Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination? - <AUTHOR> What is your specialty/tech stack? How have you gotten around age discrimination? How do you suss out whether a company is right for you?<p>(I'm in my late twenties but I'm very curious to hear all your experiences.) <comment><USER2> I'm 49! I've been working since I'm 17 as a developer -- I think the KEY thing is to be valuable, and be able to change quickly BUT not as quickly as the snowflakes.

Ignore the fad tech, get a good, serious, bulletproof base in actual computer science -- I mean, LOW LEVEL stuff--, that will help you learn ANYTHING computer related quickly, and continue surfing that wave with whatever tech you fancy might actually be useful to make you sellable in the future...

And don't hesitate to drop stuff you invested a lot in. If it's no longer trendy/selling, just drop it like an old sock and spend time updating yourself. I'm a frigging EXPERT in dozens of stuff that would make people smile now (those who are old enough ;-))

And, if you're that old, you should be GOOD. Not just nerdy and opinionated, you should be able to demonstrate being curious, capacity to change, to work with younger guys as a 1:1 basis -- and use that tons of experience of yours in new fields.

I'm lucky, I manage to 'channel' that stuff because I'm probably still more passionate about my job most people will ever be, despite the pile of years, but I've never been 'age discriminated' before. Apart from when I was 18 and winging it a bit ;-)

<comment><USER3> The big money question is: How have you managed to stay passionate about your job?

I just posted a comment in another thread about burnout. It's very common in our industry. I believe it's due to the Coolidge Effect. Aka, the brains inherent search for novelty. It's a struggle to not look at almost all programming tasks as just some variation of the same problem, if you've been doing this long enough. How do you keep it interesting enough, to stay passionate?

<comment><USER2> I had a bit of a burnout around 2006 -- I had worked my ass off on a fantastically complex framework, the pinacle of years of experience, and it was a joy. It was SO cool. There was an application on top, which was also pretty cool.

And the marketing bods/management and so on more or less dragged the project off track, up to the point I didn't want to work on it at all, I quit, I left my 'baby' and had a hard 6 months where I didn't really want to do anything... Good thing is that I became a pretty competent landscape photographer along the way...

Nowadays, I work a LOT more like a mercenary. I don't mind working on projects that leads straight to the wall -- NOBODY will listen to you, or trust you've seen that 12 times before.

So as far as I'm concerned, I enjoy the work, the architecture, the TECH challenges, and everything which gives me a quick, and I _completely_ ignore the outcome in the end. Sure, if it's a success, whoohoo whoohoo but I no longer put the same amount of 'care' and 'ownership' in what I do. I just let it go, and do something else just as efficiently.

It might sound cruel, but for the like of us who REALLY get a kick from designing/building/implementing stuff, it's actually quite liberating.

I just smile benignly on at the idiots in the room sometimes, it's quite relaxing :-)

<comment><USER3> Heh, respectfully, I think we're talking about two different kinds of burnout.

The form I am referring to, builds steadily over time. It's not the result of some bad interaction with management, rather, it's the result of doing the "same" thing for 30 years.

I recognize that the problem is in seeing it as the "same" thing. Yet, given our job as programmers is often to see the forest through the trees, to identify patterns, it becomes hard not to see yourself as solving the same set of problems over, and over, and over, and over.

That's the type of burnout I'm referring to. I'm guessing you don't struggle with that at all ;)

<comment><USER2> Well to be fair I went from doing well over 20 years of Mac programming with a lot of UNIX/Linux alongside to a semi-hardware developer with linux low level stuff, pure embedded and FPGA development...

There's LOADS of fields that you haven't done. I remember my first time trying to get my head around some VHDL code and I felt I was 12 years all over again looking at 6502 assembly code.

Make your horizon wider!

<comment><USER4> How do salaries compare? I get the impression embedded is rather low-paid, particularly compared to some of the FAANG salaries bandied about?

I'd love to be able to do 6502 for a living...

<comment><USER3> It's quite strange and yet makes sense, that embedded salaries are lower than easier higher level development. On the one hand, embedded is NOT the kind of thing some random 14 year old kid can do, whereas iOS/Android/Web is. But unfortunately, there's just not the plethora of jobs demanding embedded folks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm 51 and I have found that doing embedded and low-level programming seems to insulate me somewhat from age discrimination. I think in part that is because people expect programmers who work very close to the hardware, like me, to be geezers. Breadth of experience seems to help as well.

By comparison, trying to get a job in web or app development was a nightmare of interviewing with twenty-somethings in open plan offices, who gave me programming puzzles to solve on the spot, then turned on loud techno while I struggled to concentrate. Which honestly told me all I needed to know about what it would be like to work in their trendy consulting office.

But my opinion on all this might very well change if I lose this job... maybe there is an age "brick wall" at some point I won't be able to scale. I'm hoping not.

<comment><USER6> I see something similar in my industry. I work on embedded systems for industrial automation and in my mid 30's I still tend to be one of the younger ones in any group of coworkers/clients. In my case don't think this is issue of "insulation" but rather a difference between technical fields. Industrial automation is a long-game. Development projects can last a year or more, and client support can stretch into the 10s of years. Also, there is a lot of value in deep domain knowledge that takes years to develop.

I think age of the companies themselves comes into play. If a company is only a year old, nobody has had time to age with the company, almost nobody is going to have had a kid, been through major medical issues, ect, while working there. Even if an individual may have that kind of life experience, the company itself doesn't. I think it shows in the kind of environments they create and the type of people they tend to attract/want.

<comment><USER7> How did you get into embedded? Web work doesn't really interest me and I've been studying kernel programming for a few months.

<comment><USER6> My academic background was Computer and Systems Engineering, with a focus on computer science and machine vision. I started with project/application-level work at a company that specializes in industrial machine vision then moved into embedded Linux development on the devices I had been doing project-level work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone here is talking about their skillset, and I'm going to take another direction: appearance and interpersonal skills.

There is ageism, yes, but I think a deeper problem is reaction to peoples appearance. If you are late twenties concerned about age, then hide it, starting now.

* Always wear sunscreen when you are outside, regardless of race. It prevents skin aging, and you'll still tan and get Vitamin D regardless.

* Work out: lifting weights and doing cardio have differing goals and match up in interesting ways. Learn them. I do almost 100% pure heavy weight lifting, and I'm actually very thin, despite what I toss around.

* Make sure your clothes fit and look good. Go to a tailor and get one outfit made nice a year for interviews/on-sites (if working remotely) etc.

Taking care of yourself physically might not seem related to a lot of this, but people discriminate in a number of ways, and the more you take away, the better you might do. In addition, two of the above are general health things that you should be doing anyhow.

I forgot about interpersonal skills when I first finished writing this:

* Practice getting people talking about themselves. It's the best way to get people to think that you are interesting. I would argue it's the most important tool in my interpersonal skillset and I've met a ton of interesting people using it.

<comment><USER9> So in short the cure for ageism is to try and look younger than you are? No one saw that one coming.

<comment><USER10> Great advice, if we could all look younger when we want, we would! A lot of it depends on genetics. We'd all exercise more if our knees and backs weren't grinding down from years of use.

Any over 50 female developers care to respond to this "look younger" advice?

<comment><USER11> Not developers, but I work with a lot of professional women and basically every single one who is old enough to have gray hair, colors her hair to hide the gray.

I've posted about this before but Ginni Rometty, who is 61 years old, has perfect blond hair with no gray; she obviously has it colored. She is the _CEO of IBM_ and feels the need to do this... that gives you a sense of the amount of pressure on professional women to look young.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm almost 66. Still working on active fun projects, and love what I do. Tips?

1\. Be of value. 2\. Always learn new things. 3\. Seek opportunities in the code base (there are wins in there) 4\. Keep learning. A repeat (see #2), and important. 5\. Embrace new.

We work in an adapt or die industry; keep that in mind. And, if a shop discriminates about age, find a better shop.

<comment><USER13> Can you kindly elaborate what you meant by "3\. Seek opportunities in the code base"?

Are you possibly refers to improves existing code base, shall it be Open source projects or in-house developments?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm 60, and going strong. Most important is bring not only depth and breadth of knowledge but also _wisdom_ to the work. As a graybeard, you're expected to add value because of your years. For example, when my office was going nuts about Kubernetes, devops, etc., it got me a raise to compare this new tech to the original Unix philosophy and point out some lessons learned in Unix design that would help with our containers. Everybody reinvents everything, every 5 or 10 years; use your history to add value, and you have a unique selling point that can't be duplicated.

<comment><USER15> Care to share this wisdom? I'm wrassling with these kontainers now and I'm wondering why people think they're so wonderful.

<comment><USER16> Took me a while to see the value of Docker.

Ever deploy the same software to multiple servers, and it maddeningly behaves slightly differently on different servers, and you're not quite sure why?

This is the problem docker solves. Install exactly once, when you build the image. Then deploy the exact same code, down to the bit, as many times as you want, to as many servers as you want. Or quickly roll back to the Docker image for the previous version.

So this is how Docker helps you scale quickly and deploy as often as you want, with confidence.

Kubernetes, meh. Just some code for spinning up more or fewer Docker containers in an automated fashion. At least that's my impression, I haven't had to get my hands dirty with it yet.

<comment><USER17> So why not just make a virtual machine image and keep a pristine copy of it? I think this dates back to the mainframe era.

<comment><USER18> One reason to use containers over VMs is that building, updating and extending containers is far easier and more maintainable than full virtual machines.

Containers give you the ability to layer the pieces you need on top of each other, so you are only responsible for the parts that you maintain. No need to rebuild an entire VM image every time one piece of the stack is updated.

Distribution of containers is also far more efficient than full virtual machines (especially important in a highly distributed environment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not me, but my father in law, located in the midwest, is a sql dev. He's about to retire in a few years, switched jobs a few years back. From what he tells me, they didn't care that he was going to retire soon, they needed his skillset.

Location probably matters. My (also midwest) company was foaming at the mouth for a competent Java/SAP developer (which, forgive me for being catty, seems like a technology only a 40+ yr old would fill) a few years ago, never found anybody, position was never filled.

<comment><USER20> The Midwest has a lot of age 50+ devs. Java and ASP.NET rule the land and it's almost all B2B like hospitals and other large orgs that don't want bleeding edge tech. For example, trying to find React devs in the Midwest proved difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm 47, but my kids are reminding me 50 is coming soon!

I'm working as a web engineer — not a manager or even team lead — working remotely from the Midwest for a coastal company, and I'm pretty happy with it. All I can say is keep learning, be friendly, and delight in the energy of all you young people. I am not entirely sure why I have been hired, or even whether it was a good idea for my employer. So maybe stay humble too?

Maybe being remote prevents me from pinching the cheeks of adorable devs 25 years my junior. My advice: Don't pinch cheeks. Turns out Millennials don't like it. No matter how adorable those little non-grey-haired hackers are.

Anecdotally, the older I get, the less ambitious I get about my own career and the more interested in just helping out and doing things that make a difference. My self-discipline has become marginally better over the years, and my coding ability marginally worse. Definitely trending towards grandparent.

Things I especially like: interviewing, having a real-world impact, learning things, using cool new tools, helping out, justice.

Things I dislike: politics, jockeying for position.

Also, the whole "I've forgotten more than you've ever known about this field" feels true. But honestly thank goodness you _didn 't_ have to learn it, because a lot of it is irrelevant now.

<comment><USER22> Could you share some examples of the things you learned but then became irrelevant? I wonder if we could find some pattern to help people avoid learning modern stuff that will have the same fate.

<comment><USER21> Off the top of my head, things I _never_ implement or use anymore:

* socket listeners

* line drawing

* explicit memory management

* old APIs and libraries

* Perl

* Assembly

And things I _rarely_ use:

* Semaphores & other threading primitives

* XML

* C/C++

Now, knowing these sometimes helps, but the amount of time I spent on them probably doesn't justify the benefit aside from the fact that it was necessary at the time.

And _somebody_ is doing these now — I just find I don't need to, as it's always handled somewhere below the abstraction layers where I work.

An equally interesting list would be the things I use now that didn't exist when I graduated from college in 1996.

<comment><USER23> The gaming industry is still heavily invested in C++, for better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is a technology called hair coloring, stack it with a hoodie and some well fitted slacks, roll up one of the ankle cuffs a bit. Talk like you've exited a startup and are just working for fun, or something to keep you interested, but not like you actually have to.

<comment><USER25> Agree 100%, it has blown me away my whole life how engineers downplay marketing and [product|personal] presentation in spite of the _reams_ of data suggesting it has some of the best ROI possible of anything you can spend your time improving.

Do you want to make more money, get more connections, have _everyone_ like you more and treat you better? It's as simple as buying some nicer shirts, getting regular haircuts, and eating better (which has its own host of plusses).

Some programmers are 55 and _really good._ They also have stains on their t-shirts, are overweight, and act morose all the time. In a perfect world this wouldn't matter for a job interview, but _you are not interviewing or operating for a job in a perfect world._

<comment><USER26> > They also have stains on their t-shirts, are overweight, and act morose all > the time.

Describes more than one 20-something developer I know. Being a sloven does not correlate with age.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but the 20-somethings don't need to over-compensate for age discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm in my mid-50s and it has not caused a career problem for me. I don't do anything special about my age.

What I do is what I've done from the very start of my career over 30 years ago: I am constantly learning and keeping my skills current. That's not something I do to ensure employability, it's because I am genuinely into this stuff. I produce software for a living, and I also produce software as one of my hobbies. There's always something new and fascinating to tackle, whether it's in the workplace or not.

My professional focus has become networking and security, but my skillset is far broader than that, so I don't call myself a "specialist" at all. I'm just an experienced engineer. I don't know how to answer the tech stack question, because I use a very wide variety of tech stacks, operating systems, and platforms both in the workplace and at home.

Have I been discriminated against because of age? I honestly don't know, but I have no problem getting excellent jobs, so if it's happened, it doesn't matter.

I determine if a company is right for me in two steps --- first, before I decide to apply, I research the company to learn its history, what prior employees think of it, what technologies it uses, etc. If I feel good about or am still interested in the company after that, I'll apply.

When I interview, I don't look at it as them interviewing me. It's exactly the other way around -- I'm interviewing them. I pay close attention to what they say (not their sales pitch, but what sorts of questions they ask), the physical environment, and I pay attention to all the employees that I can spot who aren't on the team that is interviewing me. Do they look happy, angry, etc? My experience is that whatever they're feeling is likely to be what I'll be feeling if I take the job.

</comment><comment><USER28> im older than dirt_

specialty is assembler, firmware and hardware prototyping. I usually work on contract. The thing with high level stuff is that it is always changing face but never goes past the fact that it all boils down to low level operation of digital devices. If you can work at the level that allows high level language to operate then you have real power and controll, but not the convenience of ready made assembler routines, you have to roll your own firmware, and your own assembler macros. If you are a bonafide OS engineer, firmware engineer, and chip engineer, everyone else is riding your coattails, and you have direct knowledge of how a computer or any other sort of object code device functions.

{adde} after skimming through the comments it helps if you already have a code library of your own. You should be equivalent to a tradesperson with a full set of tools appropriate to the job demands. if you are re-writing code to implement a UART for example thats like an electrician constantly manufacturing a screwdriver on the job.

If you can write a piece of code from memory thats good, but proper preparation before hand is a mark of experience.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hire a lot of engineers and it's always a breath of fresh air to interview someone with 20-30+ years of experience, as long as they stay up to date.

<comment><USER23> What do you mean stay up to date? From my experience I've noticed that if they dig deep and understand the underlying fundamental concepts of the trade, there's not many programming problems, platforms, or languages, that couldn't be learned in the span of a few days. The longer I go, the more I realize that everything that seems new and fresh was most likely already invented in some capacity before I even wrote my first line of code. I completely understand if they are non flexible and still choosing out of date frameworks or libraries that aren't necessarily used any more, however the ability to compare and contrast frameworks and languages and choose the one based on a deep understanding of the underlying implications seems to me more important than being fluent in the latest platforms.

<comment><USER30> Why would I hire someone who didn't keep their skills up to date and didn't show any desire to do so when I can hire someone who can hit the ground running from day one?

I'm 45 and have religiously kept my resume "buzzword" compliant.

You can't learn best practices, frameworks, etc in a few days. Yes things were already invented, but if you don't know the ecosystem you'll end up reinventing the wheel badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm 57 and seen plenty of age discrimination, almost exclusively in big companies. Smaller companies don't seem as prone to the practice. Stay current, change as needed. After 35 years of software only, spent the last two years going back to Electrical Engineering roots and developed 3 circuit boards from scratch and developed software for the boards. Large companies that cut solely on age deserve the loss of wisdom and experience.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't really think the tech stack matters. I'm a dotnet guy for the most part and have been gainfully employed from it for 20 years, hell going back to vb-6, com etc before dotnet.

I get around age discrimination by looking a lot younger than I am. I achieve this by dressing current which doesn't mean trendy, just don't wear that same old sweater to work you've had for 10 years, keep it for family time. New clothes go a long way in this situation. Also don't over dress, that's a huge give-away so no suits.

I also shave my head, but if you aren't losing your locks, good for you though you'll want to consider dying it.

I also workout a ton, eat well/little (restricted calories, etc),take a ton of vits and sups including metformin, NMN and resveratrol to name a few of the more useful and/or exotic items. I thinking being lean, fit and strong also goes a long way toward conveying both youth and confidence that employers are naturally drawn toward.

I mean look when you've been coding for 30 years the problem isn't your abilities, it's how you are perceived by a potential employer.

I'm 51 but most guess my age around 38ish.

<comment><USER33> > I thinking being lean, fit and strong also goes a long way toward conveying > both youth and confidence that employers are naturally drawn toward.

This is my experience as well. I'm a lifelong amateur athlete and I don't wear sloppy clothing. I've seen the difference in treatment with other guys my age (49) firsthand. It's not about looking younger necessarily, just looking like you aren't falling apart. For whatever reason, some people correlate physical appearance with ability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm only in my early 30s but I have loved having old timers on my teams. They tend to have abandoned their illusory superiority (and super low estimates) that young devs exhibit so frequently, which really grounds a team. And talking tech with them is always an adventure instead of a sports team argument about which framework is best.

</comment><comment><USER35> Age 53. At my last job, I was doing React front end work. When I argued against Redux, Coffeescript and Typescript because our app didn't need them, I was told I wasn't a team player and that I wouldn't succeed in that company.

I now have a new job at much much less salary.

<comment><USER36> Don't swim against the river. If you're the only older person and not the leader or person being looked up to for direction. Don't buck the trend and go against the river, you will only make yourself visible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Started my own company with a bunch of other geezers.

Helped that all of us had previously started companies and three of us had good exits. But then again we'd each had 30+ years to get that experience.

</comment><comment> grumpy-cowboy Start your own freelancer/consultant business. Businesses will pay you a lot of money for your knowledge and wisdom. This is what I did 9 years ago (I'm 43 now) and I never looked back.

My ex-employer said that if I want to have a better pay, I'll had to have a management job. I'm not interested AT ALL about having a management job. I LOVE programming, system engineering, ...

This is why I started my own "one-man" freelancer business : I do what I want (and not what my boss want), when I want, ...

Now, I work for MY dreams and not the dreams of another person ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> Don't be afraid to learn new things. I started my IT career almost 20 years ago doing Struts and later Spring MVC. I felt a bit stuck in the enterprise java realm, but I branched out to Pylons and then Spring Boot. Now I'm doing Laravel/Vue.js and I have to say it's a breeze having worked with MVC frameworks for all these years. If you have a hot skill, which reactive/SPA apps seems to be these days, you'll always be in demand.

</comment><comment><USER39> Started my own mobile app company. B2C is a rough market but I love not dealing with customers, sales people, etc. I do hope to shift into some B2B webapps instead.

Also now working on another startup with friends roughly my age and have a couple other startups as options there if I wanted to take on more.

My specialty is pretty much being a jack of all trades and being able to learn new ones quickly. In some ways it sucks because there isn't any one stack that I eat, sleep, and breathe, but on a typical day I do some golang backend, js/html/webgl frontend, obj-c iOS, maybe some python, linux sysadmin, and some graphic design. The benefit is that it means not needing to go find and hire/contract another resource.

Keep learning new things. I know many people my age that spend 10+ years on a single tech stack and never really learned anything new. Then suddenly they're out of work and realize the demand for C99 on Solaris isn't that high. Go to Meetups, conferences, webinars. Take on side projects. Mentor students.

It helps that I look a bit younger than my age. I honestly probably get more discrimination due to my weight. Working on that, but if you can maintain your fitness and the appearance of boundless energy, it overcomes a good bit of age.

</comment><comment><USER40> There are myriad ways to pull this off but more than a few them require luck of some kind. A particular technology, a particular company even a particular manager.

However a recent study shows that, in the US at least, 55% of all workers are laid off before they reach their "natural retirement age". So you need to plan ahead.

Over the past twenty years the demand for technical talent has changed a lot. In particular, the demand has increased a lot at small and medium sized companies due to their use of the internet.

So a useful outline of a career now is, start at a large company and learn the ropes, then move away from niche technologies to more generally in demand technologies like LAMP for example. By the time you hit 35 years old you should be starting to angle for more senior jobs at smaller companies.

Software development now for smaller firms is starting to look more like law and accounting practices. Your experience there is now an advantage since you will understand more of the complete corporate needs in addtion to your tech chops. Whereas if you stay and a larger company ( _cough_ IBM) you're now just too expensive for you niche skill set.

(*source - still doing lamp stack dev at over 60)

</comment><comment><USER41> Not one myself but over the years I have seen older engineers who have published a book on a popular technical subject or have had open source contributions in widely used projects are seldom discriminated against!

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm over 50. I haven't encountered any age discrimination. Then again I don't go looking for it. I'm sure people make judgements about me based on my age and appearance. That's just life.

</comment><comment><USER42> To the folks posting comments suggesting they are 50+ and still going strong or started coding when they were children: kudos to you. However, I think you represent the minority.

Development shouldn't be a 'King of the Mountain' contest, but it is. Here's my story: I have commercial experience in C, Java, Visual Basic, MUMPS/M/Cache and Node.js. I've worked in Healthcare ( A/R, Laboratory reporting & instrument data acquisition ), Integration Space (e.g. webMethods), US defense space. I've worked in a 'tools' team delivering components used by application development teams.

On the side, I've written an open source project on Github, I've attended many meetups in recent years - and user group meetings before the Internet was a thing.

My point, is that I am very experienced. I've never had a bad review, I've worked for at least 15 different managers, I've worked at a few companies multiple times.

Yet, I still struggle daily to hang on to the thing I love which is to write code. From my perspective, this is a real problem. It seems impossible to simply be a developer for your career because the pressure from the industry is to cut developer labor costs.

Btw, I am currently an Senior Architect. I've held many titles since 1988 including Princial Architect and Junior Programmer Trainee. ( I got into software after starting off as a lab technician in healthcare. )

The only people I know who are my age are those folks who truly are kings of their mountain. This is not what I envisioned. I helped raise a large family ( 5 children ), but I am constantly working in my head - regardless of whether I am at the keyboard or not.)

This is not what I expected; however, I've been paid very well, so I've been lucky - or my family has.

<comment><USER42> Sorry, I forgot to say I'm 54.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm 61. My solution: keep up technically and choose a mainstream topic valued/needed by your company and stay near cutting edge in it (at least relative to the others working there). And develop other skills that are in short supply. Choose subject areas that leverage experience over inexperience: like regulatory compliance, subject matter domain knowledge, knowing what tactics are best with difficult clients or problematic target areas.

Some general skills that I've found help... Excel at speaking (be concise, organized, prioritized, relevant, insightful). Excel at writing and editing (tech-related communication seems notoriously poor at most companies). Excel at presenting (again, too often there's lots of vagaries and hand waving).

If you come across as sharp and tuned in, I've found that it's almost impossible for others to dismiss you. That is, unless they're idiots. So make sure you're not surrounded by idiots. That's rule #1.

<comment><USER44> Excel at Excel. :)

(OK, maybe not for software companies but certainly for engineering and manufacturing companies.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's obvious: act young.

Die your hair and adopt the "lingo" of the cool dudes.

Like double barrel your boss with your fingers and wink and say "I like your style" no matter what he says.

Or if you agree with a colleague you say "fo shizzle" to gain their respect.

Refuse to program in anything old. All code has to be Haskell or whatever and throw in a neural network. If you can do that in a container you're home free.

<comment><USER18> Liberal use of the word "lit" when describing the latest and greatest framework always works for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> 10 years ago I was laid off. I had just turned 40, and was living in an area that didn't have the most robust job market (plus at the time the hiring outlook was terrible in general due to the financial crisis).

After looking locally to no avail... I added a new strategy: apply to various federal government jobs. Benefits include stability (although with the recent furlough maybe that isn't 100% rock solid) and no possibility of the job being outsourced/offshored, etc.

I'm 50 now, been a software developer for 25 years, still working for the government, and still enjoying it. Projects are varied, I have reasonable latitude in the programming I do (job is ~50% coding, ~50% other stuff), managers understand work/life balance. Yes I don't get stock options out the wazoo and other Silicon Valley style perks but I also have other hobbies and time to enjoy them. There are tradeoffs but overall I'm glad I did it.

<comment><USER47> Unfortunately a larger and larger part of federal staff are contractors, including most younger people I know who work for the Feds. Due to the misguided attempts of Congress to reduce spending, it's much easier to hire a contractor with 50% (at least) overhead rather than just hire them directly. Heck, a guy I know used to be a federal hydrogeologist. Worked in a gov't office on a permanent basis, was supervised by government employees, etc. He literally just received his paychecks and talked to his de jure boss twice a year. For that, the contracting company actually charged more than his salary in overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Regarding the topic of career longevity as a software engineer:

 _Focus on combining your software engineering skills with delivering value in a specific, core competency._

That is to say:

Good software engineers tend to focus on being good at programming, and all of the details that venture entails (e.g., mastery of specific languages, knowledge of specific ways of operating in a given framework, IDE, or tool, etc.).

Better software engineers are capable of all of the preceding, plus the ability to apply a deeper level of problem-solving ability that has been laser-focused by their experience in the art.

Superlative software engineers are capable of all of the preceding, plus the ability to leverage those skills to deliver value as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in a specific domain.

I believe that you have to be _more than just a programmer_ if you want to maximize your career's longevity, and its associated compensation package.

</comment><comment><USER49> To have longevity in a technical discipline you need to do one of two things: 1) choose a field that changes very slowly, or not at all, and become an expert in it; or 2) work in a quick changing field, but be prepared to learn quickly and compete with younger workers (means no wage premium just for seniority)

When it comes to 1), the best fields are ones where either hardware or regulatory issues slow evolution. Examples: embedded systems programming, working on highly regulated systems for the aviation, medical, or automobile industry.

Finally, and its not really in my list, but you could always create your own product or service. That's a sure way to protect your income against age prejudice. Nobody cares what age the developer of their software is ... they just want to know it works.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm relatively young, but it baffles me that there's age discrimination is an issue. Do companies think I won't like working with someone who's significantly older than me? What's the issue?

This is a bit of rhetorical question--I get that there are stereotypes and companies want to build young, hip teams, but personally I find it short- sighted and naive. I'd rather be on a diverse team, age included. If I go for an interview and see that everyone is a white male in the late twenties/early thirties, I'm going to be pretty disappointed no matter how many hipster toys they've got in the lobby. It's a sign that corporate politics and HR are going to be problematic.

<comment><USER51> There's another issue that I noticed when I was a hiring manager. Some people find it difficult to interview and manage people who are older and more experienced than them. Some feel uncomfortable giving orders to people who are their parents' age. Others feel uncomfortable with people who are much more experienced, maybe smarter than them. A young company with young founders and managers will tend to hire younger people more like themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> 51 here. To be completely honest, I personally haven't (yet) really felt any effects of ageism when it comes to work. Both in the past two years as a contractor, and before that as a perm, I have had more job opportunities than I could handle.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm 57. I've seen plenty of age discrimination, but primarily at large companies. Smaller companies don't seem to be nearly as prone to cutting people purely by age. Regardless of company stay current and maintain new skills. After 35 years of only software development, went back to my Electrical Engineering roots and doing hardware development and have developed 3 different boards and wrote the software stack for the boards. Companies that cut solely on age deserve the loss of good experience; their mistake.

</comment><comment><USER53> 51 here I'm the CEO, still write code.

</comment><comment><USER54> I am 31, my plan for the next 19 years until 50 is to Max out my Roth 401k and Roth IRA each year. Yep tax advantaged savings is key part of my plan.

<comment><USER16> This is the best advice I've seen here.

(Although you have to make it to 59 1/2 to withdraw without penalties!)

<comment><USER55> Except that you don't have to wait until 59 1/2 to withdraw it without penalties. You can start at 55 or earlier using the "Rule of 55" or SEPP exception depending on the retirement plan that you want to withdraw from.

[https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-rule- of-55-2894280](https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-rule-of-55-2894280)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm lucky enough to look young for my age, so I leave my early jobs off my resume, and don't put my graduation year on there.

While I don't exactly hide the fact that I'm in my late 40s, I do find myself avoiding some discussions at work that would show my age, like talking about my older experiences or making pop culture references from the '80s or '90s.

Yes, you can talk about making yourself so useful that age doesn't matter, etc., but the truth is that age discrimination is often an unconscious bias, and I just find it easier to "pass" as younger than to spend my energy trying to overcome it.

Of course I focus mostly on just being good at what I do. There are benefits to age. Experience and knowledge, of course, but hopefully also wisdom and temperament.

If there's one thing I'd like people to take away from this thread, particularly people in their 20s, it's to re-examine your unconscious biases about age. How often have you assumed something about a person because they were older than you, and what can you do to overcome that and judge them on their merits instead?

<comment><USER57> >How often have you assumed something about a person because they were older than you, and what can you do to overcome that and judge them on their merits instead?

I pretty much always think they are 'smarter' than me.

The only issue I've had with older folks is that they often say 'not my job'.

<comment><USER58> > The only issue I've had with older folks is that they often say 'not my > job'.

Which, from my experience, is not a bad thing. It's often a sign of someone who recognizes that meeting everyones else's expectations at the cost of their job expectations is short sighted and the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

And rarely does anyone have enough time to even meet their personal job expectations.

There are those whom are just lazy and only want to contribute the least amount possible, but I think you'll find that's not limited to older folks.

<comment><USER59> There are two sides of "not my job." There is the Art of Saying No where you protect your deliverables, and there is the non-team player who wont help others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> There are few teams that recognize you purely for what you bring to the table, you could be the baddest ass dev on the planet, but as a gray hair you may not be accepted, or a "culture fit" as is the universal excuse nowadays for "I don't like her/him". Truth be told most Millenials don't want to go have beers with someone that reminds them of their parent's whose basement that might still be living in, and we know that life in tech is immersive, your friends are your co-workers in many of these tech gulches.

The there is the idea that your new boss may be threatened by your skillet, which opens yet a whole other can o' worms. Age discrimination in the SF Bay Area is rampant, no one will ever admit it, but it's here. It's like gravity, one denies its existence at one's own peril. So get your botox, your skinny red jeans and your converse or whatever they're wearing these days - don't forget to ink up - even if they're temporaries :)

Oh and impossibly colored hair might help too.

p.s. laugh while you can monkey people.

</comment><comment><USER61> Late 50's. React/Redux developer. Always learn new things. Simply ask other developers if a company has a reputation to hire people my age. Most have a reputation to only hire people out of college or a few years older. I just don't waste my time with those companies. Look for small companies which have several people who look like me.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm 57. A self taught generalist who's been paid to do this since the early 80's

What keeps me going? There is just so much interesting stuff going on with computers - how can you ever get bored :)

There are a lot of people better than me, also younger than me, but I can still knock out solid code. I think not thinking I have mastered something keeps me going. There is massive churn in languages and technologies, all my COBOL / FCS / IBM Mainframes skills are consigned to the dumpster but they help me learn new things like C / CP/M / MSDOS / Assembler. Which got dumped for Unix (not Linux) / Macintosh (pre OSX) / Prolog / Lisp / C++

I'm now doing Python and Ruby on Rails and learning Nim and Virtual Reality

What a time to be alive!

Age discrimination - can't say I've noticed it but I've always expected to be judged by my abilities not may age. Perhaps I've been lucky

</comment><comment><USER63> I work at a high (senior) level as a (Javascript) developer and I'm 48. I'm not aware of being discriminated against - I never have trouble finding work (and I'm a contractor so I change jobs frequently). Perhaps that is part of it: it doesn't cross my mind that I might be discriminated against; it doesn't cross my mind to treat anyone younger than me different from anyone else. So my attitude to people is open: I am not defensive or resentful. I'm in the UK which has, as far as I can tell, less of an ageism problem than the US.

If I'm honest I'm probably a _little_ bit slower mentally with very challenging, complex problems than I was 15 years ago. But, I work with some of the highest paid people in the industry and I have never once thought to myself that I was out of my depth or slow technically compared to my colleagues - regardless of their age.

And there are real, big advantages to age / experience:

\- Technically I have great _breadth_ of experience: I'm (mainly) a front end developer but I've worked commercially in Node, C++, Java and PHP; I'm confident with server + database administration and dev-ops, complex application architecture and scaling. I'm the one that the senior managers turn to when they have problems / doubts / questions because I solve problems / answer questions for them - regardless of the tech stack.

\- I'm more mature emotionally and have _far_ better interpersonal skills and experience, meaning I am far more effective and pleasant to be with in a team. This is a _huge_ (way more important than technical skills) thing - particularly in today's work climate where it is not acceptable to be 'toxic'. I am experienced about getting my ideas across and giving feedback without being an asshole; I am unfazed if people are stressing out / blaming / ignoring / not listening to me. I am not egotistical, insecure or emotional and I have enough experience with office politics to know what is happening and what people are about.

</comment><comment><USER64> 42 year old manager, with most of my team 50+, being its a specialty embedded environment full of dinosaurs.

You better be technically very good. And not have too shitty of an attitude. Because you probably make a lot more than the youngsters.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've kept the same job for over 22 years. Hopefully it will last another 22...

</comment><comment><USER66> 55.

I moved to management position but still do development when no one is looking :)

My Co just published a worldwide press release over system I built over last Xmas break. So it's fun from all sides.

</comment><comment><USER67> Side questions if anybody answers this. How did you get your first job industry? I imagine corporation weren't like there are now and thought of code as black magic.

<comment><USER68> Late '90s, and it was just as hard as today. Applied to dozens of companies as a Senior in undergrad. Similar 1 on 20 response rate as today. I remember the interview—typical "solve this trivial thing in a language of your choice." Most college kids picked java. I picked x86 assembly and nailed it. In think that impressed someone.

<comment><USER69> Heh. The main shareware program I sold for a number of years was written in x86 assembler. The horror. The horror. :-) I was just reminded this afternoon when someone sent me a message on company chat asking if I was the person who wrote said program.

When I code these days, I'll take Python.

<comment><USER70> Well, what was the program you wrote? We wont judge you

<comment><USER69> Directory Freedom. DOS directory utility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> 56 here and still pounding away. Number one piece of advice: stay technical, contribute well, be part of the team, and enjoying coding!

</comment><comment><USER72> 55 years here. Fight complexity and sell it. Avoid head counters like hell. Go fast and steep. There is a market...

</comment><comment><USER73> Lots of good advice here. Just to add my two cents:

\- Stay (get?) fit.

\- Dress well.

\- Avoid public displays of curmudgeonliness.

\- Mentor the young, high-speed people.

</comment><comment><USER74> Be better than the competition. If a company looks at age they probably are losing good people anyway. I don't worry about it. I do Scala/Spark. I ask if they respect personal time. If they don't they are probably poorly managed.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm in the Toronto tech startup scene and I haven't really exexperienced age discrimination at a company level. Maybe at an individual level but not that I've noticed. I specialize in backent, SRE, and devops.

</comment><comment><USER76> Not really. I get a lot of spam from recruiters. I also get feeler from people I have worked with before. Last time I look for work, I got multiple job offers after one week. San Francisco's tech job market is hot.

</comment><comment><USER77> Always deliver superlative value, and your customers take care of you.

</comment><comment><USER78> There is no replacement for knowing your shit and being valuable.

</comment><comment><USER79> I am in ny early 30s and working on post graduate research at night. I do it because it is interesting but also to be employable in a academic context later in my life.

</comment><comment><USER80> I am 41 and work with a 68-year-old dev and a 51-year-old. Love coding and be apart of the team. Young guys will forget your age after a bit.

</comment><comment><USER81> I've just worked hard and tried to find opportunities to keep my skills current.

So far, I haven't noticed any problems. Less than a decade to go!

</comment><comment><USER74> Be better than the competition. If a company looks at age the probably are losing good people anyway. I don't sorry about it.

</comment><comment><USER82> Nice try, IBM!

</comment><comment><USER83> The same way i did at 25. Be better!

</comment><comment><USER84> Teaching.

</comment><comment><USER85> Quit and work at Starbucks. I do like the coffee, though.

</comment><comment><USER86> okay I am in this now...

My funnel is targeted for specific startup cofounders having trouble finding expert android devs...expert in the sense that they as either the tech cofounder or the creative cofounder already know that their android app should be on kotlin and using redux not MVI or MVVM.

Basically building the demo apps show them and start the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER87> Here's the thing, it's about your value proposition (what are you offering).

All things equal, how many days can you work without sleep? How much do you need to get paid to do the job?

Age is just a coincidental number that correlates (doesn't cause) to number being able to program for days on end without suffering increasing consequences, and getting a programming job for $15 / hr not being suitable to handle a mortgage, truck payment, kids braces, and the things that come with the higher age number.

So, if you are starting out at 40 and someone is competing for a beginner job at 18, they are going to be the obvious choice because 1) they are typically more of an open book, and 2) you can pay them $15 / hr to get the same work that you would need to charge $40/hr to do.

That being said. The other side of it is if you have been programming since you were 7 and are now 42 with 20 solid years of professional experience competing with Joe Youngster who wrote his first line of code last year and has been to a programming boot camp.

Part of the issues are that you still have the stigma of 1) not being able to sacrifice time/sleep for code, 2) are more expensive.

Both of which are accurate.

However, if you are competing for a job that an 18 year old qualifies for after 20 years of experience, something is amiss.

I've seen this MANY times and am guilty of it myself, where a person will spend years spinning their wheels and not actually increasing their skills. It happens to a lot of people. You could get the same year of experience 20 times over (there was a good article written about that, good read, don't have the link handy). So "20 years of experience" boils down to 1 year of experience that you have practiced 20 times over.

After 20 years, younger programmers should not be able to compete with you. Not because they can't write code as well as you. It has nothing to do with that.

But the experience should have taught you and made second-nature all the design patterns, all the best practices, all the security tricks, all the devops.

An 18 yo can code, but they can't build a palace out of code yet (and if they can, they are typically swept up quickly). It takes years to go from knowing how to lay a brick to how to design a brick building to never crumble even if someone is beating it with a fallen tree.

While age descrimination exists (the concept of a senior developer is iffy sometimes), and I experienced it for the first time last year when someone said "no thanks" and hung up when they asked how any years experience I have; it doesn't exist when you are actually shooting for jobs that require 20 legitimate years of experience.

Some programmers settle back knowing they could code the world, but don't actually do it. Or code something twice as fast. Or 5 times as solid. Or with 567% less bugs.

What makes the 20 year experience you better than the 19 year experience you?

If you cannot sell that one year of difference, then it's not age discrimination, it's skill discrimination.

And to answer your actual questions.... :-D

What is your stack: After 21 years, I've work in .Net/Java/Node.js/LAMP(erl&HP) stacks plus tinkered with others. Now I do application security.

How have you gotten around age discrimination: When I've been discriminated against, I feel like I dodged a bullet, because who would want to work with / for someone that judges the content of a book by the wear of the spine?

How do you suss out whether a company is right for you? I focus on team and personal questions when I interview a company. What's the team culture, do they support members teaching each other, do they foster speaking at conferences, etc. The more information flow between developers and the industry the better, generally. That indicates a supportive culture rather than a competitive culture. Ask to speak to people you will be working with. "Their references".

I ask personal questions of interviewers. What is their next skill they are going to work on? What was the last issue they tackled that really taught them something new? Do they seem themselves with this company in 10 years? What was the last conference they attended? Was that on their own time? When was the last time they had an opportunity to speak at a conference?

Don't worry about getting into personal questions relating to their job.

I've found that tells me more (not necessarily their answers, but also how they answer) about the culture than the standard shpiels.

It's ALL about culture. A crap boss and crap co-workers will never be made for with good pay or high-skills in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER88> I haven't

</comment><comment><USER89> being good

</comment><comment><USER90> Sure but it's not the only descrimination my friend who is also 50 faced.

She's been working in tech companies for long and it's sad that some 20 somethings call her MILF when she's not around.

Age descrimination is a very small thing in the grand scheme of things, so she said she doesn't feel much descriminated as age is a proxy for experience if you are good with what you do.</comment>


Intellectual property's social value may trump copyright law - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-weaver20feb20,0,1675278.story <comment><USER2> The guy is quite ignorant. First, "oral rehydration therapy" is not about copyrights, but it theoretically could be patentable. Second, there _are_ taxes on patents - that's what those post-award fees are.

<comment><USER3> Whether "oral rehydration therapy" is copyrightable is beside the point. That aside by the author doesn't weaken his main claim. There are no taxes on copyrights. Yet, my company has to pay taxes on all its other assets. Why shouldn't copyright be treated the same way?</comment></comment>


You're solving the wrong problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/ <comment><USER2> Slightly similar lesson I learned when developing games (and other 3d apps). Make sure your debug-output is so good that you don't have to start the debugger before you already have an idea what's going on. Simple stuff like - your 2d and 3d cursor positions can be printed on screen always. You can add lines and polygons which are visible for debugging in your code with a single line (and you only comment them out afterward and don't remove them as you will need them again). When developing things like A* - make sure you can print every value on screen easily. Adding all those kind of easy debug- outputs is usually worth it over and over again and still it often only gets added to a project after people get stuck on the algorithms for too long. So right problem in 3D-development: debug output first.

<comment><USER3> If/then guards are better than commenting out code, so you can toggle debug at runtime, or hardcode a constant to get an optimized production build that skips the if-check.

<comment><USER2> You need both. The thing with easy debug-output is that you start using it so much that you simply get too much stuff on the screen at the same time if you keep it all enabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges."

I think this is untrue: people were solving the right problem, but doing so with insufficient tools. MacCready's solution was to improve the tools, but other alternatives (for example, hiring a thousand engineers and building a thousand planes a year) would have found the same answer. Of course that answer would have come at a much higher cost and for this problem it would have been uneconomical, but there are plenty of domains where MacCready's approach would have been suboptimal.

"Iterate faster" is a good lesson that I think is probably applicable for all of us, but the temptation to solve tangential problems is a hard one to resist and often unnecessary.

<comment><USER5> Check out _The Mythical Man-Month_ for a refutation of this.

Quoting from memory:

\- Nine women cannot have a baby in one month.

\- Adding more developers to a late project makes it later.

The problem is that in order for throwing a thousand engineers at the problem to be time-effective, each one must communicate what he has learned to all of the others. That takes time and adds friction.

<comment><USER6> Your examples are only true because gestation and many software projects are not easily parallelizable. It's a rule of thumb that applies to many scenarios, but obviously not all. If it takes 2 hours for one person to mow his lawn, then 2 people could mow it in about 1 hour. 100 people really can lift 100 times the weight of one person. Not to mention that nine women _can_ have nine babies in nine months.

Making many different aircraft prototypes simultaneously is certainly parallelizable, although it obviously would be enormously expensive.

<comment><USER7> In experimental tasks, parallelizing does not provide the same gain in success probability as accelerating the process of prototyping.

Building prototypes in parallel does not provide the benefit of a feedback loop, as the iterative process does.

Let's say you have a 10% probability of success on the first attempt, which improves by 40% after each experiment (to 14%, 19.6%...), and you have resources for 5 attempts. The chance of getting at least one successful solution is: parallel ~ 40.95%; iterative ~ 72.19%

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The secret to making things easy: avoid hard problems"

[http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/secret-to-making- th...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/secret-to-making-things-easy- avoid-hard.html)

<comment><USER9> _[...]while YouTube built a product that people actually used (using PHP and MySQL, I think, which is not at all technically impressive)_

Just some fact checking. Could someone confirm this? I've been told in the past that Youtube was originally built with Python.

<comment><USER8> That's why he qualified it with "I think". Facebook was built with PHP. You get the point.

<comment><USER9> I did get the point, but next thing you know, in some random discussion, here I am telling people that Youtube was actually developed with PHP/MySQL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wonderful ideas, and I love the discussion. Taking a step back and managing the meta-process are very helpful skills if used at the right time.

I found the previous discussion interesting as well:

"The problem is we don't understand the problem" (April 2011) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2591367>

</comment><comment><USER11> In this case, the problem domain is still very well understood and success is easily defined in concrete terms: human powered flight across a distance.

In startups, you often start with one problem in mind but stumble on another (and another, and another...). And even when you solve the technical problem, you still have to solve the business model problem.

Yes, you may solve the problem of finding the cheapest flight through search, but can it make money? And how long will it take to break even? etc etc

<comment><USER12> So redefine the problem as "Use my software skills to address an unmet need in a sufficiently large market" or "find a scalable business model" or something else along those lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yep, this seems to be a problem with developing modern medicines, trying to cure cancer, etc. The pipeline is a decade long.

<comment><USER14> > medicines, cancer...

<http://www.forksoverknives.com>

<comment><USER15> I know you have good intentions, but that documentary wasn't very realistic -- it wasn't really well-grounded in science.

For example, they keep presenting an argument about how milk protein is harmful because lab rodents developed liver cancer when fed with a diet of 20% milk protein, as opposed to rats fed with a diet of 5% milk protein. What they don't mention is that many of the rats fed 5% milk protein died.

In terms of meat, they don't make a logically sound argument against eating lean white meat or fish. Fish can be extremely healthy and nutritious. Every argument presented in that movie applies mainly to red meats or unhealthily- cooked white meats. They just use red meats as an example, and then make generalizations.

And like most documentaries, they include anecdotes to keep your attention.

It's a movie with good intentions (it's a lot easier for the average American to be healthy just by cutting down on meat consumption), but exaggerated claims (meat -- especially fish and lean white meats -- and milk protein isn't going to kill you, and can actually be very nutritious).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree with hythloday's observation that, in this instance, the problem stayed consistent, it was the process that needed fixing.

While the prize hopefuls were only focused on the outcome, MacCready realized that the process was equally important.

You can observe this in many industries. Find the biggest bottleneck in the process, solve that problem, develop faster, rinse and repeat.

All in all, a very valuable lesson I think.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone explain to me how one can use the "iterate faster" method to build highly reliable systems?

How would Google look like if they were to release GMail using an "iterate faster" mentality? Your INBOX just got accidentally erased because of our UI bug. Oops sorry, we'll release a fix in 5 minutes.

How about Windows? or a generic OS driver? Oops, your machine is just blue- screening now. Don't worry, we'll just release an update in an hour. It'll certainly make your OS drivers _very_ reliable.

Don't confuse the Web 2.0 "iterate faster" era with "the right way". Building "iterate faster" systems is easy. Building systems "the right way" is hard.

<comment><USER18> From the article:

> Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are > trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong > problem.

I bet GMail and Windows do iterate and fail fast, internally. They probably often do fix bugs within 5 minutes, and have continuous integration tests running at least hourly. This is "the right way", and yes, it's hard. You don't see the fast iterations in the final product, but that doesn't meant they're not there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Disney's seminal film was not Sleeping Beauty and it was not in 1959. It was Snow White and The Seven Dwarves, twenty-two years earlier, in 1937.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again."

I think this line best summarizes the article, and applies in problems beyond engineering.

</comment><comment><USER21> > If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you > are solving the wrong problem.

I disagree. If your goal is to create something great, you aren't necessarily so misguided—how you go about realising that goal is what's relevant. The Gossamer Condor was no less a masterpiece for having been created iteratively.

</comment><comment><USER22> In solving the "right" problem more constraints were added to solving the "wrong" problem. These constraints helped in solving the wrong problem. Often constraints, self imposed or not(ie limited resources, etc..), produce innovative solutions.

</comment><comment><USER9> Improvements over small iterations. I think nowadays they'd call it _Agile_.

<comment><USER23> I think it's time for a new word to describe that concept. The word "agile" has been co-opted by process dweebs for their latest bureaucratic nightmare.

"Fleet-footed" perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of Fred Brooks' concept of essential complexity and accidental complexity:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet>

</comment><comment><USER25> The core of this seems to be a different way of looking at the "XY Problem": <http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem>

</comment><comment><USER26> That's like taking your favourite language REPL and putting it to work in real life :)

</comment><comment><USER27> A lot of time is spent before we realise that we are solving the wrong problem.</comment>


Security flaw in French government messaging app exposed confidential info - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/security-flaw-in-french-government-messaging-app-exposed-confidential-conversations/ <comment><USER2> Is it the same everywhere?</comment>


Dungeons and Dragons, not chess and Go: why AI needs roleplay - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/dungeons-and-dragons-not-chess-and-go-why-ai-needs-roleplay <comment><USER2> >Instead of the Turing test, perhaps we need an elf ranger test?

No. The author is trying to be funny, but the Turing test already encompasses this. The rest of the article is meandering.

Edit: And the whole intro of "These computer scientists play chess and go, so they wrote bots to do it. They should instead write a bot that plays the game I like instead, then it would be 'real' AI". Come on. The hypocrisy is palpable.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. Playing a vague, open-ended collaborative game like D&D is a far more complex challenge for AI than something as bounded and calculable as chess or go. Computers are great at rapid calculation, but to be intelligent in a human sense, you need to be able to deal with vague associations and unclear boundaries.

You see similar problems with self-driving cars. They may know the rules, the physics and the street signs, but they apparently still have trouble deciding whether a shadow is an object or not, whether a plastic bag blowing across the street is something you can ignore or not, that a ball rolling onto the street can mean that a child will soon run after it, etc.

We can think outside the box, AI can't. Not yet, at least.

<comment><USER2> The Turing test is not "chess or go". It's the ability to converse with a human about anything, including art, poetry, and yes, that almost certainly includes D&D. Unless you think D&D is easier than discussing poetry, then your point is moot.

I'd argue that if you want to solve the ability to tell a story, D&D is a terrible stepping stone. The arguments in this article are weak (You need to play in person, and physically roll the dice? ReallY?). No serious scientist thinks that's necessary.

<comment><USER3> I took the comment about the Turing test as a joke. I doubt anyone would think it's about chess or go. Yes, being able to pass the Turing test would include being able to play D&D and participate in many other social activities.

But D&D doesn't have to be at the bottom of the list of things to focus on to pass the Turing test. In fact, I don't consider passing the Turing test all that interesting as a goal. But being able to deal with complex, open-ended, social situations, would be an interesting goal for AI.

AI does very well in limited situations, when there's a clear box to think inside of. But there are many situations, including self-driving cars, or playing a game like D&D, where there's no real limit to the things that are relevant to the activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> By these criteria, Dwarf Fortress embodies the greatest AI ever developed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1002/](https://xkcd.com/1002/)

Computer Arimaa and Go have since surpassed top humans, but I suppose D&D could be on the same level as Calvinball.

<comment><USER2> Tests like "Plays D&D" are bad, because you don't need to advance the tech to create convincing fakes. Just like how people wrote a chat bot that was written to "act" like an 8 year old, so if it ever got a question it wasn't programmed to know how to answer, it could just change the subject or otherwise act "childlike" as it's failure state. This was convincing to humans who were not expecting the deceit (from the programmers), but did not mean that the chatbot was more advanced in it's AI than other bots.

You can preprogram a chat bot to pretend to be a stoic monk who says very little, and could probably convince some folks that it was a real human playing the game as long as it took it's turn as expected, and rolled dice when asked.</comment></comment>


The Senators that introduced a bill to let telecoms sell your internet history - <AUTHOR> https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/03/24-senators-introduced-bill-let-telecoms-sell-private-internet-history/ <comment><USER2> In no way am I disputing the accuracy of the article, or the necessity for alarm and precautions. I will however say, that PIA sells the kind of services you might look for to combat such measures, so consider the source too.

<comment><USER3> So if telecoms can't legally sell the data, doesn't that mean that there is no need for the services of PIA?

<comment><USER4> There are many uses for a VPN beyond this privacy concern. My two reasons I use it are: 1\. I'm on someone else's wifi that I don't fully trust (or is an open wifi) 2\. I need to "be" in a country different than where I'm currently using my computer. This is the most common need, since I'm an American expat living in Netherlands (and traveling in other countries).

<comment><USER2> As someone who enjoys British television, but is maddened by geoblocking of content that _is not otherwise available, even for purchase_... yes, just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do I order the Internet history of Senators?

</comment><comment><USER6> Things like this, more than anything else, are what makes me wonder how anyone can view Republicans as anything short of working against their constituents. It just baffles me.

Why would _anyone_ want this?

<comment><USER7> Americans might prefer ad subsidized isp service.

We by and large want ad subsidized browsers, email, phone operating systems, television, you name it.

Why should the law protect privacy for only one service when Hundreds of billions of dollars of spying goes on in other industries?

<comment><USER8> If there was a free market in ISP service, that would be perfectly fine. Almost all of the US is nowhere near a free market in ISP service.

I've never understood why libertarians believe in the market so much that they believe in the markets which aren't free.

<comment><USER9> Really? I've never met a libertarian that thought that local licensure (data/voice/video transport, taxis, hair-dressers, coffin-makers, whatever) was anything but a corruptocrat's protection racket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, with untrustworthy politicians and super dodgy ISPs like these, who needs the CIA to spy on you? At least the CIA would keep it more or less in house.

<comment><USER11> It's a feature. If they're allowed to disclose it, and you agree to the terms of service, what expectations of privacy do you have?

<comment><USER12> And that would be awesome if we had meaningful competition (and, in this case, I mean more than even _two_ providers) from local Internet providers.

It is not out of the realm of possibility, if ISPs and mobile providers start putting in "you agree by subscribing to our services that we can harvest, sell, package, and distribute your access history to any company we deem suitable" their terms of service, that I wouldn't have any choice of provider who _doesn 't_ do this.

If both Comcast and CenturyLink do this, I'm SOL for wireline broadband. If T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon all do this--and why wouldn't they all, as a group?--I'm SOL for wireless service.

So that's six companies to completely foreclose having a choice.

<comment><USER13> By the way. What are the obstacles for new ISPs in the US? Is it municipality- related issues (cities disallow building any new networking infrastructure and no fibers/lambdas available for rent, or availabe only at prohibitive prices), or peering issues (peering prices are impossible or no one even wants to accept you as a peer unless you're a big telco) or something else?

I just worked for about ten years for various ISP companies in Russia (in a relatively small town), including one "start-up" ISP where I was a first and only software engineer until we had grown up. While I haven't dealt with actual physical aspect, or legal issues, I had an impression that white things were sort of unpleasant, it wasn't prohibitive. So, curious how things are in US and why there are regions with almost monopolistic ISPs. Thought US must've had a freer market than our post-USSR legacy with all the licensing and regulations.

<comment><USER12> There are two big obstacles:

1) Building a last-mile network is _very expensive_. There is a lot of backbone-style fiber in the ground but getting end customers connected to that network is a complex maze of permits, digging, pole attachments, and so on. Just the manpower alone is staggering. Verizon spent years and billions on it and all they have to show for it now is a disgruntled former CEO and having fobbed off 2/3rds of their former wireline territories off onto Frontier and Fairpoint.

2) There is _a lot_ of people-based inertia to overcome. As individuals, people object to having streets dug up, new equipment boxes planted in places, and all of the general dust and noise that construction of any kind creates. Plus your competitors will try to throw up roadblocks and, let's face it, they have more money and influence than you do. And if you want to do more than serve single-family houses and townhouses, you will have to negotiate with building owners for access. Even when the residents are the owners, like condominiums, there's still a process to gain access to walls.

Then you have to consider how you get your wires from A to B; do you go above ground (easier but then you have to get access to the poles, which may be privately owned, and then you contend with the owners of the poles and the people who consider any new wires on poles to be unsightly) or do you bury (digging up streets, sidewalks, and utility easements has gotten a lot easier but you are still bound to disturb something and Woe Betide You if you accidentally hit a natural gas line)? And then, if you want to serve an "area" instead of "a city," what do you do when you need to cross city or county borders? Or a major highway (that's likely owned by the state government)? Not all cities are compact; take Dallas, it is both _large_ and contains _three_ separate municipalities inside of its general area.

So, yeah, it's really hard and it gets harder the more people you have in a space, though the subscriber possibilities are much greater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't this data already exist in the form of ISP data brokers? I'm thinking of data that makes its way to into the hands of some marketing companies that show anonomized URL level traffic for a given website. Essentially giving you ability to see analytics on a website you don't own. Anybody know who the big players/ISP data brokers are?

</comment><comment><USER15> Is the article overblown? I thought the bill was about removing regulations that was hard to enforce technically... I didn't thought the bill gave a black check to telcos to sell internet history without consent.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a certain good aspect to this. Users should be aware that networks (any, be it their FTTH or a WiFi hotspot in some cafe) can - theoretically and practically - access and analyze their traffic.

I'm NOT saying that such capability or legality of third parties accessing that data is a good or bad thing. It's complicated. I'm sure only that the fact that proper user awareness on this matter is a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER16> Surprised and disappointed to see rand paul there

<comment><USER17> Why surprised? It seems perfectly in line with American Libertarianism: Let the corporation do whatever it wants and tell the customer to go to (or create) a competitor.

If someone complains about monopolies or power-imbalances, simply blame the government, and assure them that removing all regulation will _eventually_ fix the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why does the article mention net neutrality?

</comment><comment><USER19> They are oddly content with the Obama Administration having that same policy for 97% of its tenure and the same effect for 100% of its tenure (the rule to limit it was only put in a _week_ before the election and had yet to take effect).

</comment><comment><USER20> What is the _actual_ plan? To harvest DNS requests?

<comment><USER13> That, and NetFlow (or similar) records. While that's just "metadata"-level stuff it can basically reveal a lot about anyone's daily habits.

If a network really wants to dig into the traffic, L7 protocol analyzers (plain HTTP requests, SNI from TLS handshakes, etc) can be quite close (not exactly, but given some statistical tricks - very close) to what someone may see standing behind one's shoulder.

And I've heard some ISPs are really into the foul game, and were caught injecting their own JS into non-authenticated traffic. That was to inject some warnings or ads or whatever (I've read that, like, an year ago and forgot the details), but it could also be spyware^W telemetry, diagnostics and analytics service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What a hilariously misleading title.</comment>


Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best - <AUTHOR> https://www.loggly.com/blog/regexes-the-bad-better-best/ <comment><USER2> > In General, the Longer Regex Is the Better Regex

I'd rather word this as "more specific is better". Like say for a U.S. phone number (minus area code for simplicity),

        \d{3}-?\d{4}

is better than

        .*-?.*

because it's more specific.

"Longer is better" is only useful for helping _identify_ which regex is better, not for helping _write_ better regexes.

<comment><USER3> In many environments,

       [0-9]{3}-?[0-9]{4}

is even more specific (and faster) because \d would match other digit characters outside of [0-9].

<comment><USER4> taking it to the next level:

[0-9][0-9][0-9]-?[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Where "Best" = "Most performant". Of course, there's other ways to judge a regex - readability, specificity, robustness...

In most places I used regexes, efficiency is the least of my concerns, though for a company whose product is focused around parsing massive amounts of logs, focusing on performance does make sense.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord The RegexBuddy author has a good article on this same phenomenon, dubbed "catastrophic backtracking": [http://www.regular- expressions.info/catastrophic.html](http://www.regular- expressions.info/catastrophic.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> How would the regex below compare in this case? That is, modifying the "bad" regex to use the lazy-consumption trick on (almost) all of the `. _` patterns.

      /.*? (.*?)\[(.*?)\]:.*/

</comment><comment><USER7> Okay but think:

If you are searching a very large file for a very few occurrences of the expected match then this optimization is not so bad.

If you are running line-by-line through a very large log file to extract _just_ those two pieces of information per line, then throw away the first N characters in each line (where N is the hopefully-constant length of your timestamps plus that space char) and start the regex engine at the beginning of the expected match. Then it doesn't have to waste _any_ time passing over those chars.

Even if the exact details above aren't quite right the principal is (and is well-known): Avoid premature optimization! (And the corollary: Measure it. Profile your code, don't guess, you're probably wrong.)

<comment><USER8> There's a higher order solution. Read the AWK book, do the exercises, then ignore blog posts about regexps. Make an exception when it's Russ Cox demonstrating how often this wheel has been reinvented in square form.

<comment><USER9> Which AWK book? The one by A, W, and K?

<comment><USER8> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Awk and grep use the Thompson NFA algorithm which is in fact significantly faster in almost every way but supports a more limited set of features."

AFAIK the only feature of regexes that require backtracking are back- references, as long as your regex doesn't use it why doesn't PCRE switch to the more efficient algorithm, and use the backtracking algorithm only if you actually need the feature that requires backtracking?

<comment><USER11> Backtracking is required in a lot of cases. Consider matching the pattern /^(AA|AB)*$/ against the string "AAAAAAAAB". Before it can come up with the answer (it doesn't match) the engine has to backtrack all the way from right to left.

<comment><USER10> that can be compiled to a state machine where a decision to switch states is taken based on current character only, and when all input is consumed you are either in an accepting or rejecting state. In your case I think it only needs 2 states: state 0 moves to state 1 when it sees an A, and state 1 moves to state 0 when it sees either A or B. For your string it'll be in state 0 when it sees a B and thus rejects it.

<comment><USER12>
                       ┌┐
                       ↓│
                   ┌────┴┐
                ┌─→│     │←──┐
                │  └─────┘   │
           ╔════╧═╗       ┌──┴──┐
        ├─→║      ╟───A──→│     │
           ╚══════╝       └─┬───┘
               ↑            │
               └─────A,B────┘

Three states if you want to process the whole input. If your model is "reject when you fail to find an appropriate transition" rather than "reject if, after processing the string, you're in a reject state", then you don't need the failure trap and you can do it in two states.

Backtracking is definitely not required, nor helpful.

<comment><USER13> That diagram is quite pretty, did you just hand code it?

<comment><USER12> Yeah, all manual. :/

[http://unicode-table.com/en/blocks/box-drawing/](http://unicode- table.com/en/blocks/box-drawing/)

[http://unicode-table.com/en/sets/arrows-symbols/](http://unicode- table.com/en/sets/arrows-symbols/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Using this Perl module you can walk step-by-step through what a regexp engine actually does given a regexp and a string to match against:

[https://metacpan.org/pod/Regexp::Debugger](https://metacpan.org/pod/Regexp::Debugger)

After installing the module it can be started simply by calling `rxrx` on the command line.

</comment><comment><USER15> Surely the simplest optimisation to add would be anchors? Instead of starting the 'good' line "[12]", start it "^[12]".

As it stands, the 'good' regex will look through the whole line for any occurrence of 1 or 2 in the line, then start applying the rest of the regex from there. Putting an anchor in means it only looks at the first character for that 1 or 2.

</comment><comment><USER16> Inspiring post - I'll be sure to put extra thought into how I write my regexes from here on out.

Does anyone know a good browser-based game that trains you to do regexes well?

</comment><comment><USER17> Bug in the month matching, instead of [01]\d which will also match 13-19, maybe try something like: (0[1-9]|[1-9]|1[0-2]) [https://goo.gl/RMv4x2](https://goo.gl/RMv4x2)</comment>


Twitter Reaches Deal to Show Tweets in Google Search Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-05/twitter-said-to-reach-deal-for-tweets-in-google-search-results

<comment><USER2> I don't think Twitter realizes the value of their own search engine. If Twitter could dedicate more resources towards approximate string matching, and put Twitter search as the main attraction on the logged out homepage, it could drive adoption of Twitter among casual users. I should be able to search "new Mugabe meme" after hearing about it, and Twitter should show me pictures of his recent fall, with real-time updates.

But as of now it's pretty much an exact match search, which is frustrating if you don't know the exact term you're looking for(in my example, the exact term is "Mugabe fall"). On to of that, it's hidden away from the logged out homepage. Rather than tackle this problem themselves, they've outsourced the heavy lifting to Google. What a MySpace move

<comment><USER3> I disagree, I think they did this in order to capture _more_ users. Not everyone uses Twitter. I believe Twitter is shooting for the "everyone" demographic, not just kids, the media/artists and tech-savvy people who got into it "before it was cool". If that is true, that means they are attempting to leverage Google, which everyone's already using, in an attempt to boost their legitimacy as a source of real-time information and get more exposure. Twitter's a media company, after all, so they are looking for more and more exposure whenever they can get it. It wouldn't be surprising to see your strategy implemented at Twitter after this deal has come and gone, if Twitter is playing their cards right they will have actually used Google to steal at least some of Google's search traffic away from them.

That said, I also don't believe Twitter's long game is search. I think they're trying to re-invent how we access information. Instead of searching for something, what if you could subscribe to a topic and just get information handed to you constantly?

<comment><USER4> > Not everyone uses Twitter.

Twitter in particular is one of the cases where places like HN disappointingly fall for the fallacy of assuming that their observations are an unbiased sample (and thus that "most/tons of people use Twitter"). Twitter's numbers have always been shockingly low (compared to their influence); I remember finding out a couple years ago that active members of the narrowest possible metric of actual social usage of Google+ roughly matched or outpaced Twitter (this was before many of the integrations like Youtube which may have drawn more people to the G+ stream). That was the case for quite a long amount of time.

It's probably great news for Twitter that their user numbers so badly lag their influence, since that means the potential for growth is very, very high (though it does raise the question why this gap exists to such an unusual degree).

<comment><USER5> Definitely true! I think they're also going for other places where Twitter doesn't affect most people, talk South America, Africa, Asia... It's just this North American perspective that gets people out of context. The world's kind of a big place, y'know

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There were some rumors [1] recently that Google was considering to buy Twitter.

Now I don't know if there's anything to that, but in light of Facebook snatching up Instagram, (not to mention WhatsApp), Google moving in on Twitter seems like a fairly logical counter-move.

And just think of all the data!

My point is, this deal might be at Google's initiative, not Twitter's, and might represent the first step in that direction. It's just conjecture, of course..

[1]: [http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/23/google-is-absolutely- posit...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/23/google-is-absolutely-positively- not-going-to-buy-twitter-yet/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand how this is a good deal for Twitter, Stackoverflow and any website that generates content and makes money using ads

Google generates revenue via ads, the same business you are in. And Google has a huge advantage. Embedding content into their search stream makes Google better, and stickier.

If Twitter is giving away it's content to Google, it's probably not at the premium it could charge for ads on it's marketplace but at huge discount via an API

This doesn't fair well for any website in this category. Google has found a way to compete with you for page views

<comment><USER8> If it wasn't a good deal, Twitter wouldn't be doing it. They were in the position of power and chose to trade it for something.

Twitters growth hasn't been the greatest over the past little while, improving their discoverability and brand power is bound to help them in the future. And there's always the potential for promoted tweets to show up in Google searches, which in turn helps twitter sell more ads.

<comment><USER9> >If it wasn't a good deal, Twitter wouldn't be doing it.

People make bad deals all the time. Surely the issue isn't that more people need to discover Twitter, but that they have to make more money from those who are already on it?

<comment><USER10> But since marketeers basically consider "reach" to be the most significant measure of utility the two points are necessarily in conflict. Bottom line could be that if you have more reach, your paid services are more valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What am I missing here? How does seeing tweets (unless they are intelligently selected) help me when searching for something on Google?

As of late: I only rely on Google for finding the best place to get an answer for a question I know exists in reliable places for the subject matter (re: programming, cooking, etc.). If I suddenly start seeing tweets in my search results, how does that improve my search experience?

The immediate exception that comes to mind would be related to real-time events, but even then...how much value can 140 characters be for the website that has indexed "everything?"

<comment><USER12> Might be something like Bing where searching a famous person's name would return a lot of content about them [1], such as their social media links, songs, movies or TV shows they were involved in [2], Wikipedia excerpts, photos, etc. They might just embed that user's tweets or something in the search results now. Also note the "Tweeted about Bill Gates" section in the first link.

[1] [http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=Bill+Gates&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=bill+gates&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=1701107824094c0eae51bb8239789d3c)

[2] [http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QB...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=Pharrell&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=pharrell&sc=8-14&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=67ED1A820B014897B99A123867E654E1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know there's no single number to quantify this, but I really wonder what the signal to noise ratio on Twitter is. Sure, if you follow good accounts there are some gems from time to time, but it seems the vast majority of tweets are just complete wastes of time and resources, spraying out at a ridiculous rate.

For this to add value to Google SERPs, they're going to have to dedicate some real time, energy, and resources to process all of those tweets, something I think I wish they'd spend on other stuff than identifying which tweets are about someone's cat or not.

<comment><USER14> Twitter has a very good signal to noise ratio for me so far, even with images, videos and promotion tweets (which are all detrimental to quality). Part of that success is the ease with which I can follow/unfollow people. It is often the second point of contact to people I met somewhere, e.g. conferences or other social gatherings. That said I have just uninstalled the mobile app, because I got an e-mail promoting private messaging (why?) and get the overall feeling, that I am no longer the target demographic for Twitter (tech savvy power users that tweet themselves vs. mostly consuming VIP followers?!) since Twitter does much to worsen my experience (aforementioned imgs, videos, muting, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This could go quite wrong for Twitter. Twitter's current loyal and core userbase uses it to express a personal opinion, a random thought or an emotion, often peppered with slang words and abbreviations.

If people start targeting the tweets for Google Searches, the network might become a hotchpotch of tweets optimized with SEO terms, which would be quite irritating for most Twitter and Google Search users.

<comment><USER4> This deal was already in place for years (until 2011). The importance/usage of Twitter relative to Google was even lower then, and yet we didn't see this happen on any sort of meaningful scale.

<comment><USER15> Ok, I didn't know that. But you would agree that the social networking scene has changed a lot since 2011. Facebook was so much more personal and fun back then. I was just brooding over the fact that the Jordan pilot was burnt alive by IS two days back and not a single post about the incident showed up on my feed (I've 400 friends on fb). And I used to be quite vocal about such things 2-3 years back, but even I've lost interest in posting anything emotional now. Social networks have just become tools for marketeers and a personalized newsletter for me, with the occasional comments and likes I would make on a friend's post.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree. A simple "X didn't happen before so it won't happen now" is missing the fact that the environment has massively changed with respect to usage and influence of Twitter and Google. As I said though, this change has been in _favor_ of Twitter if anything (which stands to reason, since Google was already a leviathan by then and Twitter was still quite young). So if anything one would expect the push to sacrifice Twitter's quality for SEO on Google to be less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Twitter says that working to make some of its hashtag pages friendly to search engines has generated a huge increase in search-related visits [http://searchengineland.com/twitter-seo-more- visitors-208160](http://searchengineland.com/twitter-seo-more-visitors-208160)

</comment><comment><USER17> So, as a user of Google search, can I expect crap to show up in my search results that I was managing to avoid by not using Twitter regularly?

</comment><comment><USER18> The giants of the web continue to profit themselves at the cost of an open internet.

<comment><USER19> Fear not, the internet will route around this damage soon enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Firehose...more like a sewage pipe.

God I hope there will be a Chrome extension to block this mental diarrhea from reaching my search results page.</comment>


Founder - <AUTHOR> https://www.gospik.com <comment><AUTHOR> Gospik helps you add comments to Google search while you are searching for stuff on Google. Stop inventing topics in order to talk about, but talk about topics you are searching on Google , right on Google Search. No more with tones of forums where none have been since 2010 :). You don't have to build lists of friends /fans/followers to have 1% audience , the biggest audience is right there, on Google and with Gospik application help you can grab it !</comment>