skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are already making progress on both quality as well as the length of life.

From the 2013 NBER working paper "Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the Elderly U.S. Population":

"For a typical person aged 65, life expectancy increased by 0.7 years between 1992 and 2005. Disability-free life expectancy increased by 1.6 years; disabled life
expectancy fell by 0.9 years.

"The reduction in disabled life expectancy and increase in
disability-free life expectancy is true for both genders and for non-whites as well as whites. Hence, morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death."
It will certainly not harm your chances of getting a job but it will harm your ability to receive unemployment benefits from the government as they will consider the business equivalent of a full-time job.

You can start a sole trader business easily (and cheaply).
In many EU countries there is a scheme where students or full time employees can start side businesses as sole traders and not be liable for VAT and social security taxes. I am not sure if this exists in Portugal but you can check with your local bureaucrats.

Activity like this will increase your employability in most companies. It can be an issue in government regulated businesses such as insurance but they are used to telling employees to shut it down.. it's a non-issue for hiring.
I suspect that's going to be a very slight, probably negligible selection pressure, since you're not going to be spraying it on your growing crops. We're only talking reside in the soil, and it has a short half-life.
NB. People may want better battery life, but they'll still pay for better features or performance. Of better batteries would give both, but we've had intense R&D for decades, and it's a difficult problem. (and if we had them, do you think it will go into battery life or features/performance...?)

also, 4K looks incredible - but where do you get 4K shows?

BTW I'm sick of refreshing HN 3 times to make sure my vote was counted. I'm not voting anymore.
The issue is the engine compartments for a lot of vehicles are arranged by subcontracted firms. I know a guy who works for a company that does this for Ford, GM and Dodge, and there's not a mechanically inclined person in the bunch.

They're playing jigsaw with an engine compartment trying to get all the parts in in the most compact, but still workable, way possible.

It's sad when you think about it, because not only does it squeeze a lot of at-home maintenance out, which used to keep vehicles affordable, but now almost everyone discussing new vehicles discusses the maintenance costs.

Honestly, I'm not surprised the domestic car market essentially failed, because they're $40,000 printers. No one gives a crap about the up front price anymore, because they know they're getting screwed on the after-expenses so everyone's looking up how much their yearly maintenance expenses are going to be to make sure they don't end up paying more than the vehicle in a decade.
The thing I never understood -- back in the days of pagers, a pager could last for a month or more on a AA battery. A pager has to be constantly listening for a signal, then wake up and take action. So couldn't a phone be designed the same way? Have the main processor at idle, and offload event listening/processing to another low power processor chip. Then, wake up the main CPU when more advanced processing is required.
Evidence about what? What idea a poster intends to express when he uses a particular word?

Could you clearly state what positive claims you think I'm "denying"? Or is asking what you are talking about also somehow equivalent to creationism?
> I know there are probably hundreds more

Actually there aren't. There are like 60. It really shouldn't take too long to read over them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
Are you intentionally a shill or just completely talking out of your ass?
I'm an environmentalist and a humanitarian, and I want both of these things:

1. Freedom for Ghanaian farmers to plant their traditional crops.
2. Access for Ghanaian farmers to high-yield varietals developed by companies like Monsanto.

This article implies that the law makes goal #1 illegal, but if you read closely, it is just an implication, and not an outright statement. My current understanding is that goal #1 is not made illegal by this bill. Does anyone have any contradictory evidence?

My understanding of this law is that it adopts US-style IP laws for agriculture, which is a controversial idea. Supporters would say it creates incentives towards goal #2, because it's hard for Monsanto to sell self-reproducing technology at a profit without IP support. Detractors would say that it has other downsides. I don't think the detractors are wrong, but I have a question for anyone that's open to exchange views:

If you oppose this law, but support goal #2, what do you think will bring Monsanto into Ghana? I only see three options: a) this law, b) Monsanto writes Ghana off as a loss and sells their unprotectable technology, c) we legally compel Monsanto to write Ghana off as a loss.
It's sometimes a judgement call, though. If an incremental approach is too expensive, haphazard, or just not technically sound, doing a soft launch and gradually transitioning users can work well too. This obviously has it's own drawbacks and complexities but it's a good alternative if an in-place upgrade isn't feasible. That said, at the end of the day an all-or-nothing release really should be the last resort.
I haven't seen the Scheme problem in Io's frameworks. People tend not to invent new control structures or object models because Io provides powerful and more consistent one's already.
G-bomb?
Doesn't appear to work in Firefox 34.0.5, although it works fine in Chrome.
In Silico Cognitive Biomimicry: What Artificial Intelligence Could Be http://genopharmix.com/biomimetic-cognition/in_silico_cognit...
It would, in fact, result in so few survivors, unless of course started out in low concentrations, that it would be evidence of mens rea. As long as Monsanto is restricting their legal actions to those with "the intending mind", I'm not worried.
I lived in Baltimore for a year and a half. Oddly enough, the part of Baltimore I lived in was far safer than, say, Williamsburg where knife attacks and drug-related violence were still commonplace into the late 2000s (and possibly later).

Baltimore's problem isn't the poor blacks. It never was. (Yes, there are some in the drug trade, just as there are some low-income whites in it.) I feel sorry for them, because they've been abandoned by the economy (deindustrialization) and the politicians, and they almost never do any harm to others. Its problem is the whites in the suburbs ("the county") who've basically abandoned the city, going in for July 4th and New Years and an occasional trip to the Aquarium but otherwise avoid never deign to live there (and, therefore, don't pay taxes and leave the city poor despite being in one of the wealthiest states in the country).
I'd worry about this if I had a fuse blow in my car in the last 10 years.
This is just symptomatic of a saturated market. Between Google and apple there are over 2.5 million apps and probably over a billions website or something like that, all of which are using HTTP(S). On top of that, the market for developers is exceptional, because of this people are flocking to it by the minute. They are all excited to build a bridge without taking a class in engineering.
Actually a few things can cause that state.

1. You could be on us already so we'd say "Hey, can't be faster than us, on us"
2. The speed test API could have gotten wonky and not returned a result.
3. Could be a bug

I'll check on if any of those are true and thanks for the heads up.
This is a very well reported article and I'm grateful it was submitted here for discussion. The article definitely deserves a thoughtful read from beginning to end, as it raises a lot of issues that will have to be considered as research on human aging continues. The comments here posted before this one are interesting too.

Having read the article and the previous comments, I'll jump in with an observation that I've had so much occasion to make here on Hacker News that it is a FAQ block of text I keep off-line for posting here. What's really amazing about fighting human aging is that even with the haphazard approach of tackling one disease at a time, humankind has already made enormous progress in increasing healthy lifespan into old age. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[1] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[2]

An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[3] Provides some of the background.

Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[4]

You can look up websites that will take information you provide and report a personal life expectancy for you based on the information you provide.[5] You may be surprised by what you see. The online longevity calculators are based on historical cohort data and do not reflect any further progress in medicine, public health, or lifestyle improvement that may occur between now and your predicted age of death.

[1] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

[2] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[4] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

[5] Various life-expectancy calculators:

http://www.livingto100.com/

(My calculated life expectancy a year or two ago predicted I would outlive my mother's current age, and three of my four grandparents.)

http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html

(My life expectancy a year or two ago as calculated by this was lower than for the website above. This website is especially cool, because it shows a confidence interval around the estimate.)
Farmers have been using roundup long before roundup resistant crops came along.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
Having the same number of both colours is not sufficient. 14 Z pieces will give you 28 of each color, but you can't make a rectangular lamp (of any size) from only Z pieces.
Indeed, the scale really is mind bending. If you start in EL Cap meadow and hike towards the base, you'll notice that the base keeps being farther away than you thought it was because the height is much greater than what you thought. This is even more pronounced when approaching the South face of Half Dome (from the South) as there are no tree to obscure the view. Also, if it's your first visit to the park, I highly recommend entering on Highway 41 (as opposed to 120). You don't really see anything until you pass through the Wawona tunnel, and then you are greeted with the amazing Wawona view [1]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_View
Roundup resistant crops are much more recent than widespread use of roundup.
Yeah ... I love having the food security of my nation depending on a lawsuit and binding arbitrage against a corporation that has bigger GDP than that of my country.

And lets not get into first sale doctrine, resale and seeds bought in good faith.

Well ... do viruses have copyright? Because they are the only self replicating software I can think of. Can you link to some legal cases?
It depends on the companies working on this like Google's Calico Labs http://calicolabs.com Berkeley Labs GenoPharmix http://genopharmix.com Genentech or Craig Ventors http://humanlongevity
I had to chuckle at this, its true of course that http as a standard is greatly abused and it is one of the big reasons that writing a web crawler is not just a matter of calling GET again and again.

In providing APIs for third parties that are rate limited, our APIs return a '509' error to tell you that you've exceeded your query rate. Which if you just sleep for a bit and then send a request you'll get an answer, but no, as a 'soft' error too many developers just retry it immediately which is useless. Some folks want only 3 errors, 'ok', 'dead', or 'try again' and can't deal with any more subtlety than that.
Extratorrent Down – Suffering Form Massive DDos
> You're right, I omitted the word "deliberate." The courts were more careful: it was the fact that P.S. deliberately took advantage of Monsanto's particular genetic addition that got him in trouble.

And? He should have what, picked the sicklier plants to propagate?
As I get older (I'm about middle age if life expectancy is ~80), I think more about whether I'm really working on the most important thing I could be working on. I'm almost certainly not...but, I have the conflicting desires of making sure I have a reasonable income, decent savings for when I find myself unable to make a reasonable income, and taking big risks on wholly new things.

I have always spent a lot of my time on learning new things, but I find myself conflicted on whether I should be using what I know to maximize my impact in areas I am already an "expert" in, or self development in new areas where it could be years before I would be able to make any kind of impact but might be more important work.

In short: I'm not the person you're responding to, but I sympathize with both arguments. I think life extension (and disease prevention) is among the most important projects of humanity. But, and this is a big but, I have no background in the science behind it (except as someone that follows the field with interest via popular science channels). So, how would I join the effort? I've had my DNA "done" by 23andme, which probably contributes in some realistic, but small, way. But, getting involved in the actual science would take me years...years in which I still need to earn a living. Perhaps I should be looking into the data needs of this research. That's something I at least know a little bit about, having worked in scientific computing on the IT and data side.
Its possible using phantomjs but I am not sure I want to go through the effort.
In 1850, the average 80 year old lived to be 86 years old.

In 2011, the average 80 year old lived to be 89 years old.

[1] http://ourworldindata.org/roser/presentation/online/Improvin... (press the right arrow key for the graph to pop up)

[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

Modern medicine has mostly benefited the young, not the old. The last 150 years of little progress makes me skeptical of claims about future life extension, though of course I'd love to be mistaken.
I am very happy with smartphones. Mostly because having one means I don't have to wear a watch.
I don't think anyone needs to worry about a hypothetical future where medical science has cured cancer, Alzheimer's, and every other disease, but somehow has failed to restore neuroplasticity. Restoring neuroplasticity is a tiny, easy task compared to all the other breakthroughs needed to reverse or stop aging.
On the duality of operating system structures
My wife just discovered that if she puts her phone in airplane mode when playing solitaire it doesn't overheat and her battery lasts longer. This app should be the poster boy for being lightweight and efficient, but is instead used to showcase an advertising network. Who is the actual user here? Everything that doesn't improve the experience of playing solitaire is bloat in this case. There are countless more examples.
[Ignoring the moral/legal problem ...]

One problem is the unknown blood transmitted illness (something like AIDS, or Hepatitis C, some years ago before the blood tests were common). In the normal case, you are in an ER and your options are dying now or a blood transfusion with a low probability of an unknown illness. In this case, you are trying to live for a looong time, and receive a lot of transfusions. Each transfusion increase the probability of a problem, and the possibility that your life expectancy is reduced.
The answer to that question is here:

http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/why-does-monsanto-su...

In a nutshell, most farmers settle rather than that they go to court. Either because they know they're in the wrong or because they can't afford to take on a corporation the size of Monsanto.
Fixing loss of brain plasticity is definitely part of the problem that needs to be solved, but I suspect we'll get there before we extend life expectancy to 120 regardless.
Wait wait wait! Why would Microsoft, or any company, increase the value of a company before buying it (thus increasing the amount they have to payout to existing shareholders)? Wouldn't you think Microsoft or some other company would buy first, then make the company worth more? For example, let's say Chevy is [seriously] thinking about buying [BatteryCompany]. Would Chevy put in an order for millions of dollars worth of batteries and then buy, requiring Chevy to pay more to existing shareholders? Or would Chevy try buying the company then placing the orders to its subsidiary?
Ask HN: What is the best path to become a software tester
My name is Mina, I recently moved to London. I have a bachelor in engineering and one in psychology which I soon realized I cannot equate here, so I am now trying to shift careers to become a software tester.

As I have no practical experience in testing and cannot find any entry level jobs, I thought that the most likely path would be to get a ISTQB certification and then try to find a job, however since this involves a financial investment, I wanted to ask if anybody had similar experiences and if the ISTQB helped in their case.

In the meantime I finished the courses on QA Tutor (qatutor.com) and I am currently going through the codeacademy classes to extend my knowledge of python and try to create a portfolio.
Though I still mostly disagree about the utility of a noscript-friendly web going forward into the future, that's at least something I'd consider a worthy debate. CSS2-only, on the other hand... No. Just no. That's completely indefensible, especially given that you're aiming for mobile-friendliness. In addition to all the other things CSS3 fixes, it's where media queries come from. CSS2-only would set everyone back to having to duplicate effort to add m.blah.com sites. Which would be awful. You might as well be advocating for the return of WAP as far as I'm concerned.
I assume he means generics.
Exploring Angular 1.3: Validators Pipeline
This is not the case with the great library superagent[0], which I can confirm with a little test case I wrote.

I have a server that returns a 401 when the Authorization header is missing, but I also like to return a JSON body with a little more information as to what went wrong (ie. the header is flat out missing or the credentials aren't being sent in the correct way, with a link to the documentation), and superagent allows you to output the `response.body` in the `end()` method callback.

I think of superagent as the requests[1] of js. In fact, I usually require it under the name requests as they feel so similar.

0: https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent

1: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/

EDIT: link formatting
An task runner for python
I use the number of blog posts a year in a Google product's blog as an estimate for its importance for Google:

2014: 3

2013: 3

2012: 8

http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com

So not very important in last two years as it seems.
A lambda in a circle is the mark of the Lambda Complex and a symbol for the Resistance in Half Life. Adopting that would be pretty nerdy, but I don't know if it says "Hacker."
One of the sites mentioned, "wtnnews.com" ("West Texas News"), is a straightforward content farm running Google Adsense ads. Here's their home site, "wtnmedia.com", "A global business-to-business media company where you can forge high level client relationships through the web, print, and events." Their advertising kit shows a base ad rate is $1,295 for 7,500 impressions of a banner ad, for a Cost per Thousand of $171. Nobody would pay that; typical CPTs today are around $1. So that's not their revenue source.

The use of the business addresses of other businesses is unusual. That's identity theft. Our SiteTruth system checks out the address of the business found on the web site, and it brings up StreetView pictures of auto repair shops for some of those sites. Lots of sites don't give an address, or use some mail drop, but use of fake street addresses is rare. It tends to draw tax collector and law enforcement attention.

Google's anti-spam efforts have never been very aggressive. They filter out some of the worst offenders, but don't try hard to get rid of bottom-feeder sites like these. If Google didn't put spam sites in news results, how would they get revenue? Google News itself has no ads, and many of the top news outlets have their own advertising systems that don't involve Google.
I'd suggest giving them a "deadline" if they haven't at least responded constructively within a few days. Something like "If you're actually serious you have until $TODAY+7 days to post something substantive, otherwise I'm going to assume you have nothing actionable.". (Of course adjust 7 as needed based on the situation at hand.)

In any case you can just say: "OK, until someone comes up with evidence to the contrary, I think we should go with my version. If someone shows up with a better version later, I have no objection to merging that."
That's the classic AI success story problem in a nutshell: anything successful from the AI field gets rebranded as something else.
> Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25.

Is there documented evidence of this. Some people do better than others, obviously, but I find it hard to believe that anyone has literally as much plasticity at 90 as they did at 25.

> Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved).

Probably should be more specific than "drugs", since most drugs have no effect on neuroplasticity, and some drugs appear to actually enhance it.
Artifical intelligence publishes automatically generated books by the hour
Building Hamiltonian Graphs from LCF Notation (2012)
Good point. Should've mentioned that. Unfortunately, it's often hard to know if "async" or "defer" will work reliably.
Modern equipment has taken us a long ways from "the leader must not fall" but how forgiving a leader fall will be is still highly dependent on the route. For instance The Bachar Yerian [1] in Tuolumne Meadows (the Yosemite high country).

[1] http://www.alpinist.com/doc/ALP26/first-ascent-bachar-yerian
Actors aren't just about distributed state, they're about any state that could be accessed or modified concurrently. Distributed systems don't have to come into play for actors to be useful. Actors provide a sane way to deal with mutable state with potentially multiple readers or writers.
The attachment is the letter.