The fight to cheat death is heating up - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21704788-fight-cheat-death-hotting-up-adding-ages <comment><USER2> I don't think that "I" from 10 years into the future is the same as the "I" from 10 years ago. The accumulation of small changes is like a "small death" that comes every day. We forget most of everything, we are thrust in different situations, and those situations make ourselves effectively different because they trigger our abilities in a different way.

Fighting death is more about the immortality of the body. The mind is recycled much sooner. The "I" is created by the mind anew every moment. Even sleep is like a mini-death, because we "don't exist" for a short time, then we continue existing again.

But, of course, if we actually get to cheat death and live forever, a new kind of life opens up. If we can back up our minds and then upload them into a young body or in a virtual reality, then we can also be more like a character in a game. We could have many "lives", we could have "save checkpoints", we could restore from previous points, or fork and create more of us. In fact life would not be the same as it was during "linear life". Would a meta-life such as this be the same as immortality? I don't think it would. It would be a completely different thing altogether.

<comment><USER3> Or you know the universe is a simulation and you and I are already temporary characters.

<comment> Capt-RogerOver Let's say that you believe (or know) that. What difference does it make? You still have no access to the base reality, and you still have to make your life around the rules of this one. In fact, how does it change a single thing and/or emotion in your life?

For example: I go to work and do some project there. Let's say that I now found out that there is a base reality, and my work won't matter in the base reality, that there it's all like a video game. It doesn't change anything for me, does it? I only do the work because I enjoy doing things with my mind, because I enjoy the experience. I also know that my work will cause changes in this reality (I have a lot of past evidence for this), like give me a paycheck or change some part of the world in some way, and so I can plan according to this and how the things I do will affect other parts of the reality, including other people. All that still happens even if it's a simulation.

So why would you ever want to even think about if it's a simulation or not? There is still no way to go to the "base" reality.

Also, if it's simulation, wouldn't you want to make your life here longer? (Or are you just assuming that when you die, all your experience will somehow travel with you into some base reality that you have no way of accessing now? )

<comment><USER4> >Let's say that you believe (or know) that. What difference does it make? You still have no access to the base reality, and you still have to make your life around the rules of this one. In fact, how does it change a single thing and/or emotion in your life?

Would be amazing if it was a simulation. You would be able to hack this reality, like in movie The Matrix, and perform hacks that seems like miracles, for example, opening the sea, walking on water, and turning water into wine.

>Also, if it's simulation, wouldn't you want to make your life here longer?

If it's a simulation, you can just restore your HP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few weeks ago I wrote, what I thought was a simple comment about how I use fasting/calorie restriction that ended up getting 210 votes and causing a lot of differing opinions as to its health benefits.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188577)

Aubrey De Grey is someone who has done alot of work in this area and I recommend watching his TED talk.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_a...](https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging?language=en)

Like almost all science in this area, nothing is really proven to work yet.

<comment><USER6> >Like almost all science in this area, nothing is really proven to work yet.

That's why nobody should really buy into these fad diets until such a time as one is rigorously shown to be beneficial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read The Dying Man by Damon Knight when I was a teenager and it had a profound affect on me at the time in regards to thoughts about immortality (it would be interesting to read it again, it would probably seem less significant now).

It is not at all dystopian which puts it out-of-style but it paints an interesting picture of a far-future where the population has settled and immortality is essentially the norm. I recommend picking it up as a quick short read.

Personally I find myself being more cynical about these kinds of things because I think all reality this will not be a good thing in the near future for all but a very small set of people who will (without changes to the system) be able to maintain wealth and control for generations and further imbalance our already imbalanced world.

My real hope is that this increased understanding can lead to increased quality of life for all people if not widespread immortality, but given our ability to disregard the suffering of other people already it seems unlikely. Those of us living in the first world will probably continue to lead longer, more comfortable lives at the expense of or disregarding that of the rest of the world.

<comment><USER8> Forget achieving immortality - if we manage to extend average lifespan to even 120 years of age then almost all of our socioeconomic systems break down and we have to more or less rebuild society from the ground up.

<comment><USER9> The next time this topic comes up, notice how quickly people run into the weeds to discuss all of the social impacts. Happens every time.

There are a handful of people working on the tough problems in the world, the rest are just bullshitting about why if it ever happens, society will collapse.

<comment><USER8> Hate to break it to you but I worked around some of the most prolific hard scientists in the world and many of them genuinely enjoyed bullshitting about the potential future social impact of their work.

<comment><USER9> Good for them. Kept them motivated. The rest of us aren't adding any value. Straight to the bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the UK, your chance of death within the year crawls from approx 0 to 5% between 0 and 80 but then climbs rapidly to 30% by 100 and >50% by 110.

[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)

The recent 100 years of medical advances have lead to massive life expectancy gains (1/4-1/3 year per year in the developed world) but has had no noticeable impact on the age of the oldest living humans or mortality rates of centurions.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people)

Based on this, I think there's a good case for pessimism when speculating whether any living human will live to 150+.

<comment><USER11> "I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years" \- Wilbur Wright

"It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere." \- Thomas Edison

"There has been a great deal said about a ... rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon ... I say, technically, I don't think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing. and I feel confident it will not be done for a very long period to come. I think we can leave that out of our thinking. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking." \- Dr. Vannevar Bush

Edited: what I meant by the above is that humanity has a solid track history of mis-estimating the pace of progress in new fields.

<comment><USER12> But mis-estimation goes both ways. Most academics were very optimistic about early general AI, for instance.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. Also, there was a lot of misplaced optimism about helicopters replacing cars. But either way, I don't think the pessimism is justified.

<comment><USER13> I just find it a little difficult to believe that the one thing to have truly plagued mankind for all his existence (death) has suddenly received a serious blow. It has literally never happened before (as far as we know), and I'm not saying it can't, but current technology is like an infant if you consider it in the scale of what could be. I don't think death is just some easily fixed malfunction, but maybe many do.

<comment><USER14> I don't find it that hard to believe. I think of doctors as highly trained mechanics. We've already figured out how to keep old cars going forever. Humans are several orders of magnitude more complex but the basic idea is the same: fix the problems that kill you, one at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Before being diagnosed with a chronic disease, I was very interested in life extension. Now, I really couldn't care less about living a long time and try to enjoy the life I have-- inconvenient and frustrating though it may be.

In a way it's funny. Now I think about how I plan to shorten my life when/if the need arises rather than extending it at all costs.

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess I don't understand the desire to live forever. Do people really want suffer through daily life for eternity? Disclaimer: I barely make it through a week without thinking about not wanting to live though.

<comment><USER17> There really is so much beauty (and yes, meaning) out there to experience, comprehend, and enjoy. And there are so many kind, brilliant, fascinating people (and other living entities) to experience and share notes on it all with. Despite all the inevitable hassle and suffering and messiness.

So yes, I'd say it's worth it. You don't have to try to stretch it out indefinitely, time-wise, if that's not your thing. I think the key to our journey through all of "this", whatever it is, is to treat it as if it is, in fact, infinite (or rather _timeless_ ), even though our conscious experience of it happens to be stuck on a one-way track which makes it seem (to our primitive minds) like it's finite.

<comment><USER18> But why do you need to experience that beauty through one particular consciousness track, experienced through one particular mind (even this statement is incorrect, because if you define a person as a particular configuration of matter, then you are a new mind each time-interval)? Make way for new configurations, for more brilliant, fascinating minds.

<comment> Capt-RogerOver If you are speaking in terms of spiritual experiences, you can of course be having any kind of those and nothing can really be argued about it, because they are subjective.

If, however, you are making an objective claim about "past lives" and reincarnation - there is no solid evidence for it. 99% of "past life memories" examples are in the form of "I had a family and we had a house" (omg, that sounds like our dead relative, you must be him reincarnated), or in a form of an obviously imagined past life of a historic figure, with details which have been read in history books by the individual claiming to experience the said past life. And interestingly they always seem to read about the historic figure first (giving their subconscious mind the change to soak up that knowledge (in this life though)), and "experiencing a past life" only after.

So to answer your question - because you only get one particular mind, and that's it. This is what science shows us. Whether you "feel like" you are "one with all other minds" is just a subjective experience. It's not physical reality.

<comment><USER18> I'm not making a claim about reincarnation or past lives. I'm saying something along the lines of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism). And no, science has not shown that you get one particular mind. It could, at best, show that you experience one mind at a time. But what is experiencing the mind?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Curiously, just today I was researching the public health efforts in the Finnish town of North Karelia which is known in public health as a place that started reducing heart attacks beginning in the early 1970's and saw an article referencing Blue Zones.

The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1426211929/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1426211929/)

[https://communities.bluezonesproject.com](https://communities.bluezonesproject.com)

From the first Amazon review of the book, written by a woman:

"I first ran into my own "Blue Zone" when I hiked up a mountain near Zermatt, Switzerland to a village that was only accessible by hiking or cable car. A 102-year old woman dashed past me, UPHILL ON ICE, in felt boots, while I was (in my 40's) trying to struggle up the incline with the assistance of two ski poles. Later, I found her, running the local inn and making strudel, which was the most delicious I've ever had. She was making the strudel that day, because her OLDER sister was taking a nap."

</comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

<comment><USER21> That's just an appeal to nature. Just because something was an evolutionary necessity (and that is not even clear in this case) it does not follow that that thing should actually be desirable for us.

A plausible explanation of aging is for example the evolutionary shadow: From the perspective of your genes you don't matter (much) after you've successfully passed on you genes to the next generation. Thus there is no evolutionary pressure for longevity. The programmed cell decay of aging might be a way of multicellular organisms to fight cancer.

<comment><USER22> Even more, evolution is often 'ineffective' and also can't make big leaps without complete disasters. It is quick only when you die young, as you already mentioned. It could happen that aging became unneeded at some epochs/species, but there was no easy way and/or strong reason to "turn it off" again.

Our bodies are not well-designed, they are full of legacy. The whole idea of moving via contracting meat is... strange. For real, lower _half_ of me exists only to move the upper half. That's crazy.

<comment><USER23> Don't flap your meat at me like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Longevity research is interesting because you could theoretically get to a point where one year of research extends people's lives more than one year. Then the people who avoided car accidents and the flu could live indefinitely, which is much more of a transformation than people living to 120.

Will we live to see this happen? The optimistic view is that longevity research is very under explored right now, and there may be some significant low-hanging fruit. Also, if AI or nanotechnology live up to their hype quickly enough, they could significantly accelerate research.

More pessimistically, I see at least three major obstacles:

(a) Medical research sucks as it is, and longevity research is inherently time-consuming. There are ways to ease this, like testing treatments on mice first, but I don't see an easy way around the need to apply the test to humans and wait many years to see the results.

(b) The human body is hard to understand and manipulate - we haven't cured cancer yet, despite all our effort.

(c) Until people's attitudes about death change (or those people die and are replaced by people with different attitudes), longevity research will continue to attract much less attention than it deserves. Most people have psychologically committed themselves to doing nothing about death. They accept it will happen to them with 100% certainty, but they deny it will happen to them anytime soon, so they ignore it.

<comment><USER25> It's scary to think of what life would be if you are immortal, but can still die from an accident. Makes you wonder if you ever want to leave the house until society becomes safer.

<comment><USER26> The trouble is, your house is a death trap too. Heck, the whole planet is. Typically, mobility and active approach to such immortality brings better results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised there's no mention of Buddhism here. To accept death as a natural process, to realise that every being is subject to birth, old age, sometimes sickness and death, to constantly remind oneself of death leads to, in many ways, a more fulfilling life.

Clinging to youth, good looks, being alive itself - these are all causes of suffering, as there is nothing permanent. People wanting to "cheat death" are attempting to find refuge in impermanence. But there isn't any to be found. What is changing is unsafe. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't take medications or life-saving surgeries, as those aren't done with the intention of permanence in mind.

Buddhism says that superior to "cheating death" is in fact fully comprehending death, the unsatisfactory nature of our lives and the fact that the self cannot be found in any of these passing phenomena. To realise this puts an end to birth and therefore death. But in the context of _here and now_ , our suffering is reduced.

The search for youth only causes suffering. Desire is a root of suffering.

<comment> loup-vaillant Without hope, we should indeed accept. Let's make the most of what we have.

Death is not like that. It is not clear we couldn't find ways to double or triple our lifespan. It is not clear reincarnation (of the non-imaginary kind, mind uploading) is utterly impossible. It is not clear we couldn't find ways to keep our lives interesting for a very, very long time.

Simply put, this is not hopeless.

Yes, desire is a root of suffering. But it is also a root of progress. I'd rather not cut that root just yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The fascinating thing about the transition of aging research from mere investigation to the possibility of intervention is that many researchers don't even want to talk about extending life, but only a small expansion of healthspan. This lack of ambition, and refusal to engage with the large body of evidence that suggests we can do far better, is why we need organizations like the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation, working to make the better option happen. It is possible and plausible to extend healthy life and overall lifespan indefinitely by implementing the approach of repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging. Yet all too much of the rhetoric and effort in the scientific community still goes towards tinkering with the operation of metabolism to slightly slow the pace at which damage accumulates - a clearly far inferior approach, that can at best produce only marginal outcomes.

All of the technologies and approaches mentioned in this article are marginal, ways to only modestly slow the damage of aging from accumulation. They are very limited in what they can achieve - adding five to ten years to life would be an enormous, unlikely success for any one of these. Calorie restriction we know doesn't add more than that to human life spans, since we have plenty of examples to look at. Metformin data is all over the map in animal studies, just as contradictory and half-refuted as sirtuins. The transfer of young plasma to old individuals doesn't extend life in animal studies; it is pretty unlikely to have the desired effect in humans - that isn't the same thing as parabiosis. Human Longevity Inc is a personalized medicine company in fancy clothing, doing nothing that will greatly extend life, but rather looking for incremental gains in ordinary medicine. And so on.

Sadly journalists typically don't distinguish between the potential value and outcome of different approaches to aging - it is all the same to them, just a flat list. So they pull five or ten items from the larger list to populate their articles, and mark them all equivalent. That's something of a problem when the differences are in fact enormously important and the expected outcomes are night and day when comparing approaches that repair damage versus approaches that do not repair damage. If there is to be significant progress towards healthy life extension in our lifetimes, the better strategies, those involving damage repair, must gain far greater support. This means the SENS list: senescent cell clearance, mitochondrial DNA damage, clearing metabolic waste like amyloid, lipofuscin, and cross-links, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER29> Relevant reading from philosopher Nick Bostrom:

[http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html](http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Death makes space for new life, and new strategies. It's a key part of the evolutionary process, and thus of life itself. Yet another sign of the desperate egocentrism of a generation alienated from what it means to live.

<comment><USER31> Evolution is an awful optimization process. It's only effective in real life because it's had literally billions of years to work. Intelligently-guided directed optimization is _vastly_ superior and we should prefer it whenever possible, if only for reasons of practicality and efficiency. For example, look at the development of flight: biological evolution took probably a few billion years to evolve things like pteranodons and archaeopteryx; we _landed on the moon_ in about seventy years.

Evolution is amazing, sure. It's also evil, bad, and wrong, even without getting into ethical issues. Don't do it.

(speaking of ethical issues: [http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg- egan/](http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/))

<comment><USER32> Funnily enough I was just thinking today about how a living organism is in some ways essentially a brute force attempt at finding the solution to persistence.

EDIT > great story thx

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So if nobody dies, how do we deal with evolution in the case that we need it. What about brain plasticity? Young brains learn new concepts well and use those experiences to create new ideas and innovations.

We should try to fight aging, but if that succeeds there are a lot of other societal problems that need to be solved as well.

<comment><USER17> _So if nobody dies, how do we deal with evolution in the case that we need it?_

It needs to be seen that having older people around isn't a hindrance to evolution, but rather a great assist to it -- precisely because they have so many memories, and so many of the positive qualities (patience, forbearance... and a general lack of vanity) that naturally come with being around the planet for so long.

Which those of stuck in (seemingly) lively, energetic younger bodies can greatly benefit from.

<comment><USER34> >It needs to be seen that having older people around isn't a hindrance to evolution, but rather a great assist to it ...

That seems rather unlikely.

" _A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it._ " -Max Planck

<comment><USER26> He could have been wrong too. Because he was still alive. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Of course it is, the baby boomers are dying. 10-15 years from now, they'll all have left their positions of authority, and the fight to cheat death will cool down again.

<comment><USER36> I'm not so sure about the cool down, but i think you're exactly right about the baby boomers. Nobody wants to die. I don't think many baby boomers are connecting the anti-aging dots directly. But that large, wealthy, aging group of people are certainly spurring a ton of research.

Take this pill to not die is the ultimate killer app.

I don't think it's going to work out. I think a lot of money will go to snake oil, but hopefully something good will come of it.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "Nobody wants to die."

I do. Living for ever, or even much longer than our current life expectancy doesn't appeal to me at all. I like my life, but I also like that someday it will end. Back when I was religious (I'm not now) the idea of heaven or eternal life seemed strange to me as it was 'the goal' yet not something I wanted and the idea that I had to 'live forever' was quite worrying.

I'm curious if I'm in a minority on this. It's probably important to point out I don't want to die anytime soon but the idea that I continue living for longer than another 80 years for example is not appealing.

<comment><USER37> If living forever were the default, would you choose to intentionally kill yourself?

<comment><USER38> It would be the last new experience, after everything else had been done to death...

<comment><USER39> It's not like people haven't done it before, or does it not count if you get a revive after 30 minutes without any brain activity?

<comment><USER38> It only counts if you don't know that there is a revive available ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> At this point I can recall reading starry eyed articles about future life extension technologies 10-15 years ago. My question is simple: what products have been brought to market that can be classified as "life extension" and are we certain they work? Is there actually anything out there yet which is as effective as good old diet and exercise?

</comment><comment><USER41> With obesity at 66% (in the United States) I think the average life expectancy will start going down.

1900/day isn't very extreme. It's what I do on days I don't go to the gym (and 2200/day on days I do go). And I'm not underweight either--I'm within the healthy BMI range. People just eat too much food!

<comment><USER42> 66% is overweight OR obese[1]. Being overweight doesn't pose as many health- risks as being obese.

<comment><USER43> Heck, obesity correlates well with life expectancy but that's probably because sickness causes weight loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Seems like this will be a growth technology field. Though I am making the assumption that developments will also apply to more then just the elderly. An example would be keeping a larger percentage of the population in peak or near peak mental and physical health for longer.

</comment><comment><USER45> The discussion of calorie restriction (CR) brought to mind a piece by NYmag reporter Julian Dibbell on his experience trying out CR for two months:

[http://nymag.com/news/features/23169/](http://nymag.com/news/features/23169/)

On the sillier side, I recommend "Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart. It's an entertaining novel with themes of life extension and near- future dystopian technology. Anyone who liked the "please drink a verification can" greentext will probably enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Are there any benefits from fasting without calorie restriction? e.g. fasting for 23 hours then eating all recommended calories?

<comment><USER47> I'm curious on this too but I'm thinking of doing a Belgian monk fast though which allows beer of course. :)

Lost weight and drink solid beers? Nice! I found a post about this experience [1] which also has a few bits of research [2] linked as per your question.

One of the articles says "Water-only fasting should only be done in a specialized clinic" and "certain types of very low calorie diets, and particularly those with high protein content, can increase the incidence of gallstones in women at risk"

So perhaps the Belgian monks know what they are doing with the calories and low protein in the beers!

[1] [https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/monk-style- be...](https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/monk-style-beer-fast- diet.306185/)

[2] [https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting- appears-...](https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-to- slow-aging/) and [http://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131%2815...](http://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131%2815%2900224-7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This article illustrates superbly what Bill Gates said "We tend to overestimate the impact of changes that will happen in 2 years, and underestimate those that will happen in next 10 years"

</comment><comment><USER18> We should focus on reducing suffering, not on creating arbitrarily long life- times. When suffering is low enough that death-anxiety is the greatest source of human angst, then work on immortality.

<comment><USER49> Considering that age-related illnesses are responsible for 100,000 of the 150,000 deaths each day[1], I think working on aging is a very effective way to reduce suffering.

Also, I hope readers notice that nobody makes this criticism when someone works on a new mobile app, another static site generator, or My Little Pony fanfiction. It's an excellent example of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.[2]

1\. [http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/ENHANCE- PP.pdf](http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/ENHANCE-PP.pdf)

2\. [https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of- eth...](https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Whatever life is worth living for, I don't think it requires eternity.

<comment><USER51> How long _does_ it require? And might the answer, perhaps, be higher than 78.8 years?

Or maybe higher than 200?

How about 1000?

<comment><USER50> To put it simply, I don't feel like the current human lifespan is too short.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Related comic:

[http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/8/8/1556848/-Cartoon- Mi...](http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/8/8/1556848/-Cartoon-Millennial- lament)

</comment><comment><USER53> "hotting up"?

[http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hot- up](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hot-up)

<comment><USER54> It's the trend against declension so instead of using "heating", you use "hotting", or instead of total "spending", total "spend". For many it sounds like it's more modern and young. But there are times when using the base word introduces collision with other meanings.

<comment><USER55> "Hotting up" appears to be a quirk of British journalism, not necessarily a "trend." Not exactly modern and young when the first usage was in 1923 by P. G. Wodehouse.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10wwln- safire-t.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10wwln- safire-t.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Who wrote this? There is no byline.

<comment><USER5> See this....

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2013/09/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2013/09/economist-explains-itself-1)

The Economist's writers are always anonymous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's appalling that something like this, which would fundamentally alter what it means to be human in a profound and everlasting way, can be so casually described and is being pursued with relatively little debate. I guess we'll have plenty of time to debate our folly after the immortal/vampire class has put the leashes on us for a few half-centuries.

<comment><USER57> Oh but how much fun is it to contemplate? How does love, war, work, retirement, achievement, purpose, etc. change once you can live forever? Or once some subset of humanity can live forever? If you were nearly immortal how long would you mourn the death of a non-immortal spouse? Would you work an additional 5 years before retirement on the off chance that they figure out how to make you immortal between now and then? How would you treat a person who was immortal because they spent $1 million on a treatment that you couldn't afford? How would that treatment affect inflation? How would immortals affect inflation? There is so much awesome material here for science fiction writers!

<comment><USER56> I fully intend to write this science fiction, but the fact that this COULD be reality (and I think the biology is tractable) should be sparking some sort of policy debate. There is actual capital flowing into these ventures... Speculative fiction is ten years behind where the money is.

<comment><USER58> Drew Magary beat you to it.

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10673576-the- postmortal](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10673576-the-postmortal)

(It's a good read)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation - <AUTHOR> http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html <comment><USER2> Every day we see bat-shit-crazy lawsuits over patents and trademarks that have a huge impact on society, for no good reason but corporate greed. If the company follows through it means any computer system that lists possible time zones would be at risk since the original data came from a source that this company bought. Not surprised one bit by this.

<comment><USER3> Publicly held corporations are greedy by definition. The objective of such a corporation is simply to make as much money for its owners as possible.

Our laws create an environment where intellectual property abuse has proven to be a profitable venture.

The solution is not to redefine corporations as non-greedy entities.

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily. Generally, the purpose of a corporation is, in fact, to maximize shareholder wealth, but all a corporation is supposed to do is to represent the interests of the shareholders, which do not have to be financially motivated.

In theory, corporations are not solely profit-seeking. In practice, they tend to be.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if this is an Australia-only thing - and I was under the impression that if was far from being so - but here the responsibility to shareholders of a corporation is solely fiscal.

The reasoning behind this is that shareholder needs tend to differ. If shareholders wish to engage in philanthropy, the corporation is not the ideal (shared) vessel for doing so. Instead, individual investors may receive their asset's rent and choose to distribute their earnings as they please; management is employed to run the Corp and not make decisions for the shareholders' philanthropic activities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is that Olson is clearly derived from a copyright source and it's not clear that's it's protected by any of the fair use clauses.

The timezone data should have been derived from primary sources (legislation in the particular countries, etc.), by deriving from a secondary source which may have used editorial judgement in compiling that data there is potentially a genuine copyright issue.

It should be possible to rewrite Olson without using a secondary source (if it's not then it would imply that there is a clear copyright violation) and that's what the community should attempt to do.

<comment><USER7> Facts can not be copyrighted. See Feist v. Rural: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural>

It is difficult to imagine what data this database contains that is somehow of a creative nature, that comes from the source in question. Though I do recall there being some actual text in the comments it didn't strike me as pulled straight from an almanac.

<comment><USER8> There is arguably some creativity in the naming of the time zones, such as "America/New_York" or "America/Los_Angeles". Though I have no idea if this is part of the litigation or not.

<comment><USER9> This is basically the only readable naming convention that uses well-known geographical names and is computer friendly (Unix-like separators, lack of spaces). I see no creativity here.

<comment><USER8> There are many other naming conventions that could have been used such as "Pacific Standard Time" or "PST" but the author chose to name the time zones based on popular/well-known geographical locations as their timezone _names_ , not merely their descriptions. That is why its arguably creative.

In hindsight this seems like commonsense. But maybe not when it was designed. I'm personally against these kind of litigations. But if its purely based on interpreting the law, then this could be argued to be creative/expressive.

Again, I'm not even sure that the premise is even true. That is the litigation might not even be about the naming convention.

<comment><USER10> You should have researched more before posting. EST has not always meant the same thing in all places, certain areas moved into different timezones are different times, some places did or did not chose daylight saving time, etc.

By referencing the city name all those historical changes are also included.

You are only thinking about supporting the _current_ timezone, but this database also supports timezones for past dates and times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just tell Astrolabe what you think of them on their facebook: [http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology- Software-a...](http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology-Software-and- Services/52527078715)

<comment><USER12> I did, was removed.

<comment><USER13> You and dozens of others, with no statements from their side at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We rely on heavily on timezone databases and when designing our app had a a lot of debate on what would be the best way to go. We opted for a hybrid solution implementing several options with redundency Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that the Unix TMZ database would be compromised in such a a way. Just goes to show that you can never think of all contigencies, but good planning and foresight is essential.

<comment><USER15> I wonder if even some GNU software has gotten caught up in this. Those guys are pretty darn careful. Talk about justifying your paranoia!

<comment><USER16> Each time something like this comes down the pipe, I click over one notch more GNU/FSF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> muuh-gnu Can somebody explain what benefits we have from having time zones _at all_? They are an absolute mess: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Tim...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Time_Zones_2011_%28October_2011%29.png) Wouldnt it be easier to have one time for the whole planet, like we have one date for the whole planet? Is there some reasoning behind it or is it just another case of historical baggage? There seems to be no other rationale behind it than allies and trading partners wanting to have the same or comparable time display.

<comment><USER17> There's UTC as the universal time for the whole planet. Just need to get everyone start using it day to day.

<comment><USER18> The military does. It's called - or used to be called - zulu time.

It's only used by guys who -must- use it. Air plane drivers, strategic guys, comm center operators.

Everyone else uses the local time.

I suspect if UTC / zulu were really the bee's knees some general would mandate everyone use it.

Heck, they got me - a dumb American from the sticks - to think in metric pretty easily. UTC would be a breeze.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you need the latest version, Archive Team got a backup and put it on the Internet Archive [http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz- au-2011...](http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006)

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain how this will affect me? Will my code break because the server is down or is this more of an issue for populating the time zone data for OS and language libraries?

<comment><USER21> Your code won't break. And you probably won't even have any difficulty populating the database on new installs, since your OS provider is probably mirroring the current database.

But there are "between 20 and 100" changes to the worldwide timezone-set per year. So three weeks from now, someone's gonna change their timezone rules, effective perhaps 2013. Maybe it'll be Bolivia. And then three weeks later, someone else, maybe some part of Indiana. Then three weeks later, maybe a civil war in some ex-SSR or something finally resolves, and the two different halves end up using different time zone plans (one of them uses DST, the other doesn't, and neither of them use the USSR regime they had last year).

So now a year passes, it's 2012, what're you doing? Is your software using a database that's a year (and maybe 50 events) out of date? Or did you hand- maintain it, because you care about Indiana, and you got 10 of the 50 events? Or maybe you used the Debian fork of tzdata?

And what am _I_ doing? Probably not the same thing as you. And now when my software and your software try to interoperate (maybe our iCal calendaring, maybe our enterprise order management integration bus service routing frameworks, maybe we just want to agree when your mother's flight will land), guess what. Sooner or later a relevant event happens in one of the altered timezones, and someone misses a flight, and we get a very very difficult-to- track-down bug.

Actually, it's not that terrible, as long as every time event you care about takes place in a big important time-jurisdiction that'll be maintained by every tzdata fork that every software you care about will use. Which I guess could theoretically apply to me or you. I don't actually care about Indiana, so I don't care if time events that take place there don't synchronize.

<comment><USER22> If we agree that most OS vendors will probably ignore the copyright claim and keep using the current database, then one could put any newer updates into a "patch database", which clearly would not be under any prior copyright (and could be easily made available to everyone as the old database was). So, I don't really buy your parable about how this will only affect future changes. If tzdata "forks", it will be between what old (possibly copyrighted) data is included.

<comment><USER21> Well, on the one hand, I agree with you about one source of forks being old data, although at least this is a relatively simple fork: those who excise the allegedly-infringing parts of the database, and those who do not.

On the other hand, I think you are completely groundless in your assertion that it can't fork over future changes. There could be multiple patch databases with disjoint changesets in them, with different software using different databases.

And it's not _my_ parable. It's my rephrasing of the FA, and the comments by the FA's author in his own comments thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can vote for the second review here.... ;-)

[http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas- Expanded-5th/dp/0935127...](http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas- Expanded-5th/dp/0935127380)

edit: whoops direct link should be: [http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0935127380&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode=)

</comment><comment><USER24> If this continues, we'll need a pirate bay for open source.

<comment><USER25> Good idea! It could be called "openbay"... Hmmm...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interestingly enough, the database _is_ definitely copyrighted work in Europe. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right>.

<comment><USER27> The European database right lasts for only 15 years from each "substantial modification" of the database. The work in question dates from 1991 and contains mostly historical data so presumably those rights have expired.

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra I'm surprised that their (astrolabe) website is still up. Where's anonymous with their LOICs when they are needed desperately?

</comment><comment><USER28> Not sure if any IP lawyers are reading and could comment. Would it be helpful to a case like this to crowd-source finding prior published art for the specific ACS references in the files? This would be ideal for something like Groklaw to pick up.

</comment><comment><USER29> Serious question: Why do we need the old almanac entries anyway?

I can see current and future, but the almanac's data seems worthless to me.

<comment><USER28> Many computer programs need to deal with historical dates. Without these tz rules captured into one place, it would be very difficult to determine when an event happened in another timezone. Also, most data is either going to be stored in UTC or in some domain-specific alternate "center" (New York time, for instance), forcing conversions if a user wants to view the data in their local time.

A contrived example: Say I'm in London and I want to know what time the NYSE opened up in London-local time on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. That requires looking up the opening time in NYC and then converting the time to a different timezone, possibly taking into account DST in both locales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why are they shutting it down? Why don't they just update those entries to use a different source?

</comment><comment><USER31> Uh oh. Hopefully someone made a copy! :)

<comment><USER31> What? HN can't take a joke?

<comment><USER32> someone _did_ make a copy

[http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz- au-2011...](http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Slightly off-topic but here's a question about patents that I just can't wrap my head around. Could you patent the contents of an RFC? If so, is it possible for a company to patent the contents of all RFC's pertaining to TCP/IP and then essentially own the internet?

<comment><USER34> It's completely off-topic (this is about copyright law) but here's an answer anyway: Patents are ideally about _new_ inventions, which means that if someone can find 'prior art' (evidence someone was doing it before you) they can get your patent thrown out. (Ideally, extant prior art prevents the patent from being issued in the first place.) An RFC, pretty much by definition, is very good evidence of prior art, especially if it's a very well-known one, as all of the ones relating to TCP/IP are.

In the real world, things get not so much more complex as a whole lot stupider. Still, I think the courts could muddle through that one with minimal problems.</comment></comment>


Buying Bitcoin Just Got Way Easier - <AUTHOR> https://blog.coinbase.com/2016/06/01/buying-bitcoin-just-got-way-easier/ <comment><USER2> Does this mean that I can now put a "Pay me" button on my websites, be paid with regular debit cards and receive bitcoins directly ?

Sounds awesome!</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best practices for storing API keys? - <AUTHOR>

If I have a web service which uses other 3rd party API and I want to store the keys securely, what are the best practices around that?
I've looked at vault (https://hashicorp.com/blog/vault.html) which seems ideal but still in production.
Also AWS's Key Management system (KMS)(https://aws.amazon.com/kms/) seems promising but only provides ways to store native AWS keys. Would I then create a database which held the keys encrypted using KMS keys and SQL access keys? <comment><USER2> Another option, which is used in production by cloudflare:

[https://github.com/cloudflare/redoctober](https://github.com/cloudflare/redoctober)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this looks useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> about how many api keys are we talking? im using enviroment variables for the job. Might not be manageable if you have many keys though

<comment><AUTHOR> like 20+. That seems hard since you'd have to make sure the keys didn't show up in any of your logs.</comment></comment>


Getting Started, circa 1983 - <AUTHOR> http://www.simonallardice.com/general/2014/03/17/first-computer.html

<comment><USER3> I think the Author meant 1973 not 1983. In 1983 I was about to graduate from USC, we had FINE (Fine Is Not Emacs), vi, TOPS20, TENEX, TOPS10, Beehive terminals, VT52 & VT100 terminals, the infamous 'urinal' terminals (the Lear Sieglar ADM3) and really cool Heathkit H29 and later Z29 terminals. You tended to work in an 80 x 24 + 1 line status window but that was not nearly as bad as writing things out on sheets. Which I did do in 1973 because the only way to program Fortran at the High School was to send it into the district office to run as a batch job.

Nit picking aside though, the key issue was _turnaround_ time. The time between when you thought you were done and the time you knew your code worked. Few people these days experience hitting enter at the shell prompt and waiting 30 - 45 seconds before the command started running. This was one aspect of workstations that made them so popular, no time sharing mean you could compile quickly and test and simple things like 'ls' on a directory were fast.

It got "too good" though, with people having the computer check things rather than think about what they had written. That leads to a situation where if the result is close enough to what you think it should be, you can convince yourself that it is correct before it actually is, and _that_ can lead you to look elsewhere when things go wrong and makes debugging harder than it should be.

<comment><USER4> I was so excited when I got my own vt220 on my desk and didn't have to go into the raised floor computer room. We used a VAX 1170 then a Micro vax to compile C for Motorola 68000 and 68020 processors. Then you'd download the code to an EPROM burner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" A year or two into this, we were finally upgraded. Amidst much rejoicing, we were provided a handful of IBM 3270 dumb terminals"_

Actually, the 3270 terminal was pretty smart for its time. It was capable of x/y cursor addressing (supporting full-screen editors as opposed to line editors like the original Unix "ed"), had protected/unprotected fields (for form entry, you could only enter data in the unprotected fields and tab from one field to the next, like a form in HTML), and one version, the 3279, even had a color display. You can see a photo of a 3279 here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3279](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3279)

My first experience with computers in the 1970s was with punched cards, but unlike the author, the output (printed on fan-fold line printer paper) usually came back in a matter of minutes. When your program crashed, you'd get a hexadecimal dump of registers and memory - printed on paper.

</comment><comment><USER6> Whenever I read about how hard it was to do things in the past — program, edit movies, typeset books, make butter — I'm amazed they even bothered! What tasks that we do today will seem shockingly tedious and hard in a few decades? Well, programming still kind of sucks...

</comment><comment><USER7> Always great to read these stories.

My dad worked with punch cards to crunch numbers in Fortran as a young statistician. Initially the university had only one big machine. Every day at 5PM there were long lines of people delivering their decks of cards with source code to the computing center. At night clerks fed all the jobs to the machine, and at 9AM there was another line of people getting their job output back.

The output cards were stacked in boxes on the wall by user name. You could tell the height of the output decks from some distance, and if a box only contained one card, you knew instantly it was a syntax error and someone was going to have a bad day. So apparently at their start of computing, they immediately had a nice analog build status visualization.

</comment><comment><USER8> You want to become a ProgrammiererIn (female ending), forget it, its a badly payed women job, and besides that: Men can not type!

My first job was a bit more modern, instead of men writing code with pencil and women typing it in, we had women who coded, did the admin job, and typed themself. The men moved up to become system architects or database designers. We had ASCII typewriters with paper tape to type our own code. The papertape then went to the print and copy room, where it was printed and copied on magnetic tape. Compile time was rare, especially at the dayshift. So once the printout was on the table, a group of coders, all but me women, took a red pencil to fix bugs, before a job was submitted.

</comment><comment><USER9> In 1st professional job, in the late 80s, my first boss/lead did not know how to use a text editor. Punched cards is all he knew and the main system did not even feature a text editor (we actually compiled programs on one machine, then the compiled output was migrated over). Though there was a utility that emulated punched card input (and this was on Burroughs hardware). But he could perform a randomizing routine in his head.

Most all of the old-timers used pencil on coding sheets like displayed in this article and were aghast at us young whipper-snappers that entered code directly into the terminal.

<comment><USER10> I wonder what the next stage of this will be. Will programmeers of the future marvel that we even had to use keyboards at some point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started programming in 1982 and became adept at writing my code (especially machine language) out by hand before converting to hex by hand so I could key it into the monitor (this on a 6502, VIC-20). Having to do this makes you very careful: you made sure your logic was correct before you converted. You ran the code through your head multiple times to make sure it worked. Even today I rely on reading and rereading the code I write to find logic bugs before I compile and run the code. I find that kids coming out of school (yes, now that I'm old enough to be the father of current college graduate I'll call you kids) are more likely to code whatever comes to mind and then "run and pray" that it works. If you're lucky, they'll use a debugger if it doesn't work. If you're unlucky, they start putting in print statements.

I sometimes wonder if this type of programming is a side-effect of the short attention spans teens and twenty-somethings have now... but that's a subject for another time.

<comment><USER12> > If you're lucky, they'll use a debugger if it doesn't work. If you're > unlucky, they start putting in print statements.

I think you got that backwards. printf debugging is a very useful but dying skill. If you have a usable debugger and you're working on one atomic single- threaded module, great -- but if you are doing low-level, asynchronous stuff, often on disparate platforms, the ability to write a log file and debug things that way is a precious resource.

<comment><USER11> I completely agree: I do a lot of printf debugging in exactly the cases you describe. As with everything though it's a tool, and not necessarily the first one to go to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of a similar but more recent anecdote while I was in school (2005). During our lab exams, the teacher used to give us about 3/4th of the total time to write the solution to the programming question on a piece of paper, and the remaining time to type what you wrote on paper, make corrections, and compile. The programming questions were elementary like string manipulations, printing some pattern of `*` etc..

In retrospect, this approach made us to think about edge cases which now I'll think about much later in the coding process. The overall grade was based on the correctness and also on the number of alterations in logic made in the final running code.

edit: by school, I refer to senior high school as in US [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_high_school#United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_high_school#United_States)

</comment><comment><USER14> I started programming when I was 10 and I was instantly hooked. Two years later, my parents got a divorce and my dad took the computer. I only saw him on weekends, but I had to get my programming fix. During the week, I'd write Qbasic programs in a notebook, then type and test on weekends. Eventually I graduated to assembly and C. It was a great way to pass the time in high school health class.

To this day, I still prefer to do a lot of writing before I start typing, though I don't often write the entire program ahead of time. Instead, I'll write the "interesting" bits -- the stuff that's algorithmically complex or otherwise kind of tricky. I find that with nothing but a pencil and a sheet of paper, there are fewer distractions and fewer limitations (comments can readily contain drawings, for example).

</comment><comment><USER15> In the early 80s, even though I had access to a terminal, I always wrote my code out with pencil and paper before typing it in. Don't remember why exactly. I wonder if that was just a holdover from an earlier time and how we were taught.

<comment><USER16> I used to code like that even into the 1990s when I worked at an investment bank that used BASIC (yes, old-style basic with line numbers). We had dumb terminals at our desks, but the editor capabilies were pretty limited so it was often more productive to write pencil drafts of your code until it was close to correct. Extensive pencil reworking on printed copies of the code was also common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The furnishings of pretty much any 80's era programmer I got to observe seemed to include binders full of notes, code listings(and less often, program output) printed out and marked up, Post-its, and boxes of tapes or diskettes. A pocket calculator to work out some figures. Graph paper for working out pixel graphics, if a better tool wasn't available.

Compared with today's streamlined tools - everything cloud synced instantaneously from portable devices, and maybe a small paper notebook to sketch ideas - it seems incredibly quaint. Lots of artifacts that just aren't necessary now.

</comment><comment><USER18> My 9 year old son was shocked the other day when I mentioned that when I started programming we didn't have "windows" or a mouse. He said "How can that even possibly be a computer?"

</comment><comment><USER19> What's interesting is that kids who started programming in the 70s / 80s did use desktop computers. I was one of them, I started programming in 1983 with a TI99/4A. The computers I used at school had floppy disk drives, so I could even save my work. For the first few months I owned just one 128kb 5 1/4 floppy where I kept my (interpreted) programs.

I used to type in BASIC programs from magazines such as Byte. A typical bug that bit me several times was typing an l instead of a 1.

<comment><USER20> Geez, I used to get hit with that "l" instead of a "1" all the time. It was so much nicer when some of the mags went to a fixed-width font on non-gloss paper for code.

<comment><USER21> I was lucky that one of the first issues of Compute! I got my hands on had a listing for a proofreader[1], a utility that checksummed each typed line of BASIC and displayed the checksum in the left margin. All listings in the magazine had these checksums printed to the left of the line numbers, so it was easy to catch typing errors.

This was especially useful without any kind of permanent storage. I had to type in my games every time. :-)

[1] Compute! November 1986 issue, page 94. [https://ia600700.us.archive.org/6/items/1986-11-compute- maga...](https://ia600700.us.archive.org/6/items/1986-11-compute- magazine/Compute_Issue_078_1986_Nov.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That way (paper & pencil), we still coded in university (exams, tests) - <USER2> the same in 2014.

Especially you have to remember a lot of Java standard library APIs and the same for C#, ASM, C, C++.

For one exam I had to remember Lisp, Haskell, Ada, Pascal, Scheme, J# and Smalltalk language syntax and their common APIs to write code snips on paper to pass it.

What was your experience with university coding exams?

</comment><comment><USER23> Being a somewhat "brash young whippersnapper" myself, I was aware of the punchcard scheme, but somehow it had completely slipped by me that as late as the early 80's programmers were just still using pen and paper. Somehow, I have tended to imagine the days were thats what it meant to be a programmer to have existed in the same context as Alan Turing and the Enigma machine.

I would guess those programmers made sure they had perfect penmanship, I wouldn't have wanted a typist to mistake my colons for simicolons.

I wounder if the act of physically writing out the program on pen and paper actually made it stick for viscerally in the programmers head?

<comment><USER24> > it had completely slipped by me that as late as the early 80's programmers > were just still using pen and paper. Somehow, I have tended to imagine the > days were thats what it meant to be a programmer to have existed in the same > context as Alan Turing

seconded.

but then in another 15 or 20 years, people will probably be like, "wow, you needed a second monitor just to read documentation?" or "10 _million_ lines of code was an acceptable size for a single application?" or something similar.

much respect & sorry about trampling the flowers, sirs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very cool. I have a sense of the punch card era, but this is the first anecdotal write-up of an intermediary period that still relied on paper input that I've seen. Thanks for sharing!

I eat up computer history, but it's especially nice to hear firsthand accounts about seemingly mundane stuff like workflow.

<comment><USER26> If you want more, there's always this:

Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss 11 skills and tactics that every programmer once needed to master ... and today can blissfully forget [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9132061/Old_school_pr...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9132061/Old_school_programming_techniques_you_probably_don_t_miss?taxonomyId=11&pageNumber=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This must be why so many instructors seem to think that catching syntax errors is such an important skill.

<comment><USER28> Meanwhile, I program in an environment that highlights my line in red if I leave a syntax error in place for more than three seconds. What a different world.

(And before someone says it, yes, the programming languages have come quite far, too. Drop back to a 1970s general purpose programming language for a week if you don't believe me.)

<comment><USER11> THINK Pascal was doing this on the Mac in the mid 1980s... TP was an amazing piece of engineering given its functionality and the environment it provided.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Remote, flexible, low-skill jobs? - a-saleh A friend of my is a single mom that recently confessed that she needs to start looking for a job, because she will have spent all the money she had saved for her maternity leave later this year.
She lives in EU and by her estimates would need to earn between 300 and 500Eur a month. Could she find some low-skill job as remote data-entry/virtual assistant? Could she earn enough with these, or is 500E/month not really attainable through these services?
I would like to know from somebody who has experience from the worker side of things. Like, what service did you work for, how much time did you spend there, e.t.c.
At least from what I have heard, amazon's Mechanical Turk is a terrible place to work for, but the concept seems alluring enough. And I don't want to give her unhelpful advice. <comment><AUTHOR> I have friends who do audio transcription and medical data entry. Ive heard some customer support centers are also hiring people to field calls from home, which has been corroborated by interactions with some financial providers' customer support.

</comment><comment><USER2> fiverr or upwork?

<comment> a-saleh Did you use any of these? I always had the pre-conception these were for dev- work, but I do see i.e. data entry there.</comment></comment>


Apple COO Tim Cook could be in line to replace Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortune/ <comment><USER2> I am so sick of these stories that allude to Jobs' health all the time. Sorry for the shouting but Shut Up About It! We don't know the status, Jobs denies being ill, medical evidence says that survivors of the surgery Jobs have tend to look unwell/be very thin/have difficulty metabolizing food.

So all likelihood is that Jobs isn't going to drop dead on us suddenly. Hell, if anyone looks like they are heading for a sudden death it's Steve Ballmer whose BMI must put him in a serious danger zone.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be silly to replace Jobs for anything less than him going into a coma. Apple's stock would plummet and investors would be pissed. That's the downside to having such a strong, visible leader at the helm.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Furthermore, as an article here said a while ago, Jobs doesn't _want_ to retire. He loves being the head of Apple.

Once he's forced to retire, I'd think Cook would make a good replacement. Apple's got a ton of brilliant people with the exact same vision as Jobs. He's built up a really top-notch team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Duplicate, flagged for admins.

<comment><USER4> Which is the original link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So thats Tim Cook for the "chop" then - counting the days...</comment>


How the Co-Founder of Foursquare Tracks His Life - <AUTHOR> https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/how-naveen-keeps-track# <comment><USER2> I've been moving more and more towards conventional text files saved locally, but synced through things like dropbox, nextcloud, etc. (so that they're available wherever i am). However, a bad habit that i have is that my reflex is to search online for something first, instead of first doing a desktop search of local files.

Also, recently i've found myself saving a PDF version of webpages more and more in order to archive the content. I really dislike - no, i hate - PDFs...but trying to archive html content is annoying nowadays. Ok, so if i use wget or curl or even manually "save as..." from a web browser, the snapshot comes with so much junk - a simple html file balloons into a larger- than-should-be file (and associated folder) because it has all the content plus loads of javascript and other crap. When i want to archive stuff, i only want the content, the metadata (title, author, publication date, etc.), and nothing else - maybe the imagery if its essential to the content. It did seem that for a time - maybe a few years ago - web page articles did have CSS that stripped away some/most of the ad crap when you print - or at least "save to PDF" \- which made downloads/archives of the content at least a little smaller, if not at least cleaner to view...but, not seeing much of that anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. I've found myself using the new iOS 13 task app in a similar format to how Nareen uses Asana. Going kanban is a good idea. Though admittedly I run out of tasks fairly often and it not easy coming up with new stuff always.

Anyone ever seen a repository of tasks? I'm imagining finding something I'm interested in and subscribing to the daily tasks for that topic?

<comment><USER4> >Anyone ever seen a repository of tasks? I'm imagining finding something I'm interested in and subscribing to the daily tasks for that topic?

This is such a cool idea!

I think things like Awesome X lists for X technology to learn[0] or Fullstack Python are examples of this, and obviously for cooking/recipes this is a solved problem, but the idea of a github-like fork/clone system for general public todo lists is really motivating

[0]. e.g. [https://github.com/onlurking/awesome- infosec](https://github.com/onlurking/awesome-infosec)

<comment><USER3> I'm going to build a prototype. DM if interested.

<comment><USER5> I don't see any contact information in your profile.

I love this idea too, especially for the project management work lifestyle I am currently living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > For over a decade, he's been recording quotes, and images, blog posts, and > articles in a digital commonplace so he can always find them later if he > needs them.

Interesting, I have been doing an app for this use case for a while. I have to ship it one day.

</comment><comment><USER7> I once had a phone call scheduled with Naveen. He missed it twice and finally made it to a third time. Not making any conclusions here, but just take such articles with a grain of salt and do what works best for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> I found Asana a little overwhelming for my individual needs. I like the public Pinboard feature. I've been using Bookmark OS ([https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)) to save bookmarks and organizing my notes</comment>


Spritz – A spongy RC4-like stream cipher and hash function [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RS14.pdf

<comment><USER2> Ah, I saw this when it was released. Essentially, Sᴘʀɪᴛᴢ is a polished RC4 with knobs on. Two big things to point out:

Firstly, security: "Further cryptanalytic review is recommended before this cipher is used in critical applications." I echo that. Have fun cryptanalysing it by all means, but please don't _use_ it. Many already have deep concerns about RC4, and I know I wouldn't feel too comfortable with anything particularly RC4-like, because it's not clear to me yet how pending public results on RC4, or unpublished "cryptanalytic breakthroughs" from Nation State Adversaries (cough) may or may not read on ciphers with a closely similar design. Doesn't inspire confidence.

Secondly, speed. Sᴘʀɪᴛᴢ is _not_ winning any speed contests; in fact, it's pretty much coming in dead last. Looking at cycles/byte (lower is better), in generating sustained keystreams, which is the kindest I can be to it, Sᴘʀɪᴛᴢ clunks along at 24 cycles/byte on their Macbook Air's Core i5, which I think is an Ivy Bridge? For reference, taking the eBACS benchmark results from SUPERCOP, the modern stream cipher CʜᴀCʜᴀ20 runs on an broadly-equivalent processor (h9ivy) at 2.75 cycles/byte—nearly _10 times faster_ than Sᴘʀɪᴛᴢ! _Ouch._ [http://bench.cr.yp.to/results- stream.html](http://bench.cr.yp.to/results-stream.html) \- actually even AES-256, in software, is faster at encryption. From the paper, I also think it's slower at hashing than SHA-512 or any of the SHA-3 finalists.

While the authors note that theirs isn't a particularly optimised implementation right now, I unfortunately don't think there's too much scope for improvement, because what it shares with RC4 are the characteristics that bottleneck performance - if you're code-golfing for minimum code size, fine, but for speed optimisation it shares the same 8-bit-oriented structure with a huge state (bye-bye hardware implementation) and pipeline stalls due to iterative dependencies. This overall design pattern may have made some sense when RC4 was designed, for an 8-bit CPU with no cache, but not so much now - they acknowledge this in the paper and in fact suggest "other word-oriented architectures may be a better choice than the byte-oriented RC4/Spritz style". I agree.

Should you _use_ it, at all? Oh _heavens_ , no. I see nothing to recommend it whatsoever. I do think it's kind of cute though. Made me smile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is Bruce Scneier' take on Spritz: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/10/spritz_a_new_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/10/spritz_a_new_rc.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Using "RC4-like" as a selling point is a very bold move. Let's see if it pays off...

</comment><comment><USER5> Where is the reference implementation?</comment>


What Our Diversions Reveal about Us (1670) - <AUTHOR> http://stmaryvalleybloom.org/pascal-diversion.html <comment><AUTHOR>
        143. Diversion.--Men are entrusted from infancy with the
        care of their honour, their property, their friends, and
        even with the property and the honour of their friends.

        They are overwhelmed with business, with the study of
        languages, and with physical exercise; and they are made
        to understand that they cannot be happy unless their
        health, their honour, their fortune and that of their
        friends be in good condition, and that a single thing
        wanting will make them unhappy.

        Thus they are given cares and business which make them
        bustle about from break of day. It is, you will
        exclaim, a strange way to make them happy!

        What more could be done to make them miserable?
        --Indeed! what could be done? We should only have
        to relieve them from all these cares; for then they
        would see themselves: they would  reflect on what they are,
        whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ
        and divert them too much.

        And this is why, after having given them so much
        business, we advise them, if they have some time for
        relaxation, to employ it in amusement, in play,
        and to be always fully occupied.

<comment><USER2> that's an excellent quote, and reminds me of what I wrote at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17936282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17936282)

(just ignore the first sentence/movie reference)

Edit: woops!

<comment><USER3> You seem to have linked your entire account instead of a particular comment.

<comment><USER2> thanks for pointing it out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, it's a selection from Pascal's _Pensées_ , for some reason not labelled such.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's on the second line. The title is the name of the fragment.

<comment><USER4> Yes, obviously I had to go to the site to learn that. I meant, there was no indication on HN. I guess I commented because I was disappointed - I read a lot of stuff from the 16th-19th C, and hadn't heard the title before, so I expected something 'new'.

It's not a fragment, it's someone's selection from Pascal's book, one of the most famous books of aphorisms, if not the most famous. It's not Pascal's title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah I see what you mean

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He would've loved Buddhism

</comment><comment><USER6> Very relevant to something I am experiencing now. Thanks for sharing</comment>


The Aeroplane Flies High, Turns Left, Looks Right and Might Reach Its Destination - <AUTHOR> https://smcleod.net/the-airline/ <comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps my alternative title could have been 'or how people learn not to smash the pumpkins'</comment>


Save My Life: Hyperparathyroidism? - <AUTHOR> http://savemylyfe.blogspot.com/2010/09/hyperparathyroidism.html

<comment> anon-5 This is well worth checking out. I have symptoms similar to yours and I was eventually diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism. My PTH and calcium levels were high all along, but they ruled out hyperparathyroidism because the radioactive and ultrasound scans they did failed to show the inflamed gland.

It turns out the scans can be very hit and miss. The parathyroid glands are very small and the reliability of the scans depends largely on the experience of the person carrying them out. Hyperparathyroidism is the only known condition to cause increased PTH levels. If both serum PTH and calcium are high then it's almost certain to be hyperparathyroidism. A simple test for PTH levels can confirm or rule out the diagnosis.

As for treatment, here in the UK, most hospitals still perform the 'old' style surgery (open parathyroidectomy) which is risky and has a long recovery time. I'm saving for an operation at a hospital abroad which performs a minimally invasive procedure - much safer and quicker.

Good luck and keep us posted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, so it sounds like even once you're diagnosed via lab tests, you still have to fight to get it "fixed". That really sucks. parathyroid.com says that if you have the high Calcium and PTH, you "have it, and need an operation". I dunno how reliable that site is though.

I've read that even getting a positive lab diagnosis can be tricky, as Calcium & PTH levels fluctuate fairly rapidly, and you sometimes have to get the test repeated many times over a period of weeks.

Good luck in finding a good facility. If it turns out that this is what I have, maybe we'll end up comparing notes on that sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> You might wish to look into "Type 2 Hypothyroidism" by Mark Starr as a starting point.

<http://www.21centurymed.com/>

Keep in mind, that Starr's work in controversial, but part of the bedrock of his research is that the standard blood tests for thyroid are unable to distinguish between active thyroid hormone, and hormone that has had the iodine atoms replaced with bromine, chlorine, or florine, all of which have a higher affinity than iodine. As such a blood test may appear normal for thyroid, when in fact, one is thyroid deficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually have this book. I don't think it covers the Parathyroid though. If the Hyperparathyroidism doesn't pan out for me, I plan on asking the doctor to treat my Hypothyroidism more aggressively, to try and get my levels closer to perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> add yourself to <http://curetogether.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Good luck</comment>


Materialism alone cannot explain the riddle of consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness <comment><USER2> Maybe I am not following his argument sufficiently, but if there is some nonmaterial element of consciousness that arises out of the quantum weirdness of matter, then why does is it appear to be concentrated in our heads? Wouldn't it be a property of all things everywhere? Or is he actually suggesting that it is?

</comment><comment> andrew-lucker I feel like philosophers have an over-active desire to simplify. In their mind consciousness must be something elegant and having refined gem-like qualities.

As we see now, consciousness is probably a lot more fuzzy than we had predicted. We now have robot appendages for amputees that interface more and more closely with the natural brain. Even from this cyborg point of view, the patients don't seem to think so much about it other than simply "OMG, thank you".

The question of where "soul" exists is older than science, and not really something I could add anything to.</comment>


Facebook to Pay $5B to Settle FTC Privacy Claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/facebook-to-pay-record-5-billion-to-settle-ftc-privacy-claims <comment><USER2> Company and its leaders dont get in trouble, dont serve jail time, but get a slap on the wrist. So no accountability and everyone sees it. Whereas the people that got affected dont get a single dime for privacy violations. Where are the users compensation? That money should go to the users and not the govt that already wastes and mishandles money. It's ok to lie to congress, its okay to do shady business practices as long as you have enough money to pay off the govt. This is absurd!</comment>


AI Learning How to Play Pong in RealTime – PyTorch - <AUTHOR> https://www.floydlabs.com/tensorboard/MUfRrEmWMLJeoJMS6kvNTN/ <comment><AUTHOR> PyTorch code: [https://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q- learning](https://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q-learning)

I'll add final results and performance videos soon!

<comment><USER2> Neat! Of note: if I'm reading correctly, this is learning to play the video game pong with no prior knowledge _using the screen pixels alone_. Pretty cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! I couldn't have described it better than you just did!

Feel free to take a look at the code and star the code if you like it. I'll keep upgrading it and adding more Reinforcement Learning variations

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Forgot to mention that it is learning from raw pixels!! No other info is passed to the agent, except the screen frames :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, you can check the FloydExecution in: [https://www.floydhub.com/diegoalejogm/projects/atari/29](https://www.floydhub.com/diegoalejogm/projects/atari/29)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, it will be training for several hours more (I approximate 20), so make sure to keep updated. I'll post videos on the current execution performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> The help link doesn't work for me, did the github repo change?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it hasn't. Here: [http://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q- learning](http://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q-learning)

Try again and let me know if this time it works :)

<comment><USER3> Ah, I'm new to tensorboard. The help link in tensorboard was broken. But that link works :) very cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries! Here's also a link to the current progress [https://www.floydhub.com/diegoalejogm/projects/atari/29](https://www.floydhub.com/diegoalejogm/projects/atari/29) in case you wanna check the machine usage too

<comment><USER4> Just so you know, machine stats feature is not ramped to all the users yet, so most of them won't be able to see the fancy UI you were seeing. We will push it out to all users late next week ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know :) Thanks for the info, I'll have that in mind for the following posts!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What dealing crack taught me about business - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/06/jeff-henderson-what-drug-dealing-taught-me-about-business_n_1601526.html

<comment><AUTHOR> As a member of the same generation the first thing that hooked me on this story was that the interview subject was still alive to tell the tale. I also honestly had no idea that success in drug dealing is all about sales, marketing and keeping a clear head...</comment>