beat MS on the version number train.

Am I incorrect in my observation?

Was Arduino supposed to be an open name that anyone can adopt, a la Unix and all the varieties that are derived from that name (HPUX, Linux, BSD Unix, UnixWare, Unix System V, etc)?

<comment><AUTHOR> When Arduino got popular, the original team of five spun off a manufacturing company, Smart Projects, to handle the manufacturing and distribution tedium, with 4 of the 5 partners staying in the Development arm. When push came to shove and the development side wanted to make the manufacturing non-exclusive, Smart Projects beat them to the legal punch and registered the trademark before the development team did, forked and uprevved what they could, and cut off the income from sales going back to the dev team.

<comment><USER5> The German Heise News had an article:

 _Arduino against Arduino: Founder argue about the company_

English: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fmake%2Fmeldung%2FArduino- gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html&edit-text=)

German: [http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino- Gruen...](http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruender- streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html)

<comment><USER6> Seems to be a lot of "piggy-backers" piling onto the Github page without understanding the history...

> By the way, you (meaning the people who started this phony organization and > made this phony fork) know that you've made the front page of Hacker News, > right? If you continue, there will be no shortage of people who will > constantly point out that you're a bunch of wannabe fakers.

It's sad that HN is perpetuating this behavior.

<comment><USER7> They're right. See [0] for the details.

Excerpt:

 _When the Arduino project started, the five co-founders (myself_ [Massimo Banzi] _, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino) decided to create a company that would own the trademarks and manage the business side of Arduino: Manufacturers would build and sell boards, Arduino would get a royalty from them like in many other businesses, such as in the fashion world. This happened in April 2008 when Arduino LLC was founded and the bylaws of the company specified that each of the five founders would transfer to this company any ownership of the Arduino brand. At the end of 2008 when Arduino was about to register the trademark in the US and worldwide, unknown to us and without any advance notice, Gianluca's company Smart Projects — our main boards manufacturer — went ahead and registered the Arduino name in Italy and kept this news for himself for almost two years.

After the process of registering in the US was over and our lawyer tried to extend the trademark to the rest of the world, he realised that somebody had registered it already in Italy. We (Tom, David, David, and I) were shocked and demanded explanations. Gianluca reassured us that this was done to protect our collective investment. We were friends (or so we thought), so based on this agreement we kept working together for years, received royalties while quietly trying to bring the trademark back into the Arduino company through endless discussions that dragged on while Arduino became very successful thanks to the hard work each one of us put into it (and for a long time we didn't even get a salary out of it).

As the project became more successful and sales increased, the attempts at regaining control of the Italian trademark registration became more and more difficult with larger and larger demands made to us while Gianluca effectively vetoed us from either bringing in other manufacturers or get any external investment. We made headway with Arduino creating a lot of innovation, pushing the boundaries of open source hardware, hiring a lot of talented people around the world and ultimately building an amazing community around the arduino.cc website._

———

0\. [http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for- ar...](http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/)

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't exactly call a founder-spin-off a "bunch of wannabe fakers" and a "phony organization" and a "phony fork".

There was a disagreement, and one founder went his own way. The story is clearly messy and very unfortunate for the Arduino founders, but there's nothing "phony" or "fake" here.

<comment><USER7> "Phony" is charitable.

Smart Projects LLC has been acting in bad faith for at least seven years (registering the trademark in Italy after having pledged to transfer the IP to Arduino LLC).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is only meta, but something needs to be done to prevent Github threads from getting flooded by useless replies as soon as they gain some popularity. And there is far worse than this one - some will have you scrolling through an avalanche of meme gifs.

I know that these "+1" aren't entirely useless in that they show support - <USER2> people can show support by other means, and on other websites (for example, by simply upvoting the HN submission). This just plagues any possible discussion and turns the whole thing into a circus.

Of course, any form of moderation will make people complain even more, so I can understand why nothing has been done yet. _Edit:_ Maybe a feature to fold nonconstructive comments would be a partial solution at least. In cases like this, they can even be automatically detected.

<comment><USER9> It's a UX issue, github needs a "thumbs-up" button

<comment><USER10> I've advocated pretty hard for this feature and it turns out this used to be a thing but was removed way back in the day (years now). There is somewhat of a movement surrounding this feature, and Github wants to hear more support from the community before moving forward bringing it back. If you support this feature request, please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com expressing your support for it. For me, I hate that projects will lock-to-contributors a popular issue they don't want to implement because of the +1 comment spam. I can think of two very huge projects that did this in the last couple of months. Github definitely needs a thumbs up / upvote mechanic.

<comment><USER11> I think banning one-liners is a good start.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure about that. If you take a look at (for example) the awful change on Stack Overflow made by Shog9 to mitigate short comments (and what he believes are therefore bad comments), you'll see the huge backlash and also notice how many people can and do leave thoughtful comments with only a single line or less. I think it is an impossible problem to judge the quality of content by its quantity. The +1 comment is an extremely niche type of comment "problem" that can be mitigated successfully by outsourcing the functionality to a simple upvote widget, but I think that's as far as you can get in judging comment quality without making very broad statements that quash some quality content by mistake.

<comment><USER12> Honestly, Shog9 is the single biggest reason why my participation in Stack Exchange has dwindled to prettymuch nothing. It's as if he wakes up one morning and decides "I know! I'll make a huge change to Stack Overflow that will piss thousands of users off! ^-^"

What's just as annoying is that as far as I'm aware, he has _never_ admitted that he's been wrong about anything. Ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I started tinkering with microcontroller, I looked at a lot of the projects like Arduino. In the end, I decided to just get some PIC chips and a breadboard and learn it from the ground up. One of the reasons that I did so was because I thought long and hard about what happens if one of these open source hardware projects get's into the same issues as many software projects get into.

I did end up picking up an Arduino board to play with later on, but I am really glad that I learned hardware at a lower level than the prepackaged boards, that way I am not tied to the power struggles of the hardware manufacturers.

As a side note, I also found that designing the hardware portion is as rewarding or in some cases more rewarding than the final solution that the hardware will be used for.

<comment><USER14> Nice. If you (and anyone else reading) still have any project schematics or notes you can share, it'd be an awesome reminder of and complement to the spirit behind these hardware projects.

<comment><USER15> [http://tuxgraphics.org/](http://tuxgraphics.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's more info, including backstory, here: [http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/arduino-ide- forked/](http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/arduino-ide-forked/)

</comment><comment><USER16> That barrage of thumbs-ups is making me worry about the day when one of my projects gets significant attention on GitHub.

Doesn't each one send an email to the project owner _and_ everyone who's commented on the issue? Are we back in the days of AOL-style "Me too!"?

How many of them are from this HN link?

<comment><USER17> > Doesn't each one send an email to the project owner and everyone who's > commented on the issue?

By default yes. It's possible to unsubscribe from a thread, and only send emails for threads in which you've participated. Depending on your workflow, the latter can be a boon to your inbox.

> Are we back in the days of AOL-style "Me too!"?

We've never left it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another decent writeup:

[http://readwrite.com/2015/03/18/arduino-open-source- schism](http://readwrite.com/2015/03/18/arduino-open-source-schism)

</comment><comment><USER5> Confused.

[https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/](https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/) ... real Arduino

[https://github.com/arduino-org/Arduino/](https://github.com/arduino- org/Arduino/) ... unknown fork?

Beside that Arduino IDE was itself forked from the Processing IDE. It's a very basic IDE, with basic syntax highlighting and just 4-5 toolbar buttons.

I would prefer e.g. IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition for Arduino and RPi development.

edit: the headline has been updated; and I found an article about the background: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fmake%2Fmeldung%2FArduino- gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html&edit-text=)

<comment><AUTHOR> arduino/arduino is the legit software from the majority of the arduino team.

arduino-org/arduino is a hostile fork from 1 of the 5 original founders who was put in charge of the manufacturing spinoff, as a result of the other 4 members expressing a desire to end the exclusive manufacturing contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dilute instead of trying suppress.

1\. Make additional forks that are similar in name to the rogue fork to dilute.

2\. Rename the original branch to branch-official or branch-llc which should be distinctive enough to keep it above the fray.

</comment><comment><USER20> Most open-source licenses have a clause to prevent forks with the same name. It is in fact against GPL and Apache license to fork project under its original name.

<comment><USER21> [citation needed]

The Apache license has a Trademarks clause. But if the software name isn't Trademarked...

The GPLv2 doesn't cover forking, software name, or trademark. Go ahead and search it.

Nagios is the only software I can think of that has a clause that prevents you from forking it, with or without the same name.

[http://assets.nagios.com/licenses/nagios_open_software_licen...](http://assets.nagios.com/licenses/nagios_open_software_license.txt)

<comment><USER20> Apache v2

6\. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.

I did not found gpl clause

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find the title of this submission slightly misleading, as I thought that there can't be something like a _hostile_ fork.

FYI: The title has been updated, see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334255)

<comment><USER23> We updated the title from "Arduino is undergoing a hostile fork " to that of the GitHub issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you explain the reasoning why? I'm not offended, but with the new title there's very little context without having to follow through the link/read the comments.

<comment><USER24> The HN guidelines call for using the original title unless it is linkbait or misleading. HN doesn't allow submitters to editorialize (put their own spin on) the stories they submit. The only way to avoid this, since we're not experts on all content, is to use language from the story itself that neutrally represents it.

This rule kicks in particularly when users start to complain that an existing title is misleading. Otherwise that tends to dominate the thread. This is the dreaded title fever.

We don't always succeed in coming up with a neutral, accurate title, so there's a standing invitation to HN readers to suggest a better one. When someone does, we change it again. But if you want to be sure we see a suggestion (about anything, not just titles), send it to firstname.lastname@example.com. There are too many posts on HN itself for us to read them all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. I have also spoken to me peers who agree that the original title was not in the correct spirit.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Displaying Weather on a 32x16 LED Matrix - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bdettmer/getting-the-weather-onto-led-display-ce9281dc67a9 <comment><USER2> Oh cool, 'weather widgets' are a fun first project for small screens and LED displays.

I like showing people how to hook up ESP8266s to the OpenWeatherMap API[1] - it's a quick and useful example and it seems to get people thinking about home automation. One fun way to display the results very cheaply is to use just a few of those colored LEDs for things like temperature ('blue->yellow->red') and conditions (yellow for sunny, grey for overcast, blue for rain, etc.)

[1]: [https://openweathermap.org/api](https://openweathermap.org/api)

</comment><comment><USER3> By "west coast" OP probably means CA. Despite popular belief there are other states on the west coast of North America. The weather in OR, WA and AK is much more variable.

<comment><USER4> Until this weekend, the weather in OR has unvariably been: rain. It'll probably be back to that by the end of the week.

I once considered doing a project similar to this one, using an esp8266, but decided against it since it would be too depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > On the East coast you can be caught off guard by rain, snow, or really cold, > windy weather. I've been caught a few times in the bad weather, to the point > where I've started looking up the weather forecast before leaving the house.

It's pretty humorous to read this perspective. The west coast must truly be as fantastic as advertised.

> how do you debug hardware? One way is by using a multimeter.

:(

> A friend at the Recurse Center let me borrow Saleae's logic analyzer

Phew! Multimeter is not the way to go unless you really have no other option.

<comment><USER6> Are there any good low cost logic analyzers you know of?

I've never had a big enough, or time dependent enough project to require anything more than a multimeter and patience, so I've not put the cash forward for a logic analyzer, or oscilloscope, or whatever. Not entirely sure what the difference is anyways...

<comment><USER7> If you want to go for lowest cost possible, you can find tons of cheap hardware on AliExpress (search for "8ch logic analyzer", they go around 10 bucks).

While these vendors usually just tell you to use Saleae's software, you can and should use the awesome open-source Sigrok ([https://sigrok.org](https://sigrok.org)) tool, which supports these knockoff clones!

<comment><USER6> $10 is my kind of price! Thanks, I'll look into it. Now to find a project to test it with...

<comment><USER4> I picked up one of those aliexpress "Saleae logic analyzers" a while back. It's obviously a knock-off, but it works really well, though I've never tried to use it at its advertised max supported frequency (2MHz), most of the stuff I do is < 1MHz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see the same thing done with an Arduino Mega and a wi-fi shield. It would be a much cleaner build since most arduino boards are 5V standard.

But then I'm sure you'd pay for it in the hairiness of the aruduino/led board interface, haha.</comment>


OmniTI Delivers OmniOS to Replace OpenSolaris - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/OmniTI-Delivers-OmniOS-to-Replace-OpenSolaris-378324/

<comment><AUTHOR> And a link to the origin: <http://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/WikiStart></comment>


I Git It -- 'Aha!' moments with Git - <AUTHOR> https://legends2k.github.io/note/git_concepts/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a summary of my 'Aha!' moments with Git. Once I learned the internals of Git life became a lot easier. I pretty much stopped looking up commands, as the concepts got internalized.

I thought it might help others too (and my future self), so I put them down.

If you're looking for commands, you'd be disappointed; if you're looking for concepts and insights, welcome!</comment>


The typeface that helps dyslexics read (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171204-the-typeface-that-helps-dyslexics-read <comment><USER2> I've been using the open dyslexic font on my kobo reader for about a year and it helps me a lot

[https://www.opendyslexic.org/](https://www.opendyslexic.org/)</comment>


Nasa's flying telescope SOFIA chases down a moon shadow - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-01/sofia-flying-telescope-occultation-chasing-shadow-titan/10635802 <comment><USER2> What an amazing mission and a fantasticly told story of how it was conducted. Thanks for sharing!</comment>