terrywilcox

No sarcasm at all. Child abandonment is clearly bad for the child and can see the parent thrown in jail.

Adoption is the better choice for both parties.

I think you perhaps missed the broader point though.

If you're raising children as servants to take care of you when you're old, then yes, self-interest is a good reason to keep them around. They will also likely act in their own self-interest and ditch you.

Otherwise, raising a child requires a great deal of self-sacrifice with absolutely no guarantee that you'll even get the satisfaction of a job well done. It's a total crap shoot and even the emotional return on your investment is likely to be poor.

Acting only in your own self-interest is a good way to stay single and childless though. At least you'd have plenty of time to read Ayn Rand.

I can't explain why you're wrong about kids and self-interest. It's something you have to experience for yourself.

You may have an epiphany about the 50th time you yell "watch out for that car". I swear she _wants_ me to have a heart attack.

Correct. Put him up for adoption instead.

I recommend not having children if you're only keeping them as long as it serves your self interest.

If I kept my longest tenure family members and laid off the new ones, my kid would be pretty unimpressed. Family does not work that way.

The term you're looking for is "buddies".

So nothing in Linux is new technology?

I'm guessing you didn't get past the headline.

Which one is which?

I don't want to be fired. I want to be downsized with a large compensation package.

If phones are no less secure when the existence of a vulnerability is disclosed, why do we prefer security researchers to notify the manufacturer before disclosing the vulnerability?

And perhaps the vulnerability in question wouldn't work against your iPhone, but how many millions of iPhones still use a short passcode? This vulnerability could still affect all of those phones.

You've just reinforced my point.

You understand that you are unaware of the younger generation's pop culture (pop music is as much part of pop culture as TV is), but you don't understand how people of my generation can be unaware of your generation's pop culture.

Learning doesn't get much harder. Making time to learn gets much harder.

The real problem is that while the 50 year old has already had 30 years more learning than the 20 year old, the 50 year old probably doesn't know who the Kardashians are. How can you not know who the Kardashians are? What's wrong with you?

My exact experience.

> Technologies change, syntax evolves, semantics improve, but your deep understanding of how to ask just the right question of a business person that turns a mathematically unsolvable problem, into something you can build in three days. That is always going to stay relevant.

I used to think like you.

But I'm 51 now. I've discovered that I was wrong.

The younger the technical interviewer, the less interested they are in my experience. I'm guessing that the less experience they have, the less value they see in experience. I suspect I was the same way 25 years ago.

I now understand why good developers go on to be lousy managers. They get old and get pushed out of development. Mid-level management is all that's available to them.

Fortunately I still have a job in an older development group. I still have some value, for now.

Hunting yes.

Protection from wild animals? Contrary to popular belief, we don't all have polar bears in our yard.

We had a coyote on our street last year, but nobody felt threatened enough to pull out a gun.

Canada has all those things...

I'd hate to be the developer who has to maintain this guy's code.

It's actually been a pretty mild winter here so far. I can't remember any really cold days.

Quite a valid comparison.

The damage caused by the lack of Navigation Transitions in web browsers has made the news repeatedly for decades. My great grandfather died in the hospital after he was crushed by a non-animated change to a different webpage.

If you think Stack Overflow hates new users, go look at Usenet in the early 90's. RTFM was the polite response to new users. Asking a question was an invitation for abuse.

This is nothing new. Established communities eventually become gated communities, with guards and dogs and sneers for the barbarians at the gates.

Sites like Hacker News?

If you told me my product was the new Win32, the new Java, and the new Flash, I'd immediately apologize and kill it.

It's like being labeled "a young Justin Bieber".

April Fool's Day needs to be cancelled.

You're not the target market.

People who spend $10k on a watch exist. They're the target market.

I certainly didn't impose that criteria. I wanted the job. I certainly had the experience they were looking for.

And no, nobody came out and said I was too old. They just reacted like I used to react when old people told me they understood computers. Pleasant, but patronizing. How could an old guy possibly handle any modern technology when he's got COBOL and FORTRAN on his resume?

Discrimination is rarely blatant. I'd guess that most people are never aware they're doing it. That doesn't mean it's not happening.

I've been a programmer for 20+ years. For the longest time I didn't see any discrimination in tech, probably because everybody I worked with was also a young white guy.

Except those over the hill freaks with their comb overs and sandals with socks. Fortunately their skill sets were rapidly obsolete, so we got rid of them.

On the other hand, my wife (a senior Oracle DBA with close to 20 years of experience) sees it on a regular basis. It's disheartening to hear her talk about it because I realize I'm guilty of many of the same behaviours.

I guess I could try to protect my ego and claim it's not sexism, but that's not who I want to be. I don't want to be the guy denying something I know to be true.

I went into an interview a couple of years ago and realized I was about 20 years older than everybody in the company. I don't have a comb over and I don't wear socks with sandals, but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there. That's the day I realized my job opportunities are becoming limited. I should have seen it coming.

Hmm, maybe it's possible women don't want to be in tech because of the sexism they face.

Why would anybody writing a new VCS use Github to host it? Wouldn't it make more sense to use the new VCS itself. You know, eat your own dogfood?

There's a word for judging people by what they wear or how they look...

You also missed the satire, even though it was expressly pointed out.

Why would they? Those customers have already paid for their old device. There's no more value to be had there.

Except repeat business from happy customers, but who cares about that?

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” - Oscar Wilde