> How does one's passion and aptitude for hacking evolve towards this part of one's life?
If anything, programming has become more important to me as I have gotten older, for the same reason that mathematics has greater appeal to a maturing mind -- it represents a rational counterpoint to a world that, over time, seems to make less sense.
The answer to the last question depends on the geolocation. In developing countries, people won't enjoy programming when they get old, there are too many problems to solve in real-life that don't allow them to do what they like:/
My father isn't a HN regular, but he's 70 and is very much a hacker. He founded a software startup (www.imatest.com) when he was 63, and now has a dozen employees and is working harder than ever as its CTO. His passion for hacking hasn't waned in the slightest -- if anything, it's increased by orders of magnitude since he retired from his day job. His hacking aptitude within his own narrow speciality (imaging science) also seems to be undiminished.
I do sometimes notice that the breadth of his hacking aptitude might be less than in a younger person; he doesn't always grok new concepts as quickly when they are outside his immediate area of interest. Eg., it took me a long while to convince him that automated testing was a really important part of modern software development. But I can understand how this would seem quite alien to somebody who first learned to program on punch-cards -- and since he's happy to delegate things beyond his immediate area of focus, it hasn't been a problem.
So, anecdotally: medical issues permitting, there's absolutely no reason you need to scale back on your passion for hacking passion as you age, although the breadth of your hacking might need to narrow somewhat.
58, been very active on HN since the beginning, 7 years ago.
My passion and aptitude for hacking are higher than ever!
I struggled all day yesterday, trying to organize parameters to feed an engine to propagate data that would generate code for a new project. Woke up at 4 a.m. with a hypothesis, and built a working prototype before breakfast. What a great day already.
I have written over a million lines of commercial code since 1979, still work serving customers pretty much full time and have enough time left for another 20 to 30 hours per week on personal projects. I have at least one or two more start ups in me, for sure.
If this industry was like it was when I started, before PCs and the internet, and I had to sling COBOL for enterprises, I'd probably be a greeter at Walmart now, planning for social security. But fortunately our world has changed and it's so much more interesting and fun. If I ever do retire, I'll probably still keep building stuff forever.
The 2 best things: software is everywhere and involved in everything now. I can't imagine not finding an interesting application. And perhaps more importantly, things change so fast, there's always something newer and possibly more interesting right around the corner. (I wish I had more time to explore node, go, and some more frameworks, but I'm so busy...)
Between building software, riding my bike, drinking great beer, and getting laid every once in a while, I still feel like 25. I don't want it to ever end.
I think anyone who builds software should feel like I do. I hope most of you do. Prepare for a nice long ride!
"Between building software, riding my bike, drinking great beer, and getting laid every once in a while, I still feel like 25. I don't want it to ever end."
I love that line. That is so incredibly inspiring. You really are living the dream.
Ken Thompson [1] is about as old as modern computing, and can in fact claim to have partially invented it. He is over 70 and last time I checked he was still working for Google. His most recent project well-known to the public is the Go programming language. So it is certainly possible.
I started age 19 in 1967. Maybe even earlier. Dropped untrained into the deep end commissioning 4100 computers at Elliott Bros near London, and turned out I could swim. Passion - always had the feeling of "You actually want to _pay_ me to do this?"
Now I am 66, still fully employed, latest thing you might have heard (of) is the WiiU Audio engine. For unrelated reasons I went through a battery of cognitive function tests a couple of years ago and came out sharper than I was at 19 by at least a full sigma. I have no plans to retire.
I would add Don Knuth to the the honors list. And Minsky. Tony Hoare. Ted Nelson. Alan Kay. The original Homebrew Club members are getting up there. And about 100 others I know but you probably won't recognize. A peer group in which I am merely average.
As to selectivity and numbers. Yes, there have been programmers since WWII. But mot that many. So my age group has far fewer members than the upcoming geriatric programmer generation. But I have noticed one very encouraging feature we share: barring serious health issues (and even in spite of in some cases), a high percentage are still very active and passionate. No comment on causality, could easily be that it takes a active mind of a peculiar bent to get into the field in the first place and these just last, or it could be that the mental excersize it takes to keep relevant keeps the mind young, or both. But I'm pretty sure I won't last long if I have to stop doing it.
Peter Murray Rust [0] is in his 70s and still writes code most days [1], and is a hacker in the original sense. He's retired from his professorship but still runs an active research group making awesome software to liberate knowledge from scientific publications, and he runs the Open Knowledge Foundation and various other groups. I'll ask him to respond himself.
Greetings to HN! I am very proud to have been featured in HN at least twice.
I take inspiration from a quote last year from Nellie Kroes - European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. She's an iconic fighter for Openness - goes on Spanish hack camps with 14-year olds. Hopefully accurate:
"I'm 71. I don't do this because I have to but because I want to". [PMR was also 71 at that stage].
I take "hack" as a very positive concept - from its roots in MIT and the Hacker Manifesto up to HN and "hackdays" and "hackathons".
I started my communal chemistry code ca 30 years ago - in FORTRAN - and it's gone through C++ (including f2c), and now Java. There have been six major revisions of JUMBO.
I had the major epiphany about 15 years ago when I was writing molecular display in Java3D (argh!). I realised I didn't have to do this all myself - and so integrated the magnificent Jmol into the system. That led to the culture or sharing the load and fighting the battles communally (standard chemistry software is awful, highly prices and restrictive - one company will sue you if the publish the output FORTRAN log file).
I shan't give my life history , but I have been incredibly fortunately to find like-minded collaborators both locally and globally. Locally it came from Jim Downing who just us about 9 years ago and showed us how to use all the right ideas and tools (JUnit, maven, Jenkins (CI), Bitbucket, Stackoverflow, agile (stand ups, dojos, etc.).
The great thing was that we shared the load. We met at the Panton Arms every Friday lunch and would often work there in the afternoon. Yes, work - where ideas would flow freely. The core of hacking is not writing the code but working out what needs to be written.
We are committed to excellent software, not competitive academic impact-factor points. That meant we could do things properly. FWIW our work has gone into Cambridge Chemistry's submission for the evaluation process.
We're proud that many of our tools (OSCAR, OPSIN, ChemicalTagger, JUMBO) are robust and distributed without major maintenance need. This is unique in chemistry. As a result I catalysed a unique - zero-cash community - the Blue Obelisk (http://blueoblisk.org and Wikipedia). 20+ F/LOSS groups work in unplanned parallel ways and have created some of the best chemical software.
We are now moving into a major effort to extract all scientific facts from the current literature (contentmine.org just released). The major challenge will be lawyers. If any Hackers want to take part in knowledge liberation we'd love to hear from you.
I'm happy for anyone who is productive past normal retirement age, but it's important to be aware of what happens to our minds as we get older. I think the examples in the comments are exceptions that prove the rule. The reason for the dearth of older hackers is the same reason there are few people running marathons at age 60 or 70: As we age, our bodies and minds degrade. Exercise, nutrition, and (probably) drugs can slow the decline, but we don't yet have the technology to turn back the clock.
The most depressing graph I've seen is figure 1[1] in Images of the Cognitive Brain Across Age and Culture[2]. It shows how our cognitive abilities decline soon after we reach maturity. Starting in our 20s, we lose about 6 IQ points per decade; more in our 70s and 80s. That means someone in the top 1% in high school (IQ 135) would be down to average intelligence by the time they were in their 80s.
On the bright side, the decline in raw cognitive horsepower is offset by gains in knowledge. In fact, knowledge more than offsets it in most disciplines. Our peak productivity is usually in our 40's and declines much more slowly than one would expect[3].
Still, if you want to keep building cool stuff when you're older, it's important to prepare now. The best thing you can do is stay healthy and active. To return to the marathon analogy: A 55 year-old might not set a world record, but with the right training, nutrition, and possibly performance-enhancing drugs, they can beat >95% of people half their age.
Finally, to everyone mentioned in this thread: Well done! I hope to follow your example.
"The reason for the dearth of older hackers is the same reason there are few people running marathons at age 60 or 70: As we age, our bodies and minds degrade."
That is an overgeneralization that could lead to needlessly depressing conclusions. Research is pointing in directions that are much more encouraging and that vary tremendously from field to field. If you are interested in this subject, you'll definitely want to see the summary that the following link, which, among other things, says that the output of scientists appears to peak in their 40's and decline only in their 70's (assuming, I would guess, that they are choosing to continue to pursue their vocation):
0. bit.ly/1kzXKIz
To help maintain your brain power as you age, research is pointing in the direction that the best thing you can do is, perhaps counterintuitively, physical exercise:
1. Time just seems to move sooo fast. When I was 6, 30 minutes seemed like forever. Now as I close in on 40, 30 minutes feels like a handful of breaths. I can easily spend 2 hours on something, feel like I made no progress because the time is short. Even into my 20s, I felt like I could crank out tons of things hour after hour. Now the work of a week feels like the work of a day.
2. I think why this happens is that I've noticed I feel like I take in more space-time at once than I used to. Hypersmall details I used to obsess over seem to blend into an entire scene. I'm gulping space-time rather than sipping it. I think it's because I have much more experience and knowledge than I used to that I just automatically filter out most things. "Bigger picture" isn't just a word to me anymore. I've largely stopped thinking in hyper-local ways and started thinking more strategically, in terms of systems rather than components and in terms of aggregate behaviors rather than individual behaviors, etc.
I have to consciously focus down my attention onto small, local concerns when it used to just happen. When thinking about business ideas, I don't think as much about smaller concerns like the technology stack or whatever, but where I can take the entire idea over the next 5-10 years. Ideas grow like trees in my mind stretching out for a decade without mush effort, but looking at an individual leaf (which used to be easy), is exhausting.
It's given me a lot more understanding of what my parents are going through as they age, things I never really understood when I was a precocious child, but now make perfect sense. I don't know what they're going through now, but now that I understand roughly the trajectory of my own mind and thinking, I can kind of see how they're arriving at where they are.
There are a couple of issues though. One is that this decline coincides with a decline of challenges in most people's lives. That's a cultural thing and doesn't have to be that way for every individual.
The other one is the definition of intelligence. Take the speed component for instance. It greatly affects the IQ score, but does it equally affect our ability to come up with interesting hacks?
In other words, average IQ score does not equal individual problem solving ability.
It may be the case that the slowing down isn't just offset by gains in knowledge, but caused by it. That has some exciting implications for the quality of results from older hackers!
"A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge."
How do you account for criticisms of IQ? I think anecdotes are permissible here since we are looking for counter-examples: I know people who have scored in the 110s and 120s on IQ tests in school, who are now, in their 30s, very prolific researchers. On the contrary, I also know a few people who scored very high in school IQ tests (140+) who haven't amounted to much, professionally, later in life.
Other counter-examples to the general trend of 'age-related mental deterioration' include several greats in creative fields (e.g. P̶a̶b̶l̶o̶ ̶P̶i̶c̶a̶s̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶T̶.̶ ̶S̶ ̶E̶l̶i̶o̶t̶ Paul Cezanne, Robert Frost, etc.) [1] whose best work came later in life. All said and done, it is hard to quantify success and definitively relate quantifiable functions of the brain with 'success' and 'creativity'. An extreme example in the realm of pop-psychology is Maurice Ravel, whose most famous work 'Bolero' is thought have been the result of frontotemporal dementia. Strictly speaking, Ravel shouldn't have amounted to much after his brain started deteriorating, but the dementia directly underlies the repetitive rhythms that make 'Bolero' a creative masterpiece.
While physical exercise (and a few other mental 'exercises' such as bi-linguality) has been shown to be supremely important to stem age-related mental decay, I find your comment to be a bit too pessimistic.
This brings up an interesting question: how do statistical results relate to self-actuation and motivation? When presented with such statistics as in your comment, one can either give up on making lifestyle changes with a resignation to 'inevitable aging', or may look at the statistics as a motivating factor to remain an exception.
The authors of your reference 2 state this in the conclusions: "Importantly, these findings also suggest that neurobiological aging does not always lead to neurocognitive decline in a uniform manner, and that external experiences can modulate and perhaps alleviate some of the neural effects of aging in the brain."
[1] Bruce A. Weinberg & David W. Galenson, 2005.
"Creative Careers: The Life Cycles of Nobel Laureates in Economics,"
NBER Working Papers 11799, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. http://www.nber.org/papers/w11799.pdf?new_window=1
*Edit: I meant Paul Cezanne, Robert Frost, and Virginia Woolf.
This is one of the best comments I've read on HN, and I really appreciate you writing it. You are, however, using "exception that proves the rule" incorrectly:
He's not 60 yet, but Peter Norvig is 57 and shows no signs of slowing down. If anything he's getting more prolific with age. It seems like every time he gets on a plane he's hacking on something interesting: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
I'll be 70 in November and am putting the finishing touches on a VST plugin that can make any 'phone (head, ear, canal, etc.) I can measure sound like any other 'phone I can measure with remarkable verisimilitude. The trick was not the DSP (standard stuff, that, and part of what I once got paid to do) but in devising a measurement system that worked across types. That part was empirical and took more years and iterations than I'll admit to but without retirement I wouldn't have had the time for all the experimentation that finally nailed it.
I've got to say that my coding bug rate seems worse and debug time seems substantially longer and more tedious than I remember. My first coding was assembler for an IBM 7094 as a student at the University of Illinois some 50+ years ago. Been doing it ever since.
BTW, I'm looking for someone that can transfer the tech to a paid Android app. Somebody 70ish would be way cool. Kernel level audio skills a must for global filter insertion.
Listening to good jazz helps to stay in shape(there's some scientific data that proves music activates something in the brain, not sure what exactly, but it seems to work :-).
As someone noted earlier in this thread, there's nothing new in programming for the last 30-40 years. You just need to learn 100 tricks, you learn them early, and then the age makes no difference. What changes is that you don't think of career any more, and think about money much less, which makes you a very bad candidate for bullshit work. You can imagine the consequences.
While surely there are few hackers older than 60 or 70, the history of the personal computer is still too young for the question to be a meaningful indicator of how long people keep hacking. The Altair came out in 1975 meaning that someone that was 20 at the time and started hacking on it right away is only reaching 60 next year. The first mass-market personal computer (the Macintosh) came out in 1984 and working with computers was still a niche at that time. Those hackers that are over 60 now are either super early adopters or those that started hacking late in life, so in any case a very small group. I'm sure there will be plenty of hackers over 60 in a few decades :) - Also, looking forward to fragging and playing Starcraft in the nursing home! :)
Then again, my dad, which was a sociology major, bought a vic 20 when it came out, and proceeded to implement a system for bidding on construction contacts in Quick Basic for first the Apricot and later the PC (Because at the time there were no decent software for the task). I believe he took a part-time computer science class at the local college in the 80s prior to writing that piece of software.
He doesn't program any more, but the idea that you'd have to be 20 when you started is just plain wrong. You could've been 40.
He also used to play with meccano and legos, and I remember we built a traversing crane during a Christmas in the mid 80s (on ropes from the living room to the kitchen, a spam of some 7 meters). If you were a hacker soul before personal computing, it'd be quite easy to get into computers (and realize that it would be important).
I am 49, and I was an early Macintosh developer, gaining access to the beta OS at age 17 in 1983. I started programming via college courses in the 5th grade, and had a video game company selling Vic-20 and Commodore 64 games nationwide thru Sears & KMart in '82. Today, I am CEO of www.3D-Avatar-Store.com: a neural net + 3D computer graphics & animation startup.
What does programming have to do with PCs? Computers and programming existed long before that :)
Older people I've known continued to work with what they call "real" computers in the 80's and 90's, not PCs. Mainstream PCs didn't even have multiple processes until the 90's (386).
The Apple II and Commodore 64 were mass market successes that preceded the Mac. I expect there were others that would qualify. I think the 8086 clones came out at about the same time.
> From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.
... his take on Impostor syndrome is a bit backwards, too (:
> Constantly seeking to produce better work, he apparently exclaimed on his deathbed, "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."
My father probably qualifies too. In the early 80's we had a Bell Labs/Western Electric Energy management system with home sensors and links to the electric and gas companies. They used a Z80 microprocessor in a STD bus card rack. And at no point in the last 30+ years has he ever been without projects or machines to work on.
His skillset goes from the EPROM and PLC level, through C/C++, and on to actual 20 ton open die forging. I've seen him take a break from debugging a C++ driver for a hydraulic beam loader to replace live high voltage fuses with a hot stick rather than wait for the power company. It really puts what we refer to as 'full-stack' into perspective.
I'm 57 but didn't start programming until I was 27 years old. My first summer quarter at Purdue they still had punch card readers and I remember sitting in the hall in the basement of the Math building waiting to have my deck read and then pick up the green striped output paper in the adjoining room. The following fall we had our first DEC VT 100 terminals.
I guess I would consider myself a hacker of sorts as I now work for myself doing mobile web development with Python, JavaScript, and Django. I have to work for myself because no one will hire someone my age.
I am 63. I code sites. I build boxes. I touched my first computer terminal at the NY World's Fair in '64. Fortran on an IBM senior year in high school 67/68. That was my first and last computer class.
I haven't spoken with him recently, but I believe that Dave's still the first one in the office every morning, writing stunningly tight code and driving innovation most recently in the Xbone hypervisor. The engineer's engineer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
My father-in-law retired at 75. He was writing firmware for Perkin Elmer chip steppers. I've seen his code, it was pretty nice stuff.
One guy I met was 65 and about to start up another company. He was sharp and definitely knew what he was doing.
The group I was in at Microsoft (Xbox) had David Cutler in it; I think he had just turned 70. I didn't work with him closely, but he was definitely prolific (also more than a bit controversial, politically, at MS, but he had mellowed out quite a bit when I met him).
I started as a software developer just around the time Intel released the 8080. I was in Bell Labs when Unix Version 7 was introduced. I was at IBM when they released AIX. I now working in scala and clojure and am active in a startup in the financial services and crypto-currency fields.
Do what you love, love what you do, throw in a generous helping of luck and you can have a stimulating, productive and enjoyable professional life well into your 70s if not later.
How does one's passion and aptitude for hacking evolve towards this part of one's life ?
Came here to mention Moore, and especially color forth (a forth system that uses colors to distinguish semantic meaning between variables and verbs/command words etc). His eval blog of the new greenarray boards is full of magnificent hackery, eg:
Not mentioned elsewhere: Richard Stallman is 61. I don't know how much actual hacking he does these days vs advocacy, but whether you agree with his politics or not, the dude is definitely a hacker.
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
I'm 68, and I should add that "hacker" meant something different when I first heard it used. :)
> Are you still employed or retired?
I'm retired, but I still program for enjoyment. I have a line of free Android apps published:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=lutus&c=apps
> How does one's passion and aptitude for hacking evolve towards this part of one's life?
If anything, programming has become more important to me as I have gotten older, for the same reason that mathematics has greater appeal to a maturing mind -- it represents a rational counterpoint to a world that, over time, seems to make less sense.
[+] [-] gansai|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milani|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakshn|12 years ago|reply
http://hanselminutes.com/342/an-interview-with-paul-lutus
[+] [-] weland|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pa5tabear|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iMario|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teemo_cute|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkoren|12 years ago|reply
I do sometimes notice that the breadth of his hacking aptitude might be less than in a younger person; he doesn't always grok new concepts as quickly when they are outside his immediate area of interest. Eg., it took me a long while to convince him that automated testing was a really important part of modern software development. But I can understand how this would seem quite alien to somebody who first learned to program on punch-cards -- and since he's happy to delegate things beyond his immediate area of focus, it hasn't been a problem.
So, anecdotally: medical issues permitting, there's absolutely no reason you need to scale back on your passion for hacking passion as you age, although the breadth of your hacking might need to narrow somewhat.
[+] [-] cpach|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edw519|12 years ago|reply
My passion and aptitude for hacking are higher than ever!
I struggled all day yesterday, trying to organize parameters to feed an engine to propagate data that would generate code for a new project. Woke up at 4 a.m. with a hypothesis, and built a working prototype before breakfast. What a great day already.
I have written over a million lines of commercial code since 1979, still work serving customers pretty much full time and have enough time left for another 20 to 30 hours per week on personal projects. I have at least one or two more start ups in me, for sure.
If this industry was like it was when I started, before PCs and the internet, and I had to sling COBOL for enterprises, I'd probably be a greeter at Walmart now, planning for social security. But fortunately our world has changed and it's so much more interesting and fun. If I ever do retire, I'll probably still keep building stuff forever.
The 2 best things: software is everywhere and involved in everything now. I can't imagine not finding an interesting application. And perhaps more importantly, things change so fast, there's always something newer and possibly more interesting right around the corner. (I wish I had more time to explore node, go, and some more frameworks, but I'm so busy...)
Between building software, riding my bike, drinking great beer, and getting laid every once in a while, I still feel like 25. I don't want it to ever end.
I think anyone who builds software should feel like I do. I hope most of you do. Prepare for a nice long ride!
[+] [-] hello_newman|12 years ago|reply
I love that line. That is so incredibly inspiring. You really are living the dream.
[+] [-] copx|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson
[+] [-] brudgers|12 years ago|reply
Because Knuth is five years his senior?
[+] [-] dwarman|12 years ago|reply
Now I am 66, still fully employed, latest thing you might have heard (of) is the WiiU Audio engine. For unrelated reasons I went through a battery of cognitive function tests a couple of years ago and came out sharper than I was at 19 by at least a full sigma. I have no plans to retire.
I would add Don Knuth to the the honors list. And Minsky. Tony Hoare. Ted Nelson. Alan Kay. The original Homebrew Club members are getting up there. And about 100 others I know but you probably won't recognize. A peer group in which I am merely average.
As to selectivity and numbers. Yes, there have been programmers since WWII. But mot that many. So my age group has far fewer members than the upcoming geriatric programmer generation. But I have noticed one very encouraging feature we share: barring serious health issues (and even in spite of in some cases), a high percentage are still very active and passionate. No comment on causality, could easily be that it takes a active mind of a peculiar bent to get into the field in the first place and these just last, or it could be that the mental excersize it takes to keep relevant keeps the mind young, or both. But I'm pretty sure I won't last long if I have to stop doing it.
[+] [-] Blahah|12 years ago|reply
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Murray-Rust
[1] https://bitbucket.org/petermr
[+] [-] petermurrayrust|12 years ago|reply
I take inspiration from a quote last year from Nellie Kroes - European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. She's an iconic fighter for Openness - goes on Spanish hack camps with 14-year olds. Hopefully accurate:
"I'm 71. I don't do this because I have to but because I want to". [PMR was also 71 at that stage].
I take "hack" as a very positive concept - from its roots in MIT and the Hacker Manifesto up to HN and "hackdays" and "hackathons".
I started my communal chemistry code ca 30 years ago - in FORTRAN - and it's gone through C++ (including f2c), and now Java. There have been six major revisions of JUMBO.
I had the major epiphany about 15 years ago when I was writing molecular display in Java3D (argh!). I realised I didn't have to do this all myself - and so integrated the magnificent Jmol into the system. That led to the culture or sharing the load and fighting the battles communally (standard chemistry software is awful, highly prices and restrictive - one company will sue you if the publish the output FORTRAN log file).
I shan't give my life history , but I have been incredibly fortunately to find like-minded collaborators both locally and globally. Locally it came from Jim Downing who just us about 9 years ago and showed us how to use all the right ideas and tools (JUnit, maven, Jenkins (CI), Bitbucket, Stackoverflow, agile (stand ups, dojos, etc.).
The great thing was that we shared the load. We met at the Panton Arms every Friday lunch and would often work there in the afternoon. Yes, work - where ideas would flow freely. The core of hacking is not writing the code but working out what needs to be written.
We are committed to excellent software, not competitive academic impact-factor points. That meant we could do things properly. FWIW our work has gone into Cambridge Chemistry's submission for the evaluation process.
We're proud that many of our tools (OSCAR, OPSIN, ChemicalTagger, JUMBO) are robust and distributed without major maintenance need. This is unique in chemistry. As a result I catalysed a unique - zero-cash community - the Blue Obelisk (http://blueoblisk.org and Wikipedia). 20+ F/LOSS groups work in unplanned parallel ways and have created some of the best chemical software.
We are now moving into a major effort to extract all scientific facts from the current literature (contentmine.org just released). The major challenge will be lawyers. If any Hackers want to take part in knowledge liberation we'd love to hear from you.
[+] [-] ggreer|12 years ago|reply
The most depressing graph I've seen is figure 1[1] in Images of the Cognitive Brain Across Age and Culture[2]. It shows how our cognitive abilities decline soon after we reach maturity. Starting in our 20s, we lose about 6 IQ points per decade; more in our 70s and 80s. That means someone in the top 1% in high school (IQ 135) would be down to average intelligence by the time they were in their 80s.
On the bright side, the decline in raw cognitive horsepower is offset by gains in knowledge. In fact, knowledge more than offsets it in most disciplines. Our peak productivity is usually in our 40's and declines much more slowly than one would expect[3].
Still, if you want to keep building cool stuff when you're older, it's important to prepare now. The best thing you can do is stay healthy and active. To return to the marathon analogy: A 55 year-old might not set a world record, but with the right training, nutrition, and possibly performance-enhancing drugs, they can beat >95% of people half their age.
Finally, to everyone mentioned in this thread: Well done! I hope to follow your example.
1. https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_gxYAfFM1cj0/S6hXmZ4qtjI/A...
2. http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/36842.pdf
3. http://resources.emartin.net/blog/docs/AgeAchievement.pdf
[+] [-] garyrob|12 years ago|reply
That is an overgeneralization that could lead to needlessly depressing conclusions. Research is pointing in directions that are much more encouraging and that vary tremendously from field to field. If you are interested in this subject, you'll definitely want to see the summary that the following link, which, among other things, says that the output of scientists appears to peak in their 40's and decline only in their 70's (assuming, I would guess, that they are choosing to continue to pursue their vocation):
0. bit.ly/1kzXKIz
To help maintain your brain power as you age, research is pointing in the direction that the best thing you can do is, perhaps counterintuitively, physical exercise:
1. http://www.sciencedaily.com—081118071144.htm
2. http://www.kurzweilai.net—how-exercise-boosts-brain-health
3. http://www.brainfacts.org—physical-exercise-beefs-up-the-bra...
4. http://www.nytimes.com—how-exercise-could-lead-to-a-better-b...
5. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com—ask-well-exercises-to-prevent-...
6. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/exercise-may-protec...
In contrast, claims that "brain exercises" actually help are quite controversial.
Also, there's evidence that caloric reduction reduces cognitive decline:
7. http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/2036/20130522/low-ca...
8. http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/sirtuin-love-calori...
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
1. Time just seems to move sooo fast. When I was 6, 30 minutes seemed like forever. Now as I close in on 40, 30 minutes feels like a handful of breaths. I can easily spend 2 hours on something, feel like I made no progress because the time is short. Even into my 20s, I felt like I could crank out tons of things hour after hour. Now the work of a week feels like the work of a day.
2. I think why this happens is that I've noticed I feel like I take in more space-time at once than I used to. Hypersmall details I used to obsess over seem to blend into an entire scene. I'm gulping space-time rather than sipping it. I think it's because I have much more experience and knowledge than I used to that I just automatically filter out most things. "Bigger picture" isn't just a word to me anymore. I've largely stopped thinking in hyper-local ways and started thinking more strategically, in terms of systems rather than components and in terms of aggregate behaviors rather than individual behaviors, etc.
I have to consciously focus down my attention onto small, local concerns when it used to just happen. When thinking about business ideas, I don't think as much about smaller concerns like the technology stack or whatever, but where I can take the entire idea over the next 5-10 years. Ideas grow like trees in my mind stretching out for a decade without mush effort, but looking at an individual leaf (which used to be easy), is exhausting.
It's given me a lot more understanding of what my parents are going through as they age, things I never really understood when I was a precocious child, but now make perfect sense. I don't know what they're going through now, but now that I understand roughly the trajectory of my own mind and thinking, I can kind of see how they're arriving at where they are.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|12 years ago|reply
The other one is the definition of intelligence. Take the speed component for instance. It greatly affects the IQ score, but does it equally affect our ability to come up with interesting hacks?
In other words, average IQ score does not equal individual problem solving ability.
[+] [-] cheriot|12 years ago|reply
"A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge."
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12078/full
[+] [-] shas3|12 years ago|reply
Other counter-examples to the general trend of 'age-related mental deterioration' include several greats in creative fields (e.g. P̶a̶b̶l̶o̶ ̶P̶i̶c̶a̶s̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶T̶.̶ ̶S̶ ̶E̶l̶i̶o̶t̶ Paul Cezanne, Robert Frost, etc.) [1] whose best work came later in life. All said and done, it is hard to quantify success and definitively relate quantifiable functions of the brain with 'success' and 'creativity'. An extreme example in the realm of pop-psychology is Maurice Ravel, whose most famous work 'Bolero' is thought have been the result of frontotemporal dementia. Strictly speaking, Ravel shouldn't have amounted to much after his brain started deteriorating, but the dementia directly underlies the repetitive rhythms that make 'Bolero' a creative masterpiece.
While physical exercise (and a few other mental 'exercises' such as bi-linguality) has been shown to be supremely important to stem age-related mental decay, I find your comment to be a bit too pessimistic.
This brings up an interesting question: how do statistical results relate to self-actuation and motivation? When presented with such statistics as in your comment, one can either give up on making lifestyle changes with a resignation to 'inevitable aging', or may look at the statistics as a motivating factor to remain an exception.
The authors of your reference 2 state this in the conclusions: "Importantly, these findings also suggest that neurobiological aging does not always lead to neurocognitive decline in a uniform manner, and that external experiences can modulate and perhaps alleviate some of the neural effects of aging in the brain."
[1] Bruce A. Weinberg & David W. Galenson, 2005. "Creative Careers: The Life Cycles of Nobel Laureates in Economics," NBER Working Papers 11799, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. http://www.nber.org/papers/w11799.pdf?new_window=1
*Edit: I meant Paul Cezanne, Robert Frost, and Virginia Woolf.
[+] [-] herokusaki|12 years ago|reply
You seem well acquainted with aging research so I feel it appropriate to ask, what about the role of genetics?
[+] [-] 3pt14159|12 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
[+] [-] cab_codespring|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonGateley|12 years ago|reply
I've got to say that my coding bug rate seems worse and debug time seems substantially longer and more tedious than I remember. My first coding was assembler for an IBM 7094 as a student at the University of Illinois some 50+ years ago. Been doing it ever since.
BTW, I'm looking for someone that can transfer the tech to a paid Android app. Somebody 70ish would be way cool. Kernel level audio skills a must for global filter insertion.
[+] [-] kenferry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kordless|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lohankin|12 years ago|reply
Listening to good jazz helps to stay in shape(there's some scientific data that proves music activates something in the brain, not sure what exactly, but it seems to work :-).
As someone noted earlier in this thread, there's nothing new in programming for the last 30-40 years. You just need to learn 100 tricks, you learn them early, and then the age makes no difference. What changes is that you don't think of career any more, and think about money much less, which makes you a very bad candidate for bullshit work. You can imagine the consequences.
[+] [-] beggi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|12 years ago|reply
He doesn't program any more, but the idea that you'd have to be 20 when you started is just plain wrong. You could've been 40.
He also used to play with meccano and legos, and I remember we built a traversing crane during a Christmas in the mid 80s (on ropes from the living room to the kitchen, a spam of some 7 meters). If you were a hacker soul before personal computing, it'd be quite easy to get into computers (and realize that it would be important).
[+] [-] bsenftner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|12 years ago|reply
Older people I've known continued to work with what they call "real" computers in the 80's and 90's, not PCs. Mainstream PCs didn't even have multiple processes until the 90's (386).
[+] [-] jeremyjh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arh68|12 years ago|reply
--Hokusai
[+] [-] arh68|12 years ago|reply
> Constantly seeking to produce better work, he apparently exclaimed on his deathbed, "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."
[+] [-] rch|12 years ago|reply
His skillset goes from the EPROM and PLC level, through C/C++, and on to actual 20 ton open die forging. I've seen him take a break from debugging a C++ driver for a hydraulic beam loader to replace live high voltage fuses with a hot stick rather than wait for the power company. It really puts what we refer to as 'full-stack' into perspective.
[+] [-] robertlf|12 years ago|reply
I guess I would consider myself a hacker of sorts as I now work for myself doing mobile web development with Python, JavaScript, and Django. I have to work for myself because no one will hire someone my age.
[+] [-] geofffox|12 years ago|reply
I was on the Internet before the WWW.
I am 63, but immature for my age.
[+] [-] rozzie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kabdib|12 years ago|reply
One guy I met was 65 and about to start up another company. He was sharp and definitely knew what he was doing.
The group I was in at Microsoft (Xbox) had David Cutler in it; I think he had just turned 70. I didn't work with him closely, but he was definitely prolific (also more than a bit controversial, politically, at MS, but he had mellowed out quite a bit when I met him).
I'm 53 and have high hopes. :-)
[+] [-] Joeri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1gs3gv|12 years ago|reply
Do what you love, love what you do, throw in a generous helping of luck and you can have a stimulating, productive and enjoyable professional life well into your 70s if not later.
How does one's passion and aptitude for hacking evolve towards this part of one's life ?
Experience rulez.
[+] [-] brudgers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|12 years ago|reply
http://www.colorforth.com/video.htm
[+] [-] davidw|12 years ago|reply