5BX - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5BX <comment><USER2> I was going to develop an iPhone app around the 5BX/XBX programs. Related to that (and especially because I'm a Canadian citizen), I contacted the Canadian government about receiving the rights to use the information in a commercial product. The body of the response I got back was:

"On behalf of the department of National Defence, we were advised that the Royal Canadian Air Force - 5BX Exercise Plans for Physical Fitness are not to be reproduced. These exercises programs are outdated and have been discontinued by the Canadian Forces since they could cause physical injury."

Just so you know.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me that us geeks are constantly in search of some clever exercise program to get in shape with, but the simple and unavoidable truth is that all it takes to get in shape is going to the gym at least 3 times per week to lift weights and do some sort of cardio, and _being consistent_.

All these wacky techniques and programs we find are just distractions, and no better than the latest ab machine you see on infomercials at 3am, which by the way would work great but do nothing to help people with the one thing they actually need: motivation to be consistent.

<comment><USER4> _the simple and unavoidable truth is that all it takes to get in shape is going to the gym at least 3 times per week to lift weights and do some sort of cardio, and being consistent._

It helps far more to eat less, since you can certainly eat enough to offset any reasonable amount of exercise. Also, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but lots of people _do_ go to the gym a regularly and it doesn't help. There were some news stories recently around this ( [http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/earlyrelease2...](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/earlyrelease201006.pdf) ), which has buried in it the interesting fact that Americans are exercising more, and also fatter. So, exercise not the silver bullet.

What we really need is just to eat less. We mostly do not have the option to be active all day nearly every day as our forebears did, even up until a few decades ago, because so many people have so much to do that requires being in a single spot for hour after hour every day.

<comment><USER5> You need to eat less if you are fat and need to lose weight. If you aren't overweight, you don't need to eat less. Even if you are skinny you still need to exercise if you want to be "in shape."

<comment><USER4> Sure, but someone who is skinny and wants to get in shape is 98% of the way there already -- they won't actually have any difficulty. Losing fat is the hard part of getting in shape, and not coincidentally, is needful for the vast majority of Americans.

<comment><USER3> You don't understand how hard it is to gain weight when you're perpetually skinny. Nobody wants to be really skinny, just like nobody wants to be really fat. What we're all aiming for is that Men's Health magazine look where we have a muscled physique and very little fat. I actually think it's easier to get there from being fat than from being skinny, and don't think that just because us skinny guys get to eat whatever we want it makes it more enjoyable. When your trying to _gain_ weight, eating becomes a chore and it gets expensive.

<comment><USER4> _You don't understand how hard it is to gain weight when you're perpetually skinny._

You're quite right, I don't understand how that could be hard. :)

 _When your trying to gain weight, eating becomes a chore and it gets expensive._

I can understand the "gets expensive" part. Also, I guess if you're not actually eating things you want to eat, I could understand the "chore" part, since there's only so much health food I'd want to eat in a day. If you were really just trying to gain weight, though, you could just eat those things that you can never get enough of (whatever they are for you), and easily pack away six or eight thousand calories a day, right? You'd have to do hard labor all day, like a farmer, to burn that much off.

<comment><USER6> Gaining weight is indeed not very hard or expensive. Just drink a glass of olive oil every day. I doubt mark meant gaining fat with gaining weight, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Hacker's Diet (<http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/>), a guide to losing weight for hackers, has an exercise component based around this. It's a little outdated now, but the concepts behind it are pretty good.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. I used it as a basic guide, and lost 12 kgs. I simply replaced the "step in the bedroom" part with "jogging outside" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This program is really superb.

I used it for a year or so to get myself up to my target level and then started going to a gym to train on weights.

If you want to start getting in shape but feel too shy to go to a gym just yet, start with this. You will honestly see amazing results if you set aside that 11 minutes a day and eat right along the way.

</comment><comment><USER10> The modern incarnation of this is CrossFit, <http://www.crossfit.com>.

<comment><USER11> Requires a bit more equipment, though:

"An Olympic weight set and a place to do pull-ups and dips is essential to doing CrossFit. Gymnastics rings and parallettes, plyometrics boxes, a Dynamax medicine ball, dumbbells, kettlebells, climbing rope, Concept II Rower, and a glute-ham developer will equip your garage with more than enough to follow the WOD very closely."

<comment><USER10> Do what you can with what you got. The training philosophy is more what I had in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the sadder sentences I've seen lately:

"Orban, creating the program as a public servant, received no additional income from the success of the plan"

From following the link to his article, it does look like it helped his career some at least.

<comment><USER13> How do you figure? He was an academic. He became a dean two or three years after receiving his PhD, which is extraordinarily successful. If he was just in it for the money, he probably would have stayed in the U.S. to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you do the Back extension one without a machine?

<comment><USER15> See here, exercise #3: <http://osalrex.110mb.com/HTML/5BX_chart1.html>

The variations get harder on higher-numbered charts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://exrx.net> join a gym, setup a proper plan, really not too hard.

</comment><comment><USER17> 11 minute abs.

<comment><USER18> Best ab exercise bar none is pull-ups holding a dumbbell between your ankles. You won't see it in "get ripped quick" programmes because if you can even do it, you probably already know what you're doing.

<comment><USER6> Do you mean lifting the weight up with your feet? Pull ups don't really use the abs, do they?

<comment><USER19> Try a pull-up and see how tense your abs feel. I am not sure how exactly they are used in pull-ups, but I feel like my entire body flexes when I do a pull- up. Abs especially.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Business of Software 2009: Speakers include Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky & Geoffrey Moore - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessofsoftware.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> just noticed this on pg's biography:

> In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris _the first web-based application_ , > Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998

really?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Last year was meant to be exceptionally great. Any YC users going?</comment>


Monetizing a browser add-on by replacing websites' ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisfinke.com/2010/03/26/ambilight-for-your-browser-or-monetizing-an-add-on-with-fat-plug/

<comment><USER2> Hah. I had an idea for a startup a while back that would provide free wifi to local businesses; the plan was to monetize by replacing ads with our own ads of similar sizes; I mean, the user doesn't care about the ads, right? so we'd get our money without annoying the user more.

I talked to a lawyer about it and was told that I'd get sued, and that I'd loose.

It is an interesting business model, if the lawyer was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me, or does that seem terribly scummy. I'm not sure I'd consider inserting _additional_ ads to be an ethical problem, as long as it was clear which ads came from the browser plugin, and which ones came from the website. But IMHO replacing the website's ads is scummy.</comment>


Misreading Tehran: The Twitter Devolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/07/the_twitter_revolution_that_wasnt?sms_ss=reddit <comment><USER2> "Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."

A very simple observation, but so true, and so common-sense that you would almost overlook it.

<comment><USER3> There were a lot of problems and issues in analyzing what happened last summer in Iran. With the Web Ecology Project we grabbed every tweet that we could find pertaining to the election, before and for over a month afterward. We got them all and released a paper on what we found ([http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/06/iran-election-on- tw...](http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/06/iran-election-on-twitter/)).

We did pay attention to language issues. None of us were experts in any arabic languages, but we did make efforts to search for specific keywords in Farsi.

Another huge problem, was that so many people on Twitter changed their location in attempts to 'protect' people on the ground there. I was unconvinced from day 1 of the efficacy of this attempt, but it certainly did make data analysis on a geographic basis rather hard.

I'm sad that in the end there really was little to no effect on things in Iran. The election was rigged and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Complete revolution wasn't an option and the international community couldn't do anything either without just overthrowing the country and additionally destabilizing the area.

<comment><USER4> It's unsurprising; beyond Twitter/the Web most people outside of Iran were apathetic about it. Those who did take definite action were definitely too few to really take on an actual government.

The outcome was never really unexpected, but I think there were positives in the whole thing to be taken away. Like the idea that it;s hard for a government to cover up their actions from the rest of the world any more. Or that not even attempts to block Twitter were wholly successful.

That's unfortunately no practical use to the protesters in Iran - but it's a positive start! And I can't help wondering if the first real tech generation, as they grow, will provide a "real life" power base to actually bring online action into real world results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Protests happen all the time, all over the world. Twitter, Youtube, definitely played a huge role in bringing the opinions/thoughts of the Iranians to the rest of the world. Its unfair to say Twitter did nothing to the revolution itself. It was not meant to do anything. Just tell you what people all over the world thought about it. And it did a bloody good job.. probably starting an info revolution of its own.

</comment><comment><USER6> Between this and the fact that Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be wiped off the map[1], I'm beginning to think MSM reports about Iran can't be trusted.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#.22Wiped_off_the_map.22_or_.22Vanish_from_the_pages_of_time.22_translation)

<comment><USER7> Right, he never said that Israel should be wiped off the map. He just said that an anonymous state whose capital is Jerusalem should vanish.

EDIT: that was a reply to the apologetic section of the article the OP linked to. Reading further you get a link to Iran's president website [1] which contains plainer words by Ahmadinejad .

[1] <http://www.president.ir/en/?ArtID=10114>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honestly, guys, I wouldn't read _too_ much into all of this. If you've been around "the internet" for very long, you should have a pretty finely tuned "bullshit detector".

There were a lot of people who were running proxies, and TOR exit nodes, and VPN endpoints, and FTP dumps, and soforth, and those services absolutely were used to smuggle photos and videos out of the country while things were being filtered.

Behind all of the "make your twitter pic green, set your timezone to tehran!" etc. etc. there was really amazingly good reporting happening via the internet.

Did most of it happen via twitter? Probably not, but it certainly did help things spread when they _did_ happen...granted, if you're just watching a hashtag that _anybody_ can tag things with...then you're probably not getting much legitimate news.

Use your mind when reading the news, this shouldn't be anything new.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think this type of analysis is simply trying to shatter Western social media fantasies. It's important to know the true effect so the technology is not misapplied in future events: "they don't need our help, they have Twitter...."

</comment><comment><USER10> I always wonder how much of the 'news' is pure spin...</comment>


Andreessen Horowitz Invests $20M In Custom Apparel Platform Teespring - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/16/andreessen-horowitz-invests-20m-in-custom-apparel-platform-teespring/

<comment><USER2> The article mentions that AH was "hoping to keep the investment under wraps indefinitely". Why would this be? We all see investment press releases constantly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations to them. Who would've thought a "Kickstarter for t-shirts" would raise $20M?

<comment><USER4> It's amazing to me that two t-shirt companies have raised significant rounds in the last 3 months. CustomInk raised $40M a few months ago: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/11/customink-40m-ted- leonsis/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/11/customink-40m-ted-leonsis/)

Disclosure: I work for CustomInk. It's an exciting time to be in the t-shirt business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> AH ahead of the wave again.</comment>


SpaceX makes breakthrough by landing rocket at sea - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0X5228 <comment><USER2> Current discussion : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for not posting an article that begins "After 4 failed attempts, Spacex finally...". Makes my blood boil.

<comment><USER4> Although actually their openness about their failures has been quite inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> May I suggest the non-mobile link?

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-spacex- idUSKCN0X5228](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-spacex-idUSKCN0X5228)

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats Elon and the rest of the SpaceX team! I think it's a good opportunity to finally IPO this year. I'll be first in line to buy some shares

<comment><USER7> May that never come to pass. It would all go downhill from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This makes me very happy. Congratulations to the team behind this. I can only imagine how many hours of work, how many checks and re-checks, how many second-guesses, how many inspirations it took to make this happen. Very well done. The people behind this have put another paving-stone in the path of civilization.

</comment><comment><USER9> does landing on a sea drone make them any more competitive in terms of cost vs having to use the regular launchpad?

<comment><USER10> Yes, takes less fuel to land on the drone than to fly back to the launch pad. For larger payloads, it's either land on the drone or throw away the rocket.

<comment><USER9> awesome :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Had to happen eventually =) Seriously though, congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER12> God, hearing that team cheer when they make another first -- gives me chills every time.</comment>


500 Lines or Less – A Python Interpreter Written in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.aosabook.org/en/500L/a-python-interpreter-written-in-python.html <comment><USER2> In the early 2000's, Teemu Kalvas created "Lisp 500": 500 lines of C (plus a .lisp file that provides a library and goes as far as featuring a compiler, which works by emitting C).

I can't find the sources for this.

Incomplete, no .lisp file: [http://www.s2.org/~chery/projects/lisp500/](http://www.s2.org/~chery/projects/lisp500/)

Doesn't connect: [http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~chery/lisp500/](http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~chery/lisp500/)

The most accessible source for this currently seems to be a "lisp5000" project in GitHub: [https://github.com/jackpal/lisp5000](https://github.com/jackpal/lisp5000)

This is a derivative work whose C code has been blown up to 1600+ lines.

<comment><USER3> List is inherently easy to parse though.

<comment><USER2> That is neither here nor there because parsing is a small sub-problem of the overall problem of providing a complete programming language run-time. Lisp500 isn't a "meta-circular" interpreter; it cannot rely on a host Lisp's implementation of things like memory management, I/O streams, hashing, compilation, ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't the title of the article be "500 lines or less - ceval.c written in Python" or "500 lines or less - a python bytecode interpreter written in python" The original one is just misleading.

<comment><USER5> It is an interpreter and that's absolutely correct. They could've even said "A vm in Python" because that _is_ a VM, just without JIT etc. The compiler includes a parser usually, but interpreters in the purest sense of the word interpret the semantics of some structure corresponding to the code.

<comment><USER6> It's not an interpreter of the programming language Python, however. It's a VM for Python bytecode, which is not what most people understand as Python, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome. Also see her talk at Pycon here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVUTjQzESeo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVUTjQzESeo)

</comment><comment><USER8> Surely something like, while True: input() would be closer to the mark!

<comment><USER9> Why not make it work in python 2 and 3?

import sys

if sys.version_info.major >= 3: raw_input = input

eval(raw_input())

<comment><USER10> I would write it as input = raw_input.

Or, better, just use the six package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a metacircular bytecode interpreter in Clojure: [https://github.com/divs1210/Impala](https://github.com/divs1210/Impala)

Wrote this for fun a while back.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Python VM is elegant and it's kind of well documented. It really helped me understand stack machines.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm slightly confused about how it's possible for a language to be written in itself.

Say for instance you want to implement "printf". What's stopping you from just using printf?

<comment><USER14> Well, for one, you will have to implement the memory/system model for the language. It may or may not have access to the host language's "printf" function.

Initially of course, a shortcut way is to leverage as much of the host language's features as possible, then eventually, as you move further into the bootstrap process, you will want to remove reliance on the host language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion about the book: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12170182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12170182)

</comment><comment><USER16> Brownie points for writing another Python interpreter in this Python Interpreter :-)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is really impressive, until you look at, say, SICP's metacircular evaluator, or McCarthy's original implementation of Lisp.

Python by no means has the monopoly in elegant implementations of itself.

<comment><USER18> I'm a bit put off by your combination of praise and dismissiveness when I think neither are warranted.

This is a pretty standard stack-based virtual machine. It is not particularly elegant, nor is the underlying language designed to be particularly elegant, much less have a monopoly on such. It's designed more for clarity and practicality.

For something on the same lines which is _meant_ to be an elegant stack-based VM, see Forth. The description at [http://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with- forth-stack-machines....](http://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack- machines.html) is frequently cited on HN.

<comment><USER17> I _meant_ it was impressive that it was so simple to implement the python VM in itself, but becomes less impressive when compared to the simplicity and elegance with which you can do similar feats in other languages. I find that point valid.

<comment><USER19> Lisp will always be a special case. It's too powerful to give other languages a running. It's not quite the same when the language makes it ridiculously easy to build new languages.

What makes this impressive is the medium of expression, like when an artist blows you away with a Biro drawing.

If someone wrote this in assembly in 500 lines or less (if that's even possible), it would be incredible.

<comment><USER18> I have a different observation.

This VM is meant to match Python semantics, including support for keyword arguments with defaults, lexical scope, and exceptions. Neither the original McCarthy Lisp description which qwertyuiop924 praised, nor first Lisp implementation by Russell, supported those features. The latter two features came with Lisp 1.5, whose implementations are _much_ larger than 500 lines. [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP) .

And that's okay - a language doesn't require those features. And a language without them, like Forth, can be much more compact as a result.

<comment><USER20> I was curious so looked up McCarthy's paper. Appendix B has code and pseudo code for minimal interpreter. Takes one page. Primitives are easy to code, too. It would surpise me if that took _much larger_ than 500loc to implement.

<comment><USER17> Lexical scope, in particular, is very easy to implement. Call/cc or exceptions are a bit tougher, but it can be done. And all defaults take is a bit of extension to the lambda. In fact, defaults can be added atop the language with a macros, as can keyword arguments. Macro expanders are a bit harder to write than the functionality itself, however. Especially if you want a good one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CloudTiming: Cut up to 60% on the cost of cloud servers - <AUTHOR> https://cloudtiming.com <comment><AUTHOR> ccording to research, companies are paying an average of 36% more for cloud services than they actually need to. We've created CloudTiming to help businesses use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to fight cloud waste.

Set a schedule using the simple interface and the tool will automatically start and stop your cloud servers while you are not using them. This results in saving up to 60% on cloud computing - good news for your IT budget.

Check it out and let us know what you think! Thanks!

P.S. See how we found original idea: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cloud- timing#comment-62083...](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cloud- timing#comment-620831)

</comment><comment><USER2> Misspelling of 'period' in paragraph under "FREE START": preiod

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, will fix

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why should we use CloudTiming over AWS Instance Scheduler?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it has more flexible and user-friendly interface. You shouldn't be a technical person.</comment></comment>


Textile – Feature engineering for machine learning on any mobile device - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/textileio/introducing-textile-88bc696caae4 <comment><USER2> Also feel free to ask questions on our slack channel if you prefer: [https://textile-public.slack.com](https://textile-public.slack.com)</comment>


Will IBM's Watson put your job in jeopardy? - <AUTHOR> http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/15/will-ibm%E2%80%99s-watson-put-your-job-in-jeopardy/

<comment><USER4> Only if your job is giving answers in the form of a question.

Oh shit - that _is_ what I do.

</comment><comment><USER5> It might. The automobile made it difficult to find work shoeing horses. I do not lament this.

</comment><comment><USER6> When we think of humans being replaced by automation we often think of robotic devices such as ABB arms, Asimo, and such.

But it appears the greater influence may come from "stationary," large-scale, HAL-like systems designed to interact effectively with human beings.

Watching Watson run-up the score so quickly was unsettling and I now understand why Kasparov cried. It makes one truly realize that nowadays, if the task can be automated, it probably will be.

</comment><comment><USER7> ha ha, no. Considering the difficulty of humans equipped with the most advanced pattern matching hardware ever devised by evolution to discern nuances of meaning in spoken language I would say it's a rehash of the AI promises of the 50's that feel short of any practical implementation. We still got a long way to go before a skynet shows up and fires us.

<comment><USER8> Skynet has already fired many of us. We just don't notice because it happened incrementally.

To see an example of this on the macroscale, look at the current recession. AD (Aggregate Demand) and production tanked, leading to unemployment. AD and production have recovered, but employment has not. There is a very plausible case to be made that productivity gains made many workers obsolete, and employers took advantage of the recession to cut them loose.

[edit: forgot that not everyone is an amateur economist. AD = Aggregate Demand.]

<comment><USER9> Which jobs were made obsolete? If unemployment were technologically driven, you would expect IT to have less unemployment relative to other industries. But that's not the case. Paul Krugman had a pretty good post on the topic:

<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/whos-unemployed/>

<comment><USER8> _Which jobs were made obsolete?_

The data is insufficiently granular to determine that. But as you can see, production has more or less completely recovered: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP> <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO>

Employment has not recovered comparably: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PAYEMS>

This means we are producing more now than ever before, and doing it with fewer people. This tells us that many of the people who were laid off are obsolete.

Now, as for Krugman's chart, it's somewhat tangential. Krugman as arguing (misleadingly, BTW) against the recalculation hypothesis, which proposes that we have a recession because the economy misallocated people into the wrong sectors. His chart is misleading since it focuses on an irrelevant ratio of two other irrelevant ratios. To determine if the recession is sectorial, one must look at _employment_ [1].

If we do this, we find that construction _employment_ is down 27% (from Jan 2008 to Jan 2011). Information services employment (I think this includes IT) is down 11%. Finance is down 8%, as is Retail. Durable goods manufacturing is down 22%.

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USFIRE> <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USCONS> <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USINFO> <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/USTRADE.txt> <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DMANEMP>

This clearly shows some sectors hit much harder than others, contrary to Krugman's claims. But Krugman's claims are tangential to the main point anyway.

[1] Unemployment is a skewed indicator because it excludes people not seeking work and people who find work in other sectors. I.e., a construction worker who finds a new job in retail lowers both the unemployment rate in construction (smaller numerator) _and_ the unemployment rate in retail (bigger denominator). As the employment numbers show, this is a rather large set of people.

<comment><USER9> Ah, good point on why we should look at employment vs. unemployment. Makes sense.

I was tempted to argue that the decline in construction doesn't support the "obsolete jobs" hypothesis, because the jobs were created by an overheated housing market and shouldn't have been there in the first place. But regardless of whether the jobs were justified in the first place, they're not coming back. A technological shift isn't the only thing that can make a job obsolete; a one-time speculative bubble can do the same thing.

<comment><USER8> No, you are quite right. The decline in construction jobs doesn't support the "jobs obsolete due to technology" hypothesis. It supports the recalculation hypothesis, but that's a separate issue.

It's the increase in production combined with the lack of increase in employment that is evidence in favor of technology making jobs obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, I think it is clear that increased productivity due to improvements in information technology has resulted in slower job growth during this recovery compared with past ones. Corporations have been able to achieve top line growth with minimal hiring.

But there are other factors at play. Too much of the US labor force was dedicated to housing, and those people are going to take a long time to either retrain or find new work with their existing skills. They are not being replaced by software (yet).

However, I essentially agree with the article. Software and robots will make it easier for corporations to grow profits with out hiring people, and that this increases the threat of income inequality.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope it will put the following jobs in jeopardy:

      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - middle managers

<comment><USER12> The middle manager's only job is to retain the appearance of usefulness to remain employed.

<comment><USER11> Well, a good middle manager does a couple of useful things:

      - keeps track of schedules and workloads
      - insulates his team from clients' and upper management's requests
      - does whatever his team needs him to do to stay productive

Watson can do at least two out of three.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> lets all go down to ibm and throw our shoes in the machines, only then will our jobs be safe!!!

<comment><USER14> "Hey Watson, I bet you can't guess what's coming for ya!"

Watson: "What is shoe?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a society it should be our goal to have all the repetitive and dumb work been done by machines. If a machine can do your job it wasn't that challenging in the first place. In that case your job provides absolutely zero benefits to the society.

<comment><USER16> That is easy to say so long as your own job still falls above the cut-off line of what machines can reasonably do.

The scary part is that line will probably rise up to the point where it encompasses all jobs currently done by humans within my lifetime.

<comment><USER15> That's not scary, that's good. It's also inevitable if Ray Kurzweil is right and computers will soon exceed the mental capabilities of humans. It's only scary if you think in today's economic model where automation implies unemployment and where unemployment implies poverty.

But just think of the following arguments:

\- If a person a hundred years ago would have predicted today's technology, this person might have thought that this technology will destroy most of the jobs and unemployment will raise. Instead, people moved to new types of jobs and economy continued to grow.

\- Even if computers and robots can take over all of the jobs this does not need to be a bad thing. Of course this would not work in today's economic systems, but there could be new systems where computers and robots do the work and humans equally profit from the results.

<comment><USER16> Long-term good is often very short-term scary. Our economic models will not be adjusted to this new reality very quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No, not yet. But Ken Jennings is definitely out of a job.

</comment><comment><USER18> No.</comment>


Resources to Learn Redux - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/top8-resources-to-learn-redux-4dd4fd814c44 <comment><USER2> Nice to see my own "Practical Redux" series linked in there. Here's my own usual suggestions:

\- My top resources for getting started with Redux: [http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/12/blogged-answers- lea...](http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/12/blogged-answers-learn-redux/)

\- My "Redux Fundamentals" workshop slides: [https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux- fundamentals...](https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/06/redux-fundamentals- workshop-slides/)

\- My React/Redux links list: [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux- links](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links)</comment>


Experimental Animal Decompressions to a Near-Vacuum Environment [1965] [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660005052.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> BTW I was interested in Googling for this after reading this New Yorker essay on the costs of colonizing Mars:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/project- exodus-...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/01/project-exodus- critic-at-large-kolbert)

> _The pressure differential also had unhappy gastric consequences. The > ballooning dogs expelled air from their bowels; this led frequently—and > simultaneously—to defecation, urination, and projectile vomiting. The > animals suffered what looked like grand-mal seizures, and their tongues > froze. (This last effect was a result of heat loss through rapid > evaporation.) All told, a hundred and twenty-six dogs were tested in the > chamber, for varying lengths of time. Of those which spent two minutes in > simulated space, a third died. The rest deflated and, eventually, recovered. > Among those which remained in a vacuum for three minutes, the mortality > figure climbed to two-thirds._

 _I came across "Experimental Animal Decompressions to a Near-Vacuum Environment" while reading up on the One-Year Mission. Maybe it's just a sign of my geocentric bias, but I was struck by the correspondences. For all his training and his courage, Kelly is basically just another test mammal. Like the dogs, he's been sealed in an airtight chamber to see how much his body can take. And in both experiments the results, at least in their broad outline, are totally predictable._

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9601697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9601697)

</comment><comment><USER2> No animals were harmed in the making of this report.

<comment><USER3> Which is a report on the report in which animals were harmed. Let us remember them as martyrs to science and the knowledge required to preserve many more intelligent lives in the future.

<comment><USER4> How is harmful treatment of animals required to preserve intelligent lives?

<comment><USER3> Today, maybe not so much. However as we become a space-fairing species knowing the limits to which things must be designed (examples, blast shutters in films/anime and self-sealing blobs from scifi/anime) will help. Knowing the causes of death might also enable a better focus for pre/post treatment and medical research/supply staging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For something supposedly from 1965 it looks a lot like a LaTex document. Was layout that good back in 65?

<comment><USER6> Have you seen a book or magazine from before computers? LaTeX replicates what professional typesetters did.</comment></comment>