skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hee hee. All in support of my cynical hypothesis: the predicted future is always at least ten years away because that's slightly longer than the longest research grants. [1]

See, if you predict a breakthrough in five years and are then awarded a seven-year grant, you're setting yourself up for a lot of embarrassment when it comes time to apply for a renewal.

The future is in the future, and until you're absolutely certain of success it's important to keep it there. ;)

---

[1] that's the predicted future. The actual future isn't in the future at all. It arrives every day, without warning, as a fait accompli. There's no money in predicting the near future: you must either predict the far future, or make the near future.
Hiring religion (2002)
Anything that happens after reproduction is in an evolutionary blind spot. Aging is the result of evolutionary neglect, not design.
Poor job by the reporter for not pressing Ballmer on what he means about Android not being free.
We don't have a policy about it. No one has ever wanted to. We do sometimes defer interviews.
You've simply asserted that, though.

I own my own body, does that mean nobody should be able to say I'm not allowed to, say, defecate? What if I'm positioned directly above them?

Simply being able to do something doesn't make it a right.

(I, and nobody else, own my car. I.e., nobody should be able to say I'm not allowed to max out the speedometer?)
Nothing; we'll still manage to kill ourselves/each-other long long before we reach 1000.
I can tell you from experience... the job changes from making to managing. (c.f. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)
His argument is that there would be overcrowding. Then, we potentially wouldn't be able to sustain the large population... then people would die from lack of food/water. This can probably be overcome with new technology, much like in Asimov's robot books (the "Cities").

Anyways, while death from old age is sad, I think premature death is worse. The 5 year old kid with leukemia, the car accidents, wars. There are tons of things that kill people before they can live a "whole life" which I think we should work on first (not that we can't do both).

Hopefully with some of these aging technologies, quality of life for the 'elderly' would also improve. I would hate if I couldn't play sports for 90% of my life.
Hack Pack.  The biggest identity theft case ever.
You'll have to wait fifty years to collect. How confident are you that you'll live that long?
Annoying: the link takes you to the middle of the 5 page series.

Here's the link to the first page: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/the-net-...
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know (ed. Kevlin Henney) is sort of nice reading. All pretty smart ideas so far, imho. Though I haven't finished reading it.

(Like a lot of O'Reilly books these days, it's available in a free (legal) form on the internet too http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contri... )
"Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored"

Boredom is infinitely better than nothingness.
Curing the diseases of aging might cause problems, but what we must ask ourselves is: Are those problems bigger or smaller than the problems caused by the diseases of aging in the first place?

If your problems aren't worse than 100-150k people dying per day after a prolonged period of frailty and suffering, causing suffering to their families and friends too and costing tons in healthcare, then I'd say it's worth it.

However long you live, you live one day at a time. If you are happy today and in good health, you'll want to live until tomorrow, and so on. But if for some reason you want to stop taking the rejuvenating therapies or throw yourself off a cliff, that's your choice. Let's just not make the choice for everybody else and all future generations by not developing these therapies...
Collective action protects those who do use their free speech. If all western newspapers printed the original cartoons threatening all of them would be impossible. If one guy gets killed for making a movie and a hundred directors makes similar films it is now safe to make those movies again. There is no single person to focus the anger on.
Isn't this EXACTLY what should happen?

First you get excited about a new tech, then you start worrying if there are any problems with it.

Google seems to be tracking that perfectly according to this article, and it's exactly what I would expect.
420 smoke weed every day.
I've met him and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.
Verizon's also advertising two Droids for the price of 1 (or buy one, get one "free")
Fine, maybe it doesn't need to die. All it needed was some healthy competition from companies dumping resources into HTML5. It was starting to get a bit uppity, going unchecked for so long. And with any luck, perhaps Adobe could be pressured into releasing the runtime as a standalone open source project to which they are the major contributor, like the WebM organization for Google, which would be the best possible outcome.
While I was interning at Google in 2006 I heard the guy speak in one of the Google Talks there. Going to the talk I thought this would just be some outrageous crackpot theory, but he seemed very thoughtful and the approaches he talked about sounded very sensible (although I knew and still know too little about the subject to invalidate his claims).
7 out of 27, so 26%. Bear in mind that at this stage most that are profitable are only barely so.
It comes from the iPad. It seems to have an incredible combination of power management, hardware-accelerated video decoding, fast OpenGL (for a handheld) that yields a long-lasting video device. (Despite it being a first generation iPad)
Would love to learn more about Omar. Perhaps a Mixery interview is in order?

What a character! I remember seeing his Scoble interview and you just walked away VERY impressed by his personality and business acumen.

Thanks for Sharing!
I've always preferred the idea of immortality on the installment plan -- get frozen/stored/whatever, then woken up every couple hundred or couple thousand years, do stuff, go back into freeze/storage/whatever.

Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool stuff the future holds.
Raise taxes, do make work projects.

The growth of productivity will always be an issue.
That's an explanation that rests on group selection, which tends not to be taken very seriously by most biologists. Similarly, group selection explanations of why we age are held only by a handful of researchers in the field of aging.

Most biologists in the field of aging hold that aging is the result of the decreased force of natural selection with age. This is somewhat difficult to explain even with diagrams, but I'll try anyway.

Let's imagine three forms of a gene. One causes you to die at the age of eight, another causes you to die at eighty, and the third never causes you to die. We would expect that the form of the gene that causes you to die at eight would be removed from the population very quickly, since anyone who has it will die before they can reproduce and pass it on. In contrast, the gene that causes you to die at eighty will be rather prevalent, since by that age you'll have already passed on your genes to your progeny. In fact, it will probably exist at about the same frequency as the gene that didn't cause you to die at all.

This is the mutation accumulation theory of aging. Because natural selection acts more strongly early in life, we tend to accumulate genes with mutations that are detrimental later in life. There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age.
Think about how much more efficient and productive an economy could be if the oldest members didn't have to retire due to old age?

More poignant to the current recession-- imagine how much better things would be now if people who lived through the great depression were still around (in large numbers) and running for office.
The photo was the best thing on the page. The text was sillier than the photo.
Unless you are dealing with supply chain issues on new(ish) or rare components, which can take many months to resolve. The WakeMate is simple enough that I wouldn't expect this to be an issue, but who knows?
Sayonara, iPhone: Why I'm Switching to Android
Ask HN:  Consulting while bootstrapping?
My co-founder and I are a couple of Ruby/Java coders with a broad range of expertise. We need to pay the bills while getting our product off the ground, so we're looking at doing some contract work.

We're experienced in the IT/coding realm but n00bs at the consulting thing, so here's some questions for people who have done this before:

1. What's the best way to start drumming up consulting gigs? Craigslist? Google ads? Cold calling?

2. What kind of rates are reasonable for a strong 2-person coding team with enterprise experience?

3. Are there any special pitfalls for bootstrappers that we should be aware of? We'll be trying to juggle product development with any other work that we do. Any time management tips? Legal things that we should watch out for?

I know we're not the only bootstrappers out there, so there's probably a lot of HNers with the same questions. Any advice that you give will be deeply appreciated.

And if anyone needs work done on Java/Ruby integration or full-text search, shoot me an email. :)
Google Begins Locking Down Search With SSL Encryption
I don't have accurate data for YC startups overall, though you can assume that any that haven't raised series A and are more than a year or two old are profitable, since otherwise they wouldn't have been able to continue working on the startup.

There are a few that are making really large amounts of money, but I know they wouldn't like it if I outed them.
Interestingly, the SSL version doesn't have the Pac Man game. ;)
i'm confused why people are so mad. doesn't the pre-order only cost $1?
It seems pretty logical to me to put some serious resources into fighting the leading cause of death (which is aging [1]).

I absolutely do agree with your last line. We shouldn’t just add years, we have to increase quality of life.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
I'm starting this process right now. I'm sick of being so dependent on designers. Design is everywhere these days not just on the web. This disposable coffee cup which I am going to trash in a few seconds even has fancy design on it. The coffee holder even has a advertisement on it.

Whenever I build something, no one cares about the code, features, or performance. All they care about is how it looks.
There is a news for you: it comes preinstalled on OS X.
I grabbed Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
Tomcat: The definitive Guide 2nd ed (this one I have access to via ACM membership but those rotate out potentially so eh)
Head first Statistics (my math skills are beyond rusty, and the head first books tend to be good.

However either due to overload or something, while I was able to place my order, the books are not showing up in my available list yet. Figure I'll give them until tomorrow then throw an email at them asking what's wrong.
And there's the beauty of Aubrey de Gray's plan: it's not about finding a Cure for Aging. It's about finding a number of techniques that will allow us to extend people's life-spans long enough to find out how to extend their life-spans more, which will give more time for research, and so on.

It's a much more realistic approach than "finding a way around aging," which is how the problem is usually miscast.
No it's not. And I say that as a UX professional. Marketing. Brand. Code. UX isn't everything.
I disagree. If my parent stays around and eats all my food, I'm carrying bad genes that cause me to die pre-reproduction.
Goodhart's law
Goodhart's original formulation is beautiful: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes"
Maybe they're offering Apple even more cash up front for extending the exclusivity agreement, and they're ensuring they're going to earn that money back by raising the ETF.
True. I misspoke about many, but you will still improve the accuracy of your analytics by doing this.
Flavors.me Drops Flash for Web Fonts Using @font-face in HTML5
My book 'Programming Windows Azure' just came out today. :) I feel bad about plugging it here but hey, I put heart & soul into it for the last one year so I feel justified :).

Obligatory O'Reilly and Amazon links

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596801984
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596801971

If it helps, I need to point out that my book is chock-full of Star Trek, BSG and Monty Python references and the surprising backstory of how Windows Azure's orginal code name came to be. :)
Lessons From A Life With the Neural Impulse Actuator
Also https://duckduckgo.com
Forget Greece: Europe's real problem is Germany
Google is leapfrogging Apple
>This is an enormous responsibility that Apple has never had to deal with -- there's a difference of at least 3 if not 4-5 orders of magnitude in the number of different types of hardware platforms that each company had to deal with.

Apple is supporting two gens of hardware. The iPhone OS will support the iPhone 3GS, the latest iPod Touch, the next-gen iPhone (as of now, unreleased) and the iPad.

Android has 19+ phone configurations (not counting carrier specific nuances in the firmwares) to support.

I think its interesting that Mr. Lyons is "blown away" by Android features that will be coming to his iPhone in 30-60 days, with the exception of teathering (which isn't Apple's fault, but AT&T's).

Also, people hate to hear this, but a jailbroken iPhone provides a much better experience and much more competitive than Androids.
What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
Well, it's not for existing contracts. So, it's really having the opposite effect on me. I was strongly considering leaving AT&T for Sprint or T-Mobile and getting an Android phone before this: now it's become a near certainty unless the new iPhone just absolutely blows everything else out of the water.
Their blog talks about how you have to have a special auth-chip to pair with an iPhone, that could be an issue...Though I think Apple would make sure those were in large supply.
The VC tax break
Makes for a great headline but it's actually not difficult to achieve when you have no employees, no office space and your product is a webapp (hosting costs are a few hundred dollars per month at most).
Goodhart's original formulation is beautiful: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes"

Very loosely, it's an uncertainty principle for the control of social processes.
Is there any practical ways to apply some of this research today? It seems like there must be something out there we can be doing right now to help ward off aging?

Also what is the most promising research being done?
I don't think EDMD is congruent with a Klan march. I think a number of people consider the primary reason for EDMD to be free speech where as the primary reason for Klan marches is racism. Also you don't get to change things like the color of your skin or sexual preference where as beliefs can change. In my opinion that makes religion fair game.
The chain gets to weed out errors by starting with cells that got through functionally unblemished courtesy functioning error correcting mechanisms. Each new cycle gets a fully functional error correction mechanism, and is fault tolerant to the theoretical point of repopulation from a small point of individuals.

An individual human body has error correcting mechanisms that do not benefit from being renewed every cycle- they deteriorate over time, Individuals suffer from problems larger systems don't - a few cancerous cells can poison the whole individual, but a few cancerous individuals are likely to die with few offspring, and their offspring are also more likely to die with few offspring. If an individual is left with only a few correctly functioning cells, they have no recourse for rebuilding themself.

Species get a constant influx of fresh water, as it were, and individuals have to make do with a set quantity.
Speedy Android 2.2 hits with tethering, push framework, more
I've met mikedmiked and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.
Seeing as Dave Browning (half of We're Two Guys) works with us (We Are Titans, http://wearetitans.net), I'll second that.
Agreed. Speed Increase? More Multi-tasking? Better Web Browsing? iPhone OS 4.0 has all of that. And it's release date is likely to be announced June 7th.

Now the dropped calls thing, I can't comment on. AT&T in my area is actually great. 3G rolled out EARLY where I'm at. And I've been tethering since December of 2009.
web development: web2py, blueprint, Terminal shell, jquery, and jqueryUI, all on Ubuntu 10.04
I wholeheartedly agree with you, I'm really interested in a partnership with someone that can lead the design (and not just the art).

In my world though, I don't even know how to start getting friends that are artsy. Any good suggestions there?
It's the economic exchange we make for not having a big advertising budget. Free customers are the marketing department in the freemium scenario.
For Access Call, or Walk Right In
Anybody know if this applies to existing contracts? If so, I'll probably terminate mine tomorrow...
Well, what I'm saying is that the practice is easy once you muster the will. Sadly, many people realize how easy it is after a disease forces them to change their behavior.
Well I use HyperVM which runs on Xen to boot up virtual environments for testing and deployment. At the moment I only have CentOS images setup, but when I find some time I'll add a few more linux variants.

Though, I have to say, I'm trying to move to something else. HyperVM is so botched at the moment, it's just useless to add features to. The guy that ran the project apparently is no longer with us, so the source has been released to the public, and currently nobody is maintaing the project.
This is like Facebook saying store your data more securely by only posting it on their site.
Yep, same here. My order went through but the books haven't showed up yet.
Apple has long expressed that if you do not wish to be bound by the App Store's rules, use HTML5. "Creating a version of Pac-Man that runs nicely on the iPhone without App Store approval" is by no means a jab, subtle or otherwise, at Apple.

Using Flash for the sound might be.
Counterpoint: The open source community has rolled their own firmwares with the latest and greatest, so you can update your phone without your carrier. Is it unsupported? Probably. Does it void your warranty? Again, probably.

But considering I consider jailbreaking an iPhone a "feature", doing something similar with an Android phone is also a good thing. (At least it is an option.)
The important bit is "one where I don't have to set _anything_"—you do have to put the files you want synchronized into your Dropbox folder. (This is the part I've found hard to explain to people that just save things to wherever the Save dialog opens.)

This could actually be worked around; once Dropbox enables per-folder sync, they could also provide a daemon (as an option) that automatically finds and sets up sync for any folder you seem to be making personal use of. Kind of like how Picasa works with pictures, but with everything on your computer that's yours.
>More Multi-tasking? [...] iPhone OS 4.0 has all of that.

If you mean an implementation that's still more hamstrung than Android's, sure.
if they changed the ETF on your existing contract, you would have a great reason to opt out of the contract early.
It would be a good idea if safety laws, such as speed limits, where constructed around formula with life expectancy as one of the variables. Plug in 70 years and get out 30mph. Plug in 140 years and get out 25mph.

Since you are going to grow old and die anyway, spending too much time trying to avoid accidental death is self-defeating. Acknowledging this would provide a check on the tendency towards super-safety in public policy.
Answering your own question seems at best tacky, and at worst karma-whoring.
You'd be surprised at how often they do that. It happens with virtually every announcement.
Ask HN: where to search for open source software?
especially web projects.
My list: sourceforge, code.google.com, github

anything else?
The way I find designers is I have been friends with one for awhile so he does a lot of my work. I ask him and he gives me a list of people. So always ask designers who they know and keep a contact list ;p
A specific concern I've always had about this idea of indefinite lifespan is that of monoculture. How often have you heard a phrase along the lines of "this is a temporary problem; once the 'old guard' is no longer in charge, society can move forward on issue XYZ"? Make "XYZ" any major social issue we've had in the past thousand years; from fiefdoms to gay rights to democracy.

It's effectively the end of generational cultural change, which might be a good or bad thing, depending on which generation you most identify with.
Could you care to point out the number of correct predictions that take place well after the point of time they were made?
Except that the actual recipe itself (combining and cooking ingredients) only takes up half a page. The rest is not just boilerplate (no pun intended), it's a specification regarding ingredient and package quality.
This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. I didn't even know that designer meetups existed. Thanks!
I think you over estimate the number of types of harware each platform had to deal with.

PS: Orders of magnitude 3 = 1,000, 4 = 10,000, 5 = 100,000. Now if you ment 3-5x the number of platforms but 1000x is way to high.
FearTale Friday: When Possessed Clowns Insult You Because You're A Girl.
If anyone's new to Redis, you might find my NoSQL EU workshop slides and notes useful for getting up to speed: http://simonwillison.net/static/2010/redis-tutorial/
Hmm, this 74% stat is directly conflating funding and profit; it's a conflation that doesn't seem to make sense to me, as I really only care about the profit side of the equation. If you suppose that profit increases monotonically, this title hints at tremendous success - but I don't make that assumption. I'd be more interested to know the medium-to-long-term success - say, profitability at 12 months, or 24.
OS X, 2 monitors. 8 Terminal windows, 2 fullscreen MacVim windows (with vim running the NERDTree and Buffer Explorer plugins).

I do all my Java/Flex/Ruby/Python development like that, and I think it works great. I've written code generators to give me Java or Flex classes as needed, without having to write much boilerplate.

Just do what feels most comfortable, and make small changes as needed to make it better.
This did get me thinking about if there was a way to obscure the referrer without hitting the server side. Apparently in webkit-based browsers if you create an iframe, and inject some javascript to redirect to the desired link from inside the iframe the referrer doesn't get passed. Unfortunately it doesn't work in IE or FF, but I suppose there might be some trick. Quick proof of concept for webkit:

http://junk.wehrenberg.us/t1.html

EDIT: Apparently both FF and IE work fine if you redirect using a meta refresh rather than js from inside the iframe. But that doesn't give you any way to bust out of the iframe.

http://junk.wehrenberg.us/t3.html