Ask HN: how would you supercharge the humble browser textarea? - <AUTHOR>

the simple humble web-browser textarea...
i'm typing in one, right now...
we seem to be "stuck" with it.  for now. and maybe for a long time into the future.
so let's think how to make the best of it.
what if we supercharge it, and pair it with a nice div that displays formatted output, treating the textarea text as light-markup?
the paired-div display part is really simple -- almost every markdown editor does that -- but how would _you_ "supercharge" the textarea?
first, you have to accept what it can't do, which is to display text of different sizes, different colors, or with different styling.
anything else -- everything else! -- is open.
oh, and we're not even trying to do wysiwyg. your focus must be the "semantic" structure.
a look at medium's editor shows buttons for: bold, italics, headers, lists, blockquotes, rules, and links. it also supports embeds, in addition to the standard .html image-tag. and it has a word-counter. because #whynot.
not included are what could be valuable things like find-and-replace, to mention the obvious.
plus -- as we go to the 2-pane interface -- (a) auto table-of-contents with active links, and (b) sync of the text and display fields _when_ a user wants but free-float when not, and (c) and (d) and (e) and (f) and...
i could go on.  but i'm asking _you_ instead.
if you wanna post a comment in response, great; i can appreciate a good think-piece just fine.
but if you really want to get a lot of respect, code the javascript to make your thoughts real.
could be an fun weekend project, yes?     :+)
if this draws any interest, i will upload my work thus far.  so if you'd like a head-start with some actual code, you can wait for that.
otherwise, jump in without my preconceptions.
because, as we're stuck with this textarea shit, we might as well turn it into a shit sandwich.
-bowerbird <comment><USER2> Not to be a downer but:

[http://epiceditor.com/](http://epiceditor.com/)

[http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/home/](http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/home/)

<comment><AUTHOR> good answer...

but i'm looking for something an average person could understand and add to an average webpage, with an investment running 3 minutes or less...

-bowerbird

<comment><USER3> I just tried both of those. 3 minutes sounds about right to me, if you don't bother with any of the customisations.

<comment><AUTHOR> are you saying an average person can _understand_ those setups well enough to _install_ them in an _average_ web-page, with an investment of 3 minutes?

i mean... seriously. are you actually saying that?

-bowerbird

<comment><USER3> An average person can't write "hello world" in an average web page, because to an average person that sort of technical ability is the province of mysterious web nerds. I'm assuming you mean "an average web designer" or some such.

Could you understand those setups in 3 minutes? No. But installing them is just a matter of copy-pasting a few lines of code from the creator's website. You can do that easily enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok, now i have a much better understanding what you meant.

as i said above, in another reply just now, i'm aiming at a "sweet-spot" that _might_ be as nonexistent as you say, i.e., an "average" user who'll edit a few lines of .html.

ideally, s/he should have a good understanding of all the implications and ramifications of those edited lines, too.

all of which should take no more than 3 minutes, total, because that's all the average person will devote to it.

meaning it will boil down to calling a javascript file, plus jquery (or some other package), and _nothing_more._

if it's that simple, this kind of "supercharging" will be used by enough people that it could attain critical mass.

otherwise, not.

and i'm quite sure that, if you actually do the exercise, you'll find that none of the solutions mentioned can be installed in such a straightforward and trouble-free way.

surely not in 3 minutes.

nor with any comprehension of all possible ramifications.

it might be that they haven't been packaged up that way; or it might be that they are complex enough that it won't be _possible_ to "package them up" to be that simple; but \-- either way -- they are not now the answer i'm seeking.

i hope this clears up my position. thanks for the dialog.

-bowerbird

<comment><USER3> Ah, I see. The solutions linked above certainly claim to be easy to install, but I got lazy and didn't finish the job when I tried them out. It certainly ought to be possible to set them up with a single line of JavaScript - I can't understand why the sample code doesn't work for me. But fair enough, you were right and I was wrong.

And there's an opening in the market for an easy-to-use easy-to-install JavaScript text editor. Perhaps we should make one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea of it autogrowing, although since that's something that should be enabled/disabled per textarea it's probably best left as it is for Javascript.</comment>


Tabla Viva - <AUTHOR> http://tablaviva.org <comment><AUTHOR> This appears to have been a prototype for Dynamicland [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15390813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15390813)</comment>


Bose (of speaker fame) designs electromagnetic car suspension - <AUTHOR> http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Features/articleId=103183

<comment><USER2> This will actually make cars handle worse unless it's redesigned in one of two non-trivial ways. The problem is camber: the side-to-side tilt of the wheel and tire. Bringing the top of the wheel closer to the center of the car is called "negative camber" while the opposite is "positive camber". Most modern cars have a little bit of negative camber, which increases as the suspension is compressed. The relationship of compression to camber is called the "camber curve".

When the tire is being deformed by cornering forces, negative camber helps more of the tire stay in contact with the road. When traveling in a straight line, negative camber reduces the tire's contact with the road and increases tire wear. The reduced contact is visible on the left rear tire in the fourth photo.

One solution is to design a suspension with a very fast camber curve and allow minimal compression when cornering. This is similar to what most sports cars already do, and has a couple problems of its own. Such a suspension design is more limited in the distance the wheel can travel upward and has somewhat less traction on bumpy surfaces.

Another solution is to have a separate motor to adjust camber. That's expensive and heavy, but would probably work pretty well.

<comment><USER3> With an SLA suspension, you could just increase the ratio of bottom arm length relative to top arm to get a faster camber curve. But judging by the pic they plan on using this in McPherson style setups. Even if they left the camber settings the same though, the tire contact should still be better with the reduced roll. Increased roll angle will cause more positive camber than the camber curve will decrease it due to suspension compression. This is the reason why you typically go with more negative camber when you soften a suspension setup.

A setup like this would not work well for a few other reasons too. Like on a sports car, it would have problems with heat I can guarantee it. Looking at the pic it already has heat sinks all over the place, but in a race situation the heat emission would be totally ridiculous. As far as handling goes, it could have problems with grip when cornering hard over bumps. The outside wheel would essentially behave like having a damper with very high bump stiffness. I know they claim it has fast response time, but it would need to have very high resolution to still absorb bumps when it is basically holding up that corner of the car. Oh, and its damn heavy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This tech has been around for years. I wonder why they haven't got it in production vehicles yet?

Bose Whitepaper: [http://www.bose.com/pdf/technologies/bose_suspension_system....](http://www.bose.com/pdf/technologies/bose_suspension_system.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> If this is anything like Bose products of the past, I'm willing to bet that:

1) Bose wont release any technical specs (b/c apparently those dont matter in loudspeaker design)

2) It will be overpriced.

3) It will be over hyped.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a bose site that has much more info about the system: [http://www.bose.com/learning/project_sound/suspension_challe...](http://www.bose.com/learning/project_sound/suspension_challenge.jsp)

Video is included on the last page.

</comment><comment><USER6> Active suspension is the natural language processing of automotive industry -- it's a good idea, and can be made to work well enough in the lab, but just isn't as good as conventional suspension with the same cost.</comment>


Ask HN: Any alternatives to alcohol? - <AUTHOR> After getting better from pancreas inflammation, I'm still likely to keep my alcohol abstinence.<p>However I would like to experience the effects of it sometimes, so do you know any good and hopefully (more) healthy alternatives to it? <comment><USER2> My medical condition has significant impact on the pancreas and intolerance for alcohol runs in the family. I find that alcohol per se is not the big issue all by itself, though I'm not crazy about the stuff. A lot of alcoholic beverages have all kinds of poorly tolerated additives. Beer is full of yeast, which I don't do well with. Red wine is high in sulfur, which I don't do well with. The only alcohol I find that I tolerate okay is Kahlua. (Not that I have tried all options out there, but I did make an effort to try several different options and came up with nothing else I tolerated well.)

I did a lot of reading and tried a lot of different stuff to deal with my medical condition. Inflammation is a major component of my condition. I found that changing my diet with an eye towards correcting PH balance and removing foods that are inflammatory for other reasons did me enormous good and helped me get off multiple anti-inflammatory drugs. Not saying that going back to drinking would be a great idea, just saying that occasional alcohol isn't necessarily a big problem if you can address the problem effectively through other avenues.

That's the best I can do. I react allergically to marijuana and never tried any other recreational stuff.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently diethyl ether used to be a popular substitute, but I have no idea what it will do to your pancreas. And it's very volatile and flammable, which might not mix very well with inebriation... Anyways: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethyl_ether#Recreational_use>

</comment><comment><USER4> Having a decent cigar every once in a while isn't quite the same as alcohol, but is (arguably) equally enjoyable.

</comment><comment><USER5> How do I quit drinking and control tremors? [http://doctor.ndtv.com/faq/ndtv/fid/0024069/How_do_I_quit_dr...](http://doctor.ndtv.com/faq/ndtv/fid/0024069/How_do_I_quit_drinking_and_control_tremors.html?cp)

</comment><comment><USER6> I drink tea and water. Only when I have to (social events), that I'll have a beer or two. But yes, tea and make it into a serious thing--I have tea room at home :) Hope you feel better.

PS: I hear green tea is suppose to be good for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx. I am kind of interested in the alternetives for social events. Do you know any tea for that? I am occasionally drink mate, chamomile, lemon balm, calendula, etc... but none will get you the buzz of GABA agonists. <http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/synthehol1.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> the GABAb agonists come the closest to what you're looking for. GHB is one, which is probably illegal where you're at. baclofen is another, which might require prescription.

then there's kavakava, but that's not particularly social.

weed.

 _shrugs_

morphine? :]

<comment><USER8> yup -- phenibut. Similar to baclofen but available without Rx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kava.

It is not a pleasant tasting root.I have a blend of stevia, mango powder and cinnamon that I came up with that tastes good and has a strong effect. awesomekava [at] gmail if interested

<comment><USER10> It's been speculated, perhaps determined, that kava can challenge the liver. (I'm recalling particularly a flurry of press, oh, 5 - 10 years ago.) If the grandparent poster is recovering from inflammation (and a possible infection?), they should exercise due caution with respect to use of kava.

<comment><USER9> From what I've come to understand the press cases regarding liver problems came from consumers of leave-based manufactured kava pill "products" instead of direct root-based kava consumption. The botany of the leaves is different than the roots. The liver issues appear to emanate from the leaves.

<comment><USER10> Thank you, that's good to know. I had one friend who relied on kava significantly to combat anxiety. They were rather conflicted when the concerns started to surface. (We've lost touch, since then -- albeit for unrelated reasons.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Quaaludes (methaqualone) have a similar effect to alcohol (sans hangover) but are classified as Schedule I in the United States.

I doubt that they are particularly healthy though.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the weed numbs the brain similarly. But you have lung cancer (and few other) to look forward to and prosecution if you don't live in Netherlands.

<comment><USER13> Recent research has shown that smoking weed does not cause lung cancer[1], unlike smoking tobacco.

A separate Harvard study indicated that marijuana may be helpful in _treating_ lung cancer, reducing tumor growth[2].

However, the effects of smoking weed seem pretty different from alcohol to me. So depending what you want out of alcohol, it may be a poor substitute. But the health risks of weed are nominal. It's one of the safest recreational drugs mankind has come up with. (Smoking anything too much can harsh out your lungs, but weed can be eaten in foods, vaporized, etc.)

[1]: [http://www.webmd.com/lung-cancer/news/20060523/pot- smoking-n...](http://www.webmd.com/lung-cancer/news/20060523/pot-smoking-not- linked-to-lung-cancer)

[2]: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070417193338.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070417193338.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What effects do you want? Pot and non-alcoholic beer? A easily-repeatable exercise like surfing or cycling? Skydiving?

</comment><comment><USER15> Gaming \m/ Pick up the controller or KB/M and fire away

</comment><comment><USER16> Running long distances and surfing are each a thousand times better than alcohol, addicting, and will change your life for the better instead of for the worse.

<comment><USER17> ffffffffffffffffffffffffffff...

you'll be buried next to me about six months later, with a little sign that says "he tried really, really hard to live longer than -> that guy"

<comment><USER16> Uh, no. I spoke of positive spiritual and mental effects of things like running and surfing, not their well-documented health benefits.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appriciate the mentality. Of course I cycle a lot and it has great benefits, but I think it can only rise your overall happiness and that is different then just having a drink get relaxed and feel good at a party. I don't have social anxiety anymore since I am healthy, but still a drink can have great effects on me when I go out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> oooh man. I had the pancreas thing blow up on me once. They told me to stop drinking. Which obviously...I didn't do. If you aren't into pot or anything, it's not much fun.

What I blame it on, though, was living in South American and drinking a lot of really cheap local wisky. After my Kermit the Frog - green week from hell barfing, I stopped drinking hard booze; stopped everything for about 3 weeks, then slowly started with beer again. And now, I only drink beer. It hasn't come back for the last 4 years. I try to keep it to 6-9 beers a night (4-6 for the first year afterwards). I can't guarantee the same results for you.

On a short term basis I'd recommend taking one Xanax, one Vicodin and 1-2 beers, as that won't cause another pancreatitis attack and it pretty well mimics the effect of a twelve pack. If you're one of the 19-drinks-a-night crowd though, I'd suggest treatment because nothing is going to fix it without almost killing you.

Party on, amigo.

<comment><USER18> Interesting how relative things are. 6 beers for me in one night is pretty much a bender. And I weigh 200 lbs. I often go weeks without drinking, so that's probably why.</comment></comment>


DNA Blueprint for Fetus Built Using Samples From Parents - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/health/tests-of-parents-are-used-to-map-genes-of-a-fetus.html?hp

<comment><USER2> 98% accuracy? I'm afraid you're going to have to do a lot better than that, humans and chimps have 94% identical DNA[1] and they're 5-7 million years apart[2]. 98% might as well be any two humans.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee> [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee- human_last_common_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee- human_last_common_ancestor)

</comment><comment><USER3> Gattaca: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca>

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how serious you're being. Assuming full seriousness:

In Gattaca, parents somehow got to choose between thousands of potential embryos to maximize chosen traits. This is not biologically plausible; even in IVF, you only get to choose between a few embryos, so you could never have anything like as much control over abilities and health as we saw in Gattaca. The most realistic use of embryo selection is so that you could simply make sure that -- for diseases where you're a carrier and had a 50/50 chance of passing them on to your children -- you choose the embryos without the pathogenic mutation.

In this new paper's technique, you just get an abort/don't abort decision over your fetus after seeing what is probably its genetic sequence. We already give parents this decision via amniocentesis. It seems unlikely that people will attempt to go to great lengths to get "the perfect" fetus this way, because one fetus at a time doesn't give you many options to choose between.

More likely, we'll just move from "sometimes parents abort fetuses if they're going to have Down's or some other grave disease" to "sometimes parents abort fetuses if they're going to have a serious genetic disease". This doesn't bother me much, nor does it seem to have much of anything in common with Gattaca.

<comment><USER5> Well a woman is born with 1-2 million immature eggs. Imagine harvesting a few hundred thousand, maturing them, and fertilizing them. This is the part we haven't figured out yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Drivers are being idiots with Tesla's new autopilot features - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/10/22/drivers-are-being-idiots-with-teslas-new-autopilot-features/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand what the purpose of autopilot is. If you are supposed to keep your hands on the steering wheel and keep watching the road.

<comment><USER3> I think it's to collect data. With this beta Tesla can now review all data fed in when the car was driving itself, what happened when it sensed an emergency and how frequently a driver had to take over and what factors were there when the driver took over.

Beyond that it's a "neat" feature but yeah if you have to keep your hands on the wheel then it's just an awkward and somewhat useless feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This should really be called assisted cruise / piloting or something. Autopilot implies far more automation than what the car is currently capable of which is simply going to lead to more people taking stupid risks.

Some sort of crash / tragedy seems inevitable at this point based from all the videos on youTube.

<comment><USER2> I believe it's officially called "auto-steer". I don't think Tesla calls it autopilot.</comment></comment>


Hackers - 25th Anniversary Edition - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920010227

<comment><AUTHOR> The book that helped me decide what I wanted to be when I grew up.</comment>


IPhone/iPad app developer caught scraping Newseum's site - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/27/extra-extra-app-possibly-scraping-news-museums-feed/#comments

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, and the guy appears to find massive copyright infringement to be a huge joke, based on this video he just made:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCzYNctx9Vo&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCzYNctx9Vo&feature=player_embedded)</comment>


Apple Loses A7/A8 Patent Lawsuit, Could Owe University of Wisconsin Up to $862 M - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/13/apple-loses-a7-patent-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> I am a bit confused on why a public research university would want to have and assert its patents. Isn't the research done by a public university in public domain?</comment>


Show HN: A job board for companies fighting ageism in tech - <AUTHOR> https://noageismintech.com/ <comment><USER2> Hi all Carmen here. A bit of my story below:

my husband (leonagano) had faced ageism in his job hunting journey, especially because the tech environment sometimes attracts young people and the more experienced professionals are being left behind. Wearing my journalist hat, I started looking for ways to help and fight ageism.

After further research, I realised this is actually a common problem among the IT industry as stated in some articles from the likes of The Guardian ([https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/14/women- ageism...](https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/14/women-ageism-tech- startup-sexism)), Wired ([https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in- the-tech-...](https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech- world/)), Forbes ([https://www.forbes.com/sites/marenbannon/2019/04/10/the- bigg...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/marenbannon/2019/04/10/the-biggest-bias- in-tech-that-no-one-talks-about/#278750a062e3)), Bloomberg ([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-17/75-year-o...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-17/75-year- old-job-hunters-could-become-new-normal-in-aging-japan))

That's when I decided to start this job board and hopefully, try to reduce this problem to the minimum possible

Sometimes, the problem happens during the job description, where the "older" professionals feel excluded when words like tech-native, ninja, etc are used, according to Dice ([https://insights.dice.com/2018/02/28/employers-welcome- tech-...](https://insights.dice.com/2018/02/28/employers-welcome-tech-job- hunters-over-40/))

<comment><USER3> That last paragraph says a lot. If you have a company and you want employees that are "tech-natives", whatever that may mean, that is not the same thing as discriminating based on age. No, not even if they are wrong, and don't actually need a tech-native.

This is just as silly as complaining that a moving company only hires people that are strong enough to lift a piano and women complain about sex discrimination because women tend to be much weaker.

It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else.

<comment><USER4> I think the main idea is that words like "tech-native" are really just weasel- words that can be used as a post-hoc justification for rejecting someone.

If my first immersion in tech was BASIC on a PDP-8 in the 70's when I was 12, does that make me tech-native or not?

<comment><USER5> Depends upon how you define it. I think most people who use the term tech native and digital native are referring to people who grew up with social media.

If you are looking for somebody to do your social media campaign, then go with the "tech native". If you are looking for somebody to develop the next blockbuster social media platform, maybe you will need somebody who has done time in the trenches learning how to develop robust software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A company I worked with once hired a team of old contractors to do a job. The job was done on time, on budget, no drama, no overtime, and the customer was happy. Each of the contractors received the contractually agreed upon bonus for meeting all the targets.

I asked a manager why they didn't apply this model to subsequent projects, and never got much of an answer.

<comment><USER7> This is my experience with older skilled programmers as well. For the most part, I notice when there are technical folks in their 40s and 50s on a project, the "gee whiz" is thankfully tempered by the benefit of experience, and the projects have a more concrete results-driven character. "There is nothing new under the sun", as they say. And when you've seen the signature of a pitfall before, you can spot its many variations. Less chasing after chimeras. More driving at the actual business goal.

The heavily youth-driven focus of tech hiring has always struck me as ultimately very dumb. And I think this is also reflected in the god-awful interviewing practices that everyone is familiar with. I don't see older engineers promoting those practices that are talked about so much in the industry as being borderline absurd.

<comment><USER8> And as a counterpoint, I've worked with a number of Senior-level programmers more than old enough to be my parents and seen them behave in some of the most god-awful ways. Resume-Driven-Development, Not-Invented-Here syndrome, refusal to write new tests, refusal to maintain existing tests, breaking the build, deploying broken code. All because of the insidious little "because I (don't) want to."

I'm less convinced that age has anything to do with good outcomes these days as is the discipline to do the responsible things, regardless of how little we wish to do those things.

<comment><USER9> > I'm less convinced that age has anything to do with good outcomes these days > as is the discipline to do the responsible things, regardless of how little > we wish to do those things.

The age might also act as a filter, since the best developers are often promoted to the management roles in their 40s and 50s, and are no longer writing much code themselves.

<comment><USER10> So you're saying if you see someone over fifty writing code, odds are they're not very good at it? That's a nasty prejudice.

<comment><USER9> I believe there are many great developers who refuse other positions and still code in their 50s, but an average developer in his 30s could be better than an average developer in his 50s, because many successful developers might transition into higher paid leadership roles or start their own companies when they hit 40s. For instance, Joel Spolsky was still writing software in his mid-30s.

<comment><USER10> Was Joel Spolsky a great programmer when he was coding?

<comment><USER9> I assume he was better than an average programmer, since he was responsible for designing Excel Basic at Microsoft. I think the very best programmers keep coding in their 40s and 50s, because there is simply nothing they could be better at. It's the "upper-middle class" of programmers, who often transition into new roles at around 40, because they no longer feel the progress in their careers. How many years can one spend being a Senior Engineer at Google?

<comment><USER10> I know of senior engineers at Google in their late sixties, and I'm sure there are folks in their seventies there. Some of them are top people in their fields. Donald Knuth is 81 (10000 in ternary) and he still codes for research all the time. My understanding is that Spolsky's job at Microsoft, which was his first job, was to spec out the then nascent macro language for Excel, he wasn't a programmer himself, perhaps ever professionally. He does have a lot of opinions on what a great programmer should look like, and isn't too shy to share them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only form of ageism I've experienced was reverse. I entered dev professionally in my 40s, and it was frequently assumed because of my age that I knew more than I truly did. In consequence I was often given higher levels of responsibility than my experience merited (regardless of my protestations). This might have been good for someone more brilliant than I, but I found it a problem - it made it very hard for me to learn from other people, and although it's hard to accurately replay history I would say this slowed my skills development. It certainly made working in tech less pleasant for me than it might have been.

<comment><USER12> I could see this happening. I work at a major company and it seems like everyone over 40 is some sort of director or senior staff engineer, so they are taken pretty seriously.

<comment><USER11> Here in Aus a great deal of it is managerial complacency and in some cases laziness ('management' aspirations sometimes comprising mainly a desire to play golf & watch rugby). There's a strong tendency to clutch at pattern- matching shortcuts: "You're over 30 so you must be a senior developer".

Or (another one I've suffered) "I see you have a book on X (new technology) on your desk, so you must be an expert in it". I honestly have more than once quickly shuffled a book into a drawer when seeing a project manager approach, just to avoid being given responsibility over a project using some new tech I've only just started to investigate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At the start of my career in computing, in one two week period I sent some resume copies, went on 7 interviews and got 5 offers. The reason was the high interest in computing around DC for US national security.

I was making in annual salary 6 times what a new, high end Camaro cost. My 2 BR apartment cost me 8.5% of my gross salary.

Then some _suits_ saw the problem, had the NSF have a team of economists estimate computing labor supply and demand curves, and then have the NSF write into research grants that so many students had to be supported and, hint, hint, could get students from Taiwan, South Korea, India, Greece, etc.

So, net, the main reason for the nonsense in hiring in computing is that there's no real _shortage_. When there was a real shortage, organizations would hire based on indications of talent and expect the employees to learn on the job enough to do the job. Now it appears that the employers have a list of 10 of their most important software tools in their _stack_ and what to hire people with that particular list of 10 tools, with that particular _stack_ \-- not promising for either the organization or the employee.

For another, managers want their subordinates to be no threat, just secondary, submissive, subordinate, heads down coding, no bright ideas, no risk of the _suit_ being shown to lack technical competence, etc. And, the more people the manager hires, maybe the more the manager gets paid; so hire a lot of inexperienced people instead of a few deeply experienced people -- _empire building, goal subordination_.

The non-technical _suits_ need to start to catch on and get the IT departments being more productive and per dollar.

<comment><USER12> Watching the bidding war for a candidate who has offers from both Google and Facebook makes me think there's still a shortage of _something_. And those companies mostly don't hire for a particular stack.

There's a certain category of engineer that is still scarce and in-demand, it's just a matter of figuring out how to convince people you are in that category.

<comment><USER14> There's a shortage of engineers who will work for the incredibly low industry- standard wages.

<comment><USER15> Did you read the comment you were responding to? If they were looking to pay someone "incredibly low" wages they wouldn't be getting into a bidding war. I don't know what your definition of "low" is, but there are lots of people at FB and GOOG easily clearing 400k+.

<comment><USER14> 400k is still a steal.

We need unions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Figured I'd create a throwaway account to chime in here.

I'm 40+, and have to say the last few years (working for Fortune 100 companies) I am truly mortified at the lack of skill in many of the younger folks I've worked with.

Also, generally speaking when I've had a younger boss I would say it's NEVER because they're qualified for the position. Generally it seems they've been able to pull the wool over their managers' eyes. Don't get me wrong, they have no bad intentions. All I'm saying is confidence can only get you so far in technology.

<comment><USER17> I don't find the comments complaining about older workers very helpful to be honest. Nor those complaining about younger ones either. Substitute white/black or rich/poor to highlight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone else just hit their mid thirties and suddenly become aware of agism?

Not something that is affecting me, but something suddenly I've become more cognisant about it.

<comment><USER19> Not really agism, but I've noticed that companies are super relucant to pay extra for experience. They put their price tag on and think that's the end of it.

There's a company local to me that's been failing to deliver on their digital transformation for years because they can't hire the skills they need, but they refuse to interview me based on price, despite the fact it's costing them more to not deliver.

I think the market in the UK is a bit different though.

<comment><USER20> This mentality is an issue across all age ranges in the UK. For some odd reason employers seem to have a fixed idea of how much an employee should earn for a certain job - and if they can't find any good people for it they usually end up paying more than double to hire contractors. Its quite baffling really. And its not just in IT, I've heard of this same thing happening in social work, medicine, recruitment etc.

<comment><USER19> Most contractors aren't getting paid twice what they can get as an employee, it often works out fairly close when you consider time off, the taxes paid, etc. Shit companies obviously do act that way, but you're better off heading elsewhere, because the same companies don't allow their employees to grow.

I'm a contractor myself and made up rates are still a thing. The high end isn't any better than jobs I can see advertising for perms, and many of the companies advertise for perms before they'll consider contracts.

There's actually 3 companies that have been looking for my skillset for around the last 3 months, and they all refuse to even have a call with me because I don't fit in the rate bracket, but they'll keep looking regardless.

<comment><USER20> Really? Thats not my experience at all that contracting earns roughly the same as permanent. Why would anybody do contracting if that was the case?

Maybe earning double is an exaggeration on my part though. For myself I earn 50% more as a contractor than as permanent (this is the net amount after taxes, holidays, accountant fees etc.)

<comment><USER19> See, it depends. Realstically, as a contractor you'd be billing ~220 days a year.

Contractor: (Devops, high day rate)

750 x 220 = £165,000. 800 x 220 = £176,000.

Employee: (Devops, high salary) + Employers NI.

150,000 + 19,508.78 = £169,508.78

Said contractor would need to bring his own equipment, pay insurance, and deal with the risk of being let go arbitrarily, and won't get a bonus or pension contribs.

Now where the contractor can make out is, he can pay reasonable expenses, and he can act more tax efficent, especially if he doesn't pay himself more than the higher threshold.

For the record, I'm not a big fan of the politics that comes with being an employee, I like to just come in, do the work, and leave, so quite happy as a contractor.

<comment><USER20> Hmmm, a £150k salary seems much harder thing to achieve than a £750 day rate, I can see quite a few DevOps contract jobs at £750 / day but no permanent ones at £150k! As you say though, it depends on how you look at it..

<comment><USER19> I think there's a reasonble amount of both but large bureaucracies like gov, banks or multinationals have finance departments that set salary bands.

These usually don't reflect that skilled IT is vastly different from desktop jocky, and that it's a well paid field, thus they're forced to use contractors or outsource.

Skill wise, they're probably same same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am pretty sure "ageism" is just an inadvertent consequence of the wrong belief that years of experience must linearly translate to ability. Not because anyone dislikes older folk per se.

If someone has got 30 years of experience, employers/recruiters think it requires at least senior or manager position, while entry/mid level position appears "unsuitable".

They don't understand that after 3-5 years the diminishing returns flatten the output almost completely and the only thing that years of experience can tell is the arithmetic difference between current year and the year of graduation.

The matters are surely made worse by the current FAANG tendency to ignore whether the experience is relevant. If someone has never wrote a line of Java before, a junior position with quick promotion is the most fair and logical choice. But if their resume shows 7+ years of any coding experience at all it wouldn't even pop up in recruiter's search because of how they set up their filters for junior positions.

<comment><USER20> I think this is a very good point and is definitely part of the reason why we have apparent ageism. This aspect is also compounded by the fact that technologies and paradigms are changing so fast - yes I know software re- invents the wheel a lot, but the fact that you were coding GUIs in the 90s, before some of today's 20-something developers were even born, really doesn't make you that much better of a React.js developer.

I'm not saying the kind of ageism thats being discussed here doesn't exist - the "brogrammer", "culture fit" kind of discrimination. But I think its probably blown out of proportion. Especially for non-bay area companies, it seems like whenever somebody talks about "tech companies" they are referring to a very specific kind of tech company that is really only a relatively small portion of the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My thoughts are that ageism in IT is a natural consequence of not valuing experience.

Rather for many employers what is sought is simply someone, smart, fast learning, motivated, compliant, enthusiastic, loyal, and a good team fit, with perhaps boot camp level knowledge of the latest in shiny framework(s).

Many inexpensive 18 year olds can fit that description well, particularly in regards to their being enthusiastic, compliant and motivated. It helps that these are values that inexperienced managers and interviewers can actually assess, along with (inapplicable to the position) canned answers to questions about data structures and algorithms.

<comment><USER23> > My thoughts are that ageism in IT is a natural consequence of not valuing > experience.

Exactly, which is often reflected in job specs. You rarely see a requirement to have 10, let alone 15 or 20 years of experience as a requirement. When the application is automated you can get a drop down menu that stops at 5+, for example. I once complained about this to Hired.com; they didn't react at the time but years later they added more options up to 15+.

This is a Dunning-Kruger effect of sorts. When those hiring have no more than 5 years of experience, they have no idea that the difference between 10 and 5 is as big as between 0 and 5, and so on. Unfortunately you have little chance of seeing the value of experience if you lack it yourself.

<comment><USER24> There's probably a lot of things where the extra years of experience over a certain number doesn't matter much anymore. I don't think you can learn as much about many things in the second five years as you did in the first. Other factors then play a much bigger role anyway, such as: did you use whatever you claim experience in once a week or all the time.

<comment><USER23> There are things where it's not about learning as much as about the quality of code you produce within the same timeframe. My personal record of rewriting a big product was reducing a 150k LOC project to 7k lines with the same functionality and then some more. Now compare the cost of maintenance of 150k lines of code vs 7k. That literally translates to a lot of (saved) money for the company. While that one was probably a bit extreme, even 3x or 4x reduction can be a big win. These things come with experience more than "learning" in the traditional sense.

<comment><USER20> Fair point but do we have any actual data around the correlation between years of experience and value to a company? Admittedly its probably a hard thing to measure..

Because I can also tell you another anecdotal example of some developers who each had 20+ years experience each and we're quite high ranking they company they worked at:

\- They would re-invent the wheel constantly: the framework provided lots of functionality which had been developed and battle tested by thousands of other developers but they couldn't be bothered to learn what was available to them so wrote a lot of functionality from scratch which was usually far more buggy than the open source code available.

\- classes which had literally 10,000+ lines of code in them.

\- of course the idea of following SOLID principles was never ever going to happen

\- a general view that they were the experienced ones who "just made it work and got on with the job" while the younger programmers or those who followed more modern practices were seen by them as being "airy-fairy" and worried about things that didn't matter. that argument might have held weight if the application they built wasn't so awfully riddled with bugs and so poorly architected that mainting it and building new features took ages.

\- They had all been working at the same company for at least 15 years, so they were able to ignore the advances made in software development in that time and carry on with their old ways. Of course they could still code new features and fix bugs but they didn't realise that what they were doing could be done in a much much better way.

I'm not saying all old developers are like this. But if somebody is able to tell me that older developers are better because X, then they should be able to accept somebody else disagreeing and saying that older developers are worse because Y. You can't have it both ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Super interesting idea and hope it goes well.

I'm not sure if it's just a slew of interviews lately with older individuals or a trend but couple of things to avoid when interviewing that maybe are innocent comments but can def get you labeled as disrespectful.

Things I've been called or have had said by candidates in interviews the past three weeks: \- Kid \- "You're basically a child then" \- Youngin \- "You're too young to know this but there used to be..." — Punch Cards — Mainframes — COBOL \- Not taking my questions seriously compared to the older individual I'm interviewing with \- A comment about the fact I'm wearing a t-shirt

So, yes, I do think ageism is a problem in technology but also, there's a growing issue it would appear with older candidates specifically not understanding how disrespectful it is the other way to assume lack of 15+ years experience somehow indicates I don't know anything about the origins of computer science, that I've never touched low level code before and that it's okay to use phrases like "you're too young" and "youngin".

<comment><USER26> What was the coolest thing you coded up for your operating systems class?

<comment><USER27> Bro do you even chromebook?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well I am pretty sure I am facing ageism as well, although I am employed now.

Considering why ageism exists though, I think there are some assumptions that lead to it.

A common one that get trotted out whenever we discuss this subject is that older workers won't put up with as much as younger people do (long hours, pressure, low wages).

On the subject of low wages there are two things - younger inexperienced workers get less money because they are inexperienced, older more experienced workers get more money because they are experienced, that's clear.

Here is a guide on wages in Denmark (in Danish) [https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og- svar/loenstatistik-2019/](https://www.prosa.dk/raad-og- svar/loenstatistik-2019/) In the region I am in programming wages for someone with 0-3 years experience is 37420 DKK per month (before high taxes of course) at 19 years experience which is what have it's 57277.

So an employer is paying for this experience, and they might think is it really worth it. I am working mainly with React now, and it is impossible to have 19 years experience in that. As it happens my experience with search solutions and international law garnered from my 4 years at Thomson Reuters is invaluable at my current job, but that's luck.

At some point a manager must think given the changeableness of the IT market, how much of that 19 years should be monetizable? I mean I did a lot of years building XML/XSLT based solutions for web and print - nobody wants that anymore, I remember when Netscape 4.something would crash because you had a nested p inside of a div that was inside of a p, an employer pays a couple thousand for those years, and the argument is that all experience translates to value but what if it doesn't?

Based on what I do on a day to day basis I would say the experience I have that I actually use is from 2009 on - based on the guide that should translate to 48045 of value. I'm not saying my experience before 2009 will never be used or do not inform who I am, but in day to day I have a hard time pointing to something I am doing that anything before that year is really relevant, if I know this I suppose a manager must sometimes suspect it.

on edit: grammar

<comment><USER17> Interesting, however I'd look at it this way. I don't need obsolete tool knowledge anymore, true. But I waste a lot less time making stupid decisions, which I got out of my system using those tools. And many subjects, such as OS fundamentals, Unix tools and shells, and project management continue to pay dividends.

<comment><USER28> Sure, but it's hard to quantify, and ok when I think of it there is some linux knowledge from before 2009 I use but really it is spotty.

There is also the whole thing about pattern recognition, you have seen similar things in other systems, but these benefits are conjecture - we can't say how much they apply, we only suspect that they apply at a significant enough level to matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is great. I am 40 myself, and hired and lead a strong dev team where about half are older than me and about 30% over 50 years old. In fact we have a father and his son working on the same team :)

Anyway my view is that you can't beat experience if what you care about is a stable system. Good people get better over time.

<comment><USER2> This is awesome! What a diverse team. I wish it was a reality for everyone in this industry but unfortunately is far from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great idea! The best two engineers I've had the pleasure to work with were both 45+ years old. They had a cool head when shit hit the fan, and were generally unfazed about technical problems. "Been there done that, let's do this right." If your company is discriminating against older engineers you're making a big mistake!

Now can we get a "no leetcode" job board? My favorite companies give you a take home, of a real world problem, vertical slice of what you're expected to do day to day.

<comment><USER31> What is "leetcode"?

<comment><USER32> They don't want to write code during the interview. Some complain about needing to practice, which I can't understand. Me, I'm pushing 50 and I'd be wary of joining a team who got hired _without_ writing code.

<comment><USER31> So leetcode is code that is written by the interviewee during an interview? Sounds tough. I never had to do that. I would probably clam up and fail.

<comment><USER33> That is related, but leetcode is actually a website dedicated to these kinds of interview problems:

[https://leetcode.com/](https://leetcode.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think that as the years go by we'll see ageism reverse. The early 80s is really the first time CS education really started taking off and it continues to be a very popular major. These people are now starting to get old and it's the first time we've had this vast an older software developer workforce. I think it'll have more effects than just anti-ageism but also the coming into our own in regards to engineering by way of having older mentors.

<comment><USER35> > These people are now starting to get old and it's the first time we've had > this vast an older software developer workforce.

Where are all the older software developers? I've worked at a few FANG and similar-level finance companies, and the vast majority of developers are under 35. Are the older ones clustered in some other corner of the industry?

<comment><USER36> There are also many of us who are having trouble finding work. I'm 45, and have a ton of experience. I lost my last job after a few more younger people joined the team (all fresh out of college). They all lived together near the office, went out each night after work -- I'm a single dad with kids so can't do that these days. As much as I liked working with them, there was this growing feeling that they felt that I didn't belong (even though I had been on the team since they were in high school). Code reviews got tougher, I heard complaints from my manager that they thought I took too long on tasks. The final straw was an argument that erupted when I took a day extra than they thought it should take on a particular task. One of them had pulled in OpenSSL a little while back to do some crypto. I needed to make some changes to their code and noticed that the random number generator wasn't being seeded. I wrote some code that I've written before to gather a little entropy from the system and feed it into OpenSSL's PRNG. Even after showing them articles about weak entropy being the cause of security breaches, they collectively felt that I wasn't working in line with the team. At that point I was the only original team member, and I had six team members, all of whom were well below 30 years in age.

I've been out of work for 12 months now. Previously I passed every interview I went to (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) and had the luxury of choosing between multiple offers. I haven't got through an onsite loop with any of these recently, nor with a bunch of other companies. The _only_ thing I believe is different is my age.

BTW, the me/them thing is reflection after the fact, not how I felt at the time.

<comment><USER37> I'd start targeting the legacy industries (insurance, boating, auto). Plenty of large software development houses that would (off the record) hire older people who are more serious.

<comment><USER38> You can earn a living there, but most non-software industries are bad at software, so your skills will deteriorate and you will have a hard time finding another interesting job.

<comment><USER39> It seems this fixation on the shiny "interesting" jobs is another problem. I'm not getting any younger and I don't doubt there is some ageism in the industry but if we're biasing the search to only include FAANG and a handful of other darlin companies then that's not really a fair analysis of the situation.

Anecdotal but I've seen >40 year old engineers thriving at non tech-hub software companies. There's plenty of interesting B2B companies that lurk in the suburbs or tier-2 or tier-3 cities.

<comment><USER38> I did not say that it's either FAANG or not interesting. But the companies doing interesting software work tend to be software companies. There are many counterexamples both ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I see many people here calling engineers to people who are only coders. A software engineer is something else, and guess what? It is not only about coding, is designing a product from concept to delivery. ( and maintenance of course ). By the way, ageism ( at least in the Bay Area ) is real as hell. It's happening to me right know, and I am ONLY 43 years old. This is the truth, if the interviewer is younger than you, it does not matter how good you are or what amazing skills you have, you won't get the job. Sorry, but that's the truth right now.

<comment><USER2> unfortunately is not a reality just in the Bay Area. We found it here in London as well, in huge companies and startups. That's why we had the idea, to alert companies that this is actually happening everywhere and they should pay more attention to older professionals, not only gender and race. Diverse teams are proved to be more effective than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wish there was a "no leetcode-ism in tech" job board

<comment><USER42> Maybe we'd have more women and other current underrepresented groups in "tech", did the whole post-graduation jobs thing not seem to be about fratbro hazing and "culture fit".

When I got my first real software engineering internship, as a teen, shortly before dotcoms, about half the engineers in my group were women.

And, though they were doing difficult work on technical and systems software, there was none of the posturing, glamorizing, and self-congratulating that we often see in industry today.

(In hindsight, some of the work they did is still beyond what most developers do today, though I didn't appreciate that enough at the time.)

I'm sure there were industry problems such as sexism in the '90s and earlier, pre-dotcoms, and in some ways we have more awareness today, but I think we've become arrogant and cultish in other ways. Yet commoditized. And one-way leetcode-type hazing is part of that.

<comment><USER17> The big push in the media to stereotype boys as computer nerds strengthened in the early 80s. Think War Games and Whiz Kids. I didn't notice at the time because it was what I was.

Nowadays every computer "hacker" on TV is a really hot chick; maybe the pendulum could come back to center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Granted I'm only 42 but I've never experienced a hint of ageism here in Scandinavia. Maybe it's an American thing? But to you who complain of ageism, would you be fine working for the same salary as a 22 year old that shares a cheap studio apartment with some mates? Or would you be willing to put in as many late nights as a childless youngster would? If not, I don't think we are actually dealing with some kind of nefarious discrimination here, just a rational market.

<comment><USER43> If we were dealing with hard labor maybe your point would make sense to me. The very best laborer can only do X times as much work in same amount of time as the least skilled laborer. When dealing with skills of the mind one person could take an entire lifetime and never accomplish what a skilled academic can achieve in an afternoon.

Granted I'm not saying older folks are all better than their younger counterparts. But what I would say is that in corporate America it feels to me as though there is no differentiation made between 2 people (with same title) while one takes 10x as much time to accomplish the same amount of work.

Take for example my last project. I never stayed late and always made it known that I wasn't happy when asked to. Meanwhile my younger counterparts worked happily through the night very regularly. I was never late on a deadline. Almost 100% of the younger folks were almost always late. Yet instead of being happy, that I was accomplishing my work within my regular days, my "commitment" was questioned as I wasn't happy to work all hours of the day and night to help this company complete its project.

So my line in the sand is now drawn. It's a question I regularly ask when interviewing for new positions now. I'm not interested in working with people who have to work endlessly to try to meet deadlines. It's a clear "smell" that ultimately they don't really know what they're doing.

<comment><USER3> It's not just in hard labor where employers may want people to work long hours. Regardless of what a lot of older people say, you can actually achieve more by working more hours, at least for short periods. And the younger you are the longer those periods can be.

And yes, commitment can also be relevant in itself, especially in a startup.

I had a previous career as a management consultant and we worked 60-80 hours every week. You can't really do that if you have a family, at least not without making significant sacrifices. Those crazy hours are not just about producing more, it's also about showing your dedication, paying your dues and showing the client that our people are really working hard for out fees. It wasn't for me, but it's naive and insular to claim that age is irrelevant. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it isn't.

<comment><USER44> Personally I find it kind of disgusting you ever expect anyone to work those hours for anything. That is absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As time goes by there is going to be more and more "old" code out there, and generally that will either have to be maintained in its current state or converted to something newer. And to do that you're going to have folks who are both familiar with it and are willing to work on it - except that the young bucks today just _really_ don't want to do that.

I'm hearing from IT employees of local corporations that if their code base is twenty, ten, or even just five years old now, they can't find young folks who are willing to work on it. And even if they do find them, they don't necessarily have the skills to do that work, nor any particular inclination to really learn those skills, nor are they willing to stick around for very long even if they do start the process.

<comment><USER46> I think that a lot of engineers consider the opportunity to work on new technology and code to be part of their compensation. In that case, in order to attract them a company would either need to allow them to do that or increase other forms of compensation. However, it doesn't seem like many companies are willing to do that.

<comment><USER45> IIRC, something like 90% of a software engineer's career will be spent doing "maintenance" work - working on existing code bases, some of which may (eventually) be quite long in the tooth. So it's something that the young bucks are going to have to get used to pretty quickly.

Also, a lot of the "new" stuff that they want to work on is really old stuff, just with a new name and a new coat of paint. Having been in the business for several decades now I see of lot of this, and I am by turns both amused and appalled by it.

<comment><USER47> One caveat though. One way to avoid maintenance is to do full rewrites. This happens quite a lot in some domains and industries. As long as they can keep doing it and change company, they can avoid a lot of maintenance.

<comment><USER45> Doing a full rewrite is often asking for trouble, though. Somebody out there on the internet maintains a list of companies which have pretty much put themselves out of business by doing full rewrites. Why is this? Because it turns out that a lot of that "old, ugly code" is in fact various types of bug fixes and other operational accommodations. And when you do a full rewrite you tend to lose track of a lot of that stuff, meaning that you get to deal with it all over again, often in a quite painful manner.

A former employer of mine had switched from using custom code to packaged code, which introduced plenty of problems of its own but overall things were generally going about as well as could be expected. Then they decided that they just had to have the latest and greatest version of that code from the vendor, which promised all kinds of flashy bells and whistles. They unwisely jumped into this with both feet (they were an early adopter), only to find that when those bells and whistles were added a lot of the old code had been rewritten, too, which introduced (or maybe re-introduced) a large number of very serious bugs. By the time those bugs were corrected (if they ever really were), the company (which was by now my former employer) was in such bad shape that they were basically forced to close their doors. They had pretty much lost control over their inventory and financials, for example, and had committed themselves to fulfilling contracts which were based on cost figures that were woefully incorrect.

<comment><USER47> You're thinking of software that's been used and battle tested over many years. Most software will never reach that state.

A typical project is done by a handful of contractors or fresh graduates, that are all gone after a year or so. The next team will attempt to throw it away and start over more often than not. Point being, there is plenty of work in churning out software.

<comment><USER45> The "churn" thing may cut it the web world and such but not so much elsewhere. There's a local mega-corporation whose core code base is up to twenty years old now, and another whose is up to ten years old. Neither will probably be rewriting anything anytime soon because their current codes bases _were_ the rewrites - expensive and time-consuming ones at that - so they're still adding new features and in some cases still trying to work out long-standing bugs. Neither is lately having much luck bringing in fresh graduates, either, because the young bucks don't want to work on that stuff - it's too old for them.

<comment><USER47> It's more common than you think. A lot of software don't last long. In fact a lot of software never actually get used.

Consider startups. Each successive group of new joiners will be adding a lot of new code and regularly throw anything that's already there. The churn is massive.

Have you worked with or for contracting company like Accenture? They assign developers to work on a project for a defined period of time, then disappear. It's not systematic that the software will reach a well working state, be handed over to the client and be actually used.

Another case. Things done with independent contractors. They are regularly hired to do nothing, well, maybe pretend to work and show a demo once in a while. If they produce something, it's not uncommon that the company didn't bother to hold the source code or build scripts.

Don't get me wrong. I fully agree with you. There is definitely more work available in maintenance than in new projects. However I also think there is enough work for a developer to make a career in either.

<comment><USER45> Yes, in the past I've been both a contractor myself and a contracting customer. And while I have seen newly built code bases thrown out for various reasons, from what I've seen that's not very common. AFAIK most of the code that I've ever written is still out there and working, unless maybe it died a natural death - company closed, got bought out, changed technologies, or what have you.

At my last gig as an independent contractor I did a lot of work on a project that mostly revolved around one of their largest customers. But then the employee who I was working with the most on this took early retirement due to medical reasons, which caused a change of direction somewhat because the employee who took over that job wanted to do things a bit differently. Then their big customer went out of business, which had a rather dramatic effect on the overall project. But as far as I know the code and such that I worked on is still in active use, it's just not nearly as critical to the business now as it used to be.

Before that I worked at a local mega-corporation, and there was one project there which I worked with on and off for ten years. But then one day, due to an act of legislative fiat, its reason for being just up and disappeared, so almost overnight all of the software and hardware that was used to make it work just went away.

But that same place suffered a bit from what you describe, in that it wasn't too unusual for them to spend money on software that didn't actually work, so it was ultimately abandoned. In fact, I had a running joke with them: "Gee folks, if I'd known that you were willing to settle for software that didn't actually work and that you were going to just throw out anyway, I would have only charged you half of what you paid those other folks to develop it!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Site got slashdotted. Wayback machine copy: [http://web.archive.org/web/20190622083122/https://noageismin...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190622083122/https://noageismintech.com/)

Also, can some one explain the "diversity link" on a bunch of these?

<comment><USER49> slashdotted??? Now you're truly showing your age ;)

<comment><USER48> Yikes. I'm not that old... right? Right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As the tech industry ages, we will see more and more articles about how maybe old programmers aren't so bad after all. By the time Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the Google gents, et. al. all reach retirement age, there will no longer be such a focus on youth in the industry.

<comment><USER51> Wanted to post exactly this. Ageism is far less of an issue in other Engineering disciplines, and my hope is that as ours matures, it becomes less of an issue too. We're already starting to see maturation in recent years with things like less language, framework and tooling churn, and consolidation around a few SDLC best practices

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Are there stats on the proportion of older engineers who can't find work? It would seem most of the "working engineers are young" observation could be explained by most people who have ever entered the field entering it recently.

<comment><USER53> Unlikely. Probably representative of not much even if there were. Most old types like me would not seek to be a visible statistic if they couldn't find work, but quietly go off and find something else to do.

Of my similarly aged friends who were once in tech, most have now left it - some from getting bored or burnt of some aspect, others from ageism. It's an _absurdly_ ageist sector and startups an order of magnitude worse. Worse still I have seen overt and blatant ageism on the hiring side multiple times.

Not everyone cares, and you can often work around it with even more applications, but it does get tedious hearing the euphemisms for "ew, you're old, we're all cool kids." that can translate as "You're perfect, but we think you'll get bored", "great interview, but you're a little overqualified". Hmm. My qualifications were on my CV when you invited me...

I've yet to fail to get work, but it's definitely becoming more effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> THANK YOU.

I'm not enough of a dinosaur to need this yet, but this is the right approach. Advertise willingness to hire regardless of age, which works to ingrain acceptance in your own company, and shame those who don't participate.

This is just what our industry needs.

</comment><comment><USER55> "Your really over qualified for the job..." I heard that for the first time my last job search. It's so tempting to say back: "So...What dpes that mean? I would do the job too well?"

Age-bias and Agism is real, especially on a job hunt. We have come so far as a society in chipping away at all the various types of discrimination - this one may be one of the last to (hopefully) fall.

I am just adding this for those who can relate.

Here's the kicker: In my early 60's I am better at my job (IT Program/Project Management) than ever. I want to retire at 90 (or never). I understand people better, know more than ever, embrace what's new, know and am certified on the newer ideas and methodologies, I am better at working with a wide variety of people and teams than my peers. Plus, I have far more stamina and energy than people 25 years younger (not a small thing in IT). I even have 2 teenagers (keeps you moving).

All I can do is do it better, possibly start my own company (but I'm actually a much better #2 than an owner.) And hope people get smarter about it. But building awareness (like this thread) can't hurt. Look at how the other discriminated groups have challenged everyone else to question their prejudice.

</comment><comment><USER56> Ageism definitely exists when company feels someone is too old to join them. There's obviously easy solution to this problem: join companies where people are similar age to yours or older. Because younger people are probably just not able to handle you or appreciate your life experience and are looking for people similar to them. What if you're extremely old and your equals are dead? You should've retired by that time or have alternative revenue streams than salary. If you've failed to have other income streams than salary that's your fault. You've limited your (professional) life to technical excellence which is obviously only one of the aspects of career and life general. I think people should at some point take wider responsibility of what they're doing and become not necessarily managers, but maybe tech leaders, authors, trainers etc. There is one more aspect to that: person may have a mental condition, like asperger's or something like that. Then he probably cannot build his career in a way described above and he needs to seek alternative ways of progression.

</comment><comment><USER57> It would be more useful if the jobs were searchable or sortable. It's frustrating that I have to go to each company's page to see the jobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes agreed. Initial idea was to include all jobs on the homepage, but we'd like to build the website as simple as possible to validate the idea and see if it is really a problem in the industry. I'm sure the website will change over time

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I sadly had an experience last year with older team members neither having the sage wisdom nor the flexibility to add value to a project, but they were kept on because of diversity reasons. The project was still delivered on time, on par with specs and within budget, but the older people were sent on paid leave after the first month of the project.

While it's a cliche to assume older (or younger) people are never going to work out in a team, it definitely happens a lot where outliers in the age range simply cannot do the work, whatever the reason. (and I'm not talking about not being qualified, that's usually not the problem)

On the other hand, with this anecdotal failure we have seen anecdotal successes as well; but knowing that older members can fail on a project due to what they self-describe as their age does actually happen in just the way people seem to fear; just not as often as they seem to think.

<comment><USER2> Sorry to hear that but think that's more a problem of commitment instead of age

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> How much is ageism, and how much is it employers feeling like a more senior person will have higher salary expectations?

<comment><USER60> Feeling a more senior person will have higher salary expectations IS ageism. Make the same offer to everyone qualified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Thank you so much for this. A CS professor of mine who is currently struggling with her income and her future (even though she is tenured) could really use something like this (she doesn't mind doing boring programming work).

<comment><USER2> Many thanks for the support and hope we can help her to find a new position

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I went through the site out of curiosity . First of all, kudos for taking the initiative. You will hopefully grow big because it seems like a big problem (or soon to be one). I have a suggestion regarding the UX: Can you have a couple of filters (location, skills etc) which will make it easier for job hunters? As of now, it seems ok without the filters but as soon as the job postings increase, you will face issues. Again, good luck with the project :-)

</comment><comment><USER63> Great initiative. I hope it gets better and better from this point of view.

The way I see it is that we tend to hire minorities but when it's about people with experience we rather pass... I have the luck to work with 50+ years old colleagues and it's the best experience you can have, because you can learn a lot and share a lot.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm not trying to be critical but genuinely curious? How do you convince companies to post on a job board that is new like this (or any other marketplace type product)? Is this a fake it until you make it type of product?

<comment><USER2> That's the hardest of having a two-sided marketplace. The famous "chicken and egg" problem.

The beginning is difficult and for that reason, we're trying to focus on companies with D&I department. Companies wanting to diversify their staff have many option when it comes to gender but not many job boards focused on ageism

<comment><USER65> What is D&I?

<comment><AUTHOR> Diversity and Inclusion

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> As a 50+-year-old, I like the idea of this site. I think it would be even better if people could search for specific skills (e.g. Elixir, Erlang, Rust, etc.) and see more detailed job descriptions.

</comment><comment><USER67> If age discrimination is illegal should not the age profile of companies be tracked the same way race and gender are, at least I think they are.

</comment><comment><USER68> You don't want to be within the system which actively rejects you. Accept the gift of warning and walk away, search further.

<comment><USER2> The point here is the kind of benefits and how companies are advertising their roles more focused on the youngest professionals and forgetting the more experienced ones. ie pets and cool offices with video-games. That's definitely not attractive for "older" professionals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> School seems to be a mandatory field and I couldn't find some schools on the list.

</comment><comment><USER70> it doesnt make sense to stay in tech (as an individual contributor) long term - especially working for someone else

<comment><USER71> well some people are not interested in management positions and building your own thing is sometimes not as easy for everyone, so care to elaborate why it doesn't make sense?

<comment><USER72> Simply put: The risk of ending up generally unwanted and unable to get back up after your current gig goes south, or you have to take a leave due to an illness or other life obligations, rises dramatically over the years due to systemic ageism in our industry.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly the point, apart from what you have chosen (keep coding and work in tech), you don't have the option to choose as the companies have been recruiting only youngest professionals and all environment is focused on the youngest people. There is space for everyone and it's a fact that diverse teams are more effective than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> And - Thanks for this forum!

</comment><comment><USER73> How can people not blame the infanticised offices with food, toys and gym which signal latent expectation that you spend most of your time in the office and you've no family.

Lack of private cabins and too much noise in open offices and feeling that you are always being watched.

Coding interviews which make you feel as if you are applying for a competitive top tier university which often require days of prep. Then the interviewer who pulls out some weird special case and is shocked to see that you spent years in industry yet you don't know about this case.

And startups whoes purpose is market disruption by often undermining rules/regulations, how can anyone who is not naive will not be worried about that? Who wants to be part of a racket who deliberately breaks rules/regulation and it isn't 100% guaranteed how government is going to react to that and feel mostly like a gamble which experienced people won't like making. No wonder younger people commit more crimes.

With age comes experience and wisdom and desire to not be taken advantage of and to not be manipulated by any dark patterns.

Sorry but I think most tech companies are optimized for certain kind of people and will find it increasingly hard to attract, keep and get best work out of the aged ones.

<comment><USER74> I agree about noise and private work areas, but disagree about food toys and gym. In most populated areas, traffic is a big deal. An employer that gives me food now cuts out this potential headache for me, plus saves me money. An employer that has an on-site gym clears a _huge_ burden for me which is the waste of time to drive to the gym and try to work out perhaps at 5:30 when _everyone else_ is doing the same. Perhaps I have a higher social anxiety that normal, but circling crowded parking lots at lunch or after work, or bumping into people in a crowded locker room pisses me the hell off. If an employer eliminates this source of stress for me, that is superb. Double for exercise, because in this industry you will gain weight and lose circulation from being anchored to a computer 8 hrs/day. So working out can literally save/extend my life.

Now, if they try to imply that I need to regularly stay for 9,10 or more hours per day, that's when I will become assertive and simply refuse. I don't see the correlation between overworking and giving me great amenities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> This has likely a lot to do with a wave of 'new' experiences in tech that possibly required a whimsical and specific curiosity, and of course a degree of 'nativism'.

When someone said something about 'digital natives' \- I think he had a point. I'm 'not quite digital native' and I've never liked FB, or anything 'social media'. I think that kind of disqualifies me for such work.

Instagram, FB, Snapchat, Kik - these are as much 'social' as they are 'tech' \- they are more like media shops than tech shops in many ways (or were).

So for the same reason MTV etc. (ha ha, dated reference!) are mostly young and hip, it might make sense that some companies have the same.

There's something to be said for 'doing things in a new way'.

Now, as many have noticed "there's nothing new under the sun" for the most part, and as the heady bubble bursts a little bit, I'm hoping that things become normative.

I started my career in the Valley, in Telecom, surrounded by 35-50 year old people, so brilliant, so experienced, I could barely keep up and I felt 'junior' on a daily basis.

Contrast that with my 'dot com' SF friends who were 27 and the 'oldest, most senior' folks at the company.

For the issues that I face in my work, I actually loathe to have to deal with 'fresh grads' because there's so much grindy material in the work, that one needs 'a couple of years' of experience just to be useful. For example, almost anything done in C++ ... there's so many ways to 'do it wrong', it takes some failure and good habits.

I think things will probably change as the materiality of experience becomes evident in some ways and managers catch on to that. I suggest there are probably enough companies around that do value experience.

One issue is however that 'experience' shouldn't be an excuse for complacency, nor should it excuse bad habits, not does it mean 'massive dollars' at every job. The pay scale probably starts to plateau at 5 years, maybe inching incrementally after that.

</comment><comment><USER76> The link is redirecting me back to HN post. How's this on the front page?

<comment><USER77> There are a few topics on HN that always perform well (loneliness, Google's fuckups, etc). I guess ageism is one of them now

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I guess because most new cool companies are startups and who was the guy over 40 in the movie "The Social Network" other than probably the investor/lawyer.

Most companies homepage is filled with younger folks and also why would anyone 40+ is going to listen to a 20 something CEO?

<comment><USER78> Why would a 40+ year old person listen to a 20-something? Perhaps because that's what they're being paid to do?

CEOs do more than just issue edicts from on high, they take feedback from the people running the various operations, otherwise the company falls apart.

<comment><USER73> I don't know about you but a friend of mine told me he sometimes feel insulted to take orders from someone inexperienced who don't know what they are doing specially when there are female members on the team, the insult doubles.

Did you watch the movie dictator where the the great general Aladdin demands the rocket be made pointy?

At small companies CEOs act similar to a dictator, maybe not all? But they've the vision. It's mostly them who get it, other are called naive or stupid.

Stuff like this is what drives experienced people out of the door.

As you get older, it gets hard to keep up with that BS and some people prefer mental sanity over paychecks naturally the jobs gets filled by ones who are willing to do the crazy thing in order to keep the money coming in.

<comment><USER79> What does having women on the team have to do with it?

<comment><USER73> when faced with absurdity, he loses temper and signs of which start showing on him and women feel uncomfortable around him. Atleast he's aware of what people around him are feeling. He never said he wants no women on the team, it's just how he feels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> We're fixing the glitch

<comment><USER2> fixed, sorry...we had some problems with the hosting

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Ninja is one of the oldest professions in the world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja)

<comment><USER81> We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252920) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> There are three themes driving ageism in tech.

First, upper management and investorship doesn't understand engineering or technology. Accountants understand cost and risk, they do not understand oppertunity or business process. MBA's understand cost and risk, as well as any non-iterative business process with a defined start and end that is quantifiable; they are suited for running a company, not growing a company, and religous application of skills within that spectrum of capibility only creates tragedy and torture chambers (e.g. open floor plan offices). Any R&D process is by definition unquantifiable; you have 10 million workcenters infront of you and have to figure out the right routing, which may be iterative and require adjustments to the workcenter, to produce the widget. Figuring that out requires knowing where the bottlenecks are to constrain the problem, and that requires specialized knowledge and experience.

Accountants and MBA's are taught, religously, to view those things as "key man risk", and because of the ability of people to leave to go elsewhere to work for more money, that training staff is just a waste of money. It is vital to our industry that we take on interns as journeymen for a few years and guide them; the results are much better for all when they are taught how to think. This is antithetical to most organizations.

Any company that thinks this way is doomed to a slow death because nobody who is capible of managing the bottlenecks is going to work there; they will reverse engineer the company, find the bottlenecks, propose them, come across as pompous, then move on. Devoid of the experience of working with talent, the management, often coming from non-engineering management backgrounds, assumes programmers are factory, retail, logistics, or any kind of manual laborer and due to that, equates youth with maximum ROI.

They build torture chambers and hope to capture a few young geniuses then force out golden eggs. Think of MSP's that have no intellectual property or investment in technology, but hire IT folks and force them into bogus non- competes and other slaver working arrangements. Can't tell you how many times I've been look upon as the "whiz kid saviour" by some imbecile in their 50's or 60's coming from a non-engineering background who happens to have money. It's really patronizing, demoralizing, and absolutely disgusting. Nobody wants to work with that, and especially in a company that creates situations where the staff feel the only way out is bankrupting the place.

Second, you have highly levered\financialized companies. Facebook has almost no real world value aside from social entertainment, and nobody knows how to valuate the company. Because of this, goals cannot be clearly defined by the top brass of the organization; there's no long-term vision. Anyone who's seen a Zuckerberg press conference will call him a visionary; he comes across as a man-child trying to make sense of his dumb luck. Old engineers know, most importantly of all, how to have heated debates like an engineer and to discuss like an engineer. That threatens the management in these orgs because engineers, if left to their own whims, will form their own vision and experienced people know what works and how to be successful. They'll do things that can clearly be seen as progress and that reduces the importance of everyone else at the org in the eyes of the investorship. That too, becomes an engine for drama.

Finally, there's a severe shortage of good technical\engineering management around right now. Some of that is the above two reasons, but a lot of it has to do with things like IRS exemptions against allowing IT Staff to bill on a W11 obstensively because too many people were working as FTE at multiple companies working as specialists without benefits. Remember, one of the driving factors behind Austin Stack driving a Cessna into an IRS building was that very thing. Technology changes society drastically, and when you see management and leadership turning the nails on people, it's a response to this.

Feminism, for example, is a response to technology; first wave feminism was a response better materials science producing pressure vessels that created hard alcohol. Men ended up in the gutter escaping hard lives rather than dealing with them and it's no wonder when universal sufferage was passed, the first thing the ladies voted for and demanded was prohibition. Second wave feminism, e.g. equal pay for equal work, was driven by the obsolescance of muscle in manufacturing. That produces a discussion on what gender roles in a relationship are and ought to be (which by the way, the only people qualified to make that decision is the couple). Third wave feminism is a response to contraceptives and social media. GAO Does retirement security studies and did one in 2009 on the impact of fertility rates on retirement security and ended up publishing, then redacting, the fact that men with an 80th percentile income have a 50\50 shot, back in 2009, of procreating. You have lots of women inundated with too much selection via social media, and throwing everything they've got after it using contraceptives. It's logical, then, that intelligent hard-working men with money being given access to any women they want for anything they want would be demoralized about relationships and the quality of the breeding stock. The old addage of "building a family" or "building a man" has stopped being a concept and instead you have Maybelene, Gucci and Pornhub engaging in psychological warfare against young people to sell sex, hand bags, eye shadow and sex as a mental illness.

Government has been far outpaced by tech, and the key realization here is, it can take advantage of anyone irregardless of how smart you think you are. We really do not know what we're doing and it is total chaos out there.

<comment><USER44> I feel like you made some good points, but how does feminism fit into this? Interesting take on it I had not heard that about feminism. Another huge part of the alcohol problem with men was marital rape, lots and lots of drunken marital rape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Aside from the Zuckerberg " _young people are just smarter_ " quote, I suspect a lot of this is more side-effect of businesses (especially large ones) wanting interchangeable, easily-replaceable parts rather than overt ageism.

Having a core business system done right the first time by an old-timer or two kind of puts you at their mercy. Using the infinite monkey theorem to grind out a bunch of python and javascript is much safer from a managerial perspective.

</comment><comment><USER84> I found myself applying for jobs recently.

One of the startups that contacted me was founded by three 2015 graduates.

I am 41. I cancelled the interview. There was no way in my mind that I could work with these three folks. It was as good as being from different planets.

What I am trying to say is that maybe ageism is a two way street, and maybe it's just normal. Generation gap and all.

<comment><USER42> Why didn't you think you could work with them?

2015 graduates probably have at least a couple years real experience, which is a huge difference over fresh out of school (and a lot of people coast after that, anyway). Even new college grads can start figuring things out.

And there's so much possible to know today, no one person can know it all, and even a top veteran engineer can learn some things from NCGs.

I look for companies where people want to do good work, on good things, are capable, yet intellectually humble, and treat everyone as respected colleagues.

<comment><USER84> Maybe my comment came out wrong.

It's not about their(or my) technical skills.

Technical compatibility is not enough for a team to work closely and efficiently IMHO

<comment><USER42> True, though it sounded like them only having a few years experience was a showstopper on its own (no other factors, like their mission blurb was unappealing), in this case?

Maybe we're back to your original statement, about ageism being a two-way street sometimes. I appreciate your candor in mentioning it. Were you thinking of particular things, like "they'll make bad decisions, or won't have much experience executing", or "they'll probably be on drugs, and the company picnic will be extreme snowboarding", or something else?

<comment><USER85> Maybe it's simply about them being two generations younger? E.g. people in their 20's have never suffered communism while my father has lived through the socialist normalisation AND the Velvet Revolution, my grandfather fought in WW2 and then lived in stalinist communism and my great-grandfather was in Austrian Imperial Army and then Czechoslovak Legions in Russia during the WW1.

<comment><USER86> Perhaps their grandfathers lived through the socialist normalization, their great grandfathers fought in WW2, and their great-great grandfathers were in the army.

It sounds like you can relate to people older than you. Maybe they can do the same. It's worth giving people a chance.

<comment><USER85> Oh yeah, of course, but maybe someone (certainly not me) doesn't want to. We should let them be themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I would rather keep ageism. It keep my competitive advantage intact (25 years C++, 20 years java.). I can easily code much faster than a team of 10 younger developers, not because I can program faster, but because I know WHAT to program, as oppose to how to program. I.e. they are running faster to the top of the wrong hill.

Kind of strange that you will judge your MD by its age, but when it come to mission critical systems you prefer young people.

<comment><USER88> That's not really ageism, but effectivenessism.

I think companies like younger people because they are cheaper and perhaps more agreeable.

<comment><USER12> And flexible. They will work longer hours and demand less holiday time.

<comment><USER89> And white men are just smarter and harder working! /s

Listen to yourselves!

<comment><USER90> I think the point is that young people are more _exploitable_. That's not really a good thing for young people, but one can see why employers would want to exploit them.

This is why unions fought for 40 hour work weeks. Otherwise it's a race to the bottom in terms of who can overwork the most.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did downvote requirement change again? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed that I'm no longer able to downvote.
I'm a frequent reader of HN, though I don't comment often. Because of this, it took me a while to get to 200, which at the time was the requirement.  It changed shortly after that to 500, and a year or so ago I got to 500 and got the ability to downvote again.
I don't really downvote that often, but this afternoon I saw a message that I thought warranted downvoting (in fact it was already shown in gray text) and proceeded to downvote it.  I then saw that the down arrows were not showing for me anymore.
This is a new article (on the Front Page as of this writing) and I verified I was logged in, so my conclusion was that the downvote threshold changed again.  What's the requirement now? Since when did it change?  Is there a page which details these requirements? <comment><USER2> My understanding is that downvote privileges are limited. I remember reading something a while back that effectively said that if you downvote significantly more than you upvote then you temporarily lose the ability to downvote until your upvote count creeps back up.

This is entirely anecdotal, I have no proof for my theory only a vague recollection of an explanation offered for a similar question at least a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see up and down arrows, and I think you'll find my current karma level to be particularly relevant.

<comment><USER4> hrabago has more karma then you mikestew; 587 vs 506 at the time of typing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Ask HN: Is Intel Jarvis faster than Google's Speech Recognition? - <AUTHOR>

I read a bit about Intel Jarvis and they're saying that it really fast as they process everything offline on the device itself [1]
Google's Speech Recognition is blazing fast. So they might have really fast servers as they process everything on their backend. [2]
What one do you think is faster?
[1] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2325465/intels-jarvis-headset-will-take-on-apples-siri-and-google-glass-by-working-offline
[2http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/10/31/client-vs-server-architecture-why-google-voice-search-is-also-much-faster-than-siri/] <comment><USER2> I haven't found Google to be fast at all, in fact it breaks a lot with a no internet warning because often my Glass can't even manage connectivity through my Bluetooth through my phone, the rest of the time it definitely has network lag attached to it. Are you just testing on a browser on a cable modem or something? Note the OK Glass menu has its own custom local voice model it runs against, you need to do something like a google search or reply to a text to really test the network backed stuff.</comment>


SEEKING FREELANCER - <AUTHOR> testing - couple of postings haven't worked
this doesn't show up in the hn/yc freelance/work wanted section/page
not sure why... if someone has a soln, feel free to add it in the comments.
thanks! <comment><USER2> Please see the FAQ regarding job posts: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

For the latest post, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)

Also, using allcaps is a good method to get your post flagged. Read also [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Edit:

After reading your post again ...

You posted a thread in the previous edition: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460778) , your post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539454)

These posts are not shown in [https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs](https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs) . Only the posts of the startups backed by YC can post there.</comment>


On Liking Women - <AUTHOR> https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/ <comment><USER2> > overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete > automation and destroy the male sex

I'm calling it, Valerie Solanas is Satoshi Nakamoto.</comment>