Scientists say they'll soon extend life 'well beyond 120' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/11/-sp-live-forever-extend-life-calico-google-longevity <comment><USER2> I too would like to live forever, but one problem I see is that if you just extend peoples physical age but their minds become frozen in time, then all progress stops. It is well known that as people age their neural plasticity degrades and they loose the ability to learn anything new. I have observed this with my Dad who is 84. If people lived to be 1000 but their neural plasticity was gone by 120, we would still have slavery, women would not be able to vote and we would still be riding around in horse and buggy. There has been a lot of speculation that progress in technology or society or both has slowed are stopped. I think if true, it is likely due to an aging population. In addition to slowing the physical aging process, there would need to also be a way to somehow maintain peoples brain function, including neural plasticity.

<comment><USER3> It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time (say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your personality and outlook is formed by age 30.

If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generations will tend to cluster together socially, to the exclusion of another. They will have come of age with the same events. You already hear people in their 30's talking about how they don't understand what teenagers are doing (Snapchat, etc.). Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would have to be an expert in history to even relate to people.

People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them. I mean it would be hard to imagine this NOT happening.

<comment><USER4> I've always wondered if the average human lifespan is somehow implicitly factored into interest rates. If people lived to 1000+ years old, a small investment made early in life could potentially balloon into incredible wealth given even relatively conservative investments. Obviously political and financial stability could have huge impacts too. I have to imagine multi- century-long held accounts would have an impact

<comment><USER5> I think the markets will regulate themself as they always do. If (actually, in such scenario it's best to say _when_ ) the accounts held for a vastly longer amount of time start to spread, there would be at most an initial impact, but then the markets will stabilize automatically and nothing will by disrupted unrepairably. What now we call "short term investments" will become very very short terms, and so on. There's nothing that will be distructed on this side in my opinion.

What could lead to problems (that is: a not changing social and political situation) would be the adaption of political mechanism for the longer lifespans. For example, now politicians have mandate that last from 3 to 5 years, then there are elections (talking about not totalitary states). Putting this in prospective, with humans having a 1000+ years lifespan, politicians mandate would grow to 50+ years. That's bad, and in my opinion will only lead to deadlocks.

Imagine a nation guided for 50+ years by the same persons. They will start demanding always more power, leading to mostly only totalitary scenarios. Everything will fall apart.

Instead, keeping the actual model could lead to even more _variety_ (that's not the right word in this case, my apologize for it) than what we have now, and there's a reasonable chance that humanity will benefit from this.

Of course, the one described is just one of the worst case scenarios (altought not the worst at all), maybe our brain will change drastically and we will become a complete different _thing_.

<comment><USER6> Why would political terms suddenly change because people are living longer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Blood transfusions are old and safe tech. I don't see any reason why you couldn't right now go into a nursing home and begin intensive transfusion therapy and see what happened. in fact, the weird thing here is that only Stanford is doing something like this.

Which leads me to believe that one of the real obstacles here is going to be the legalities and logistics of actually testing something and bringing it to market. If you have a cough and I give you a pill, either you stop coughing or you don't. We have a very tight feedback loop: in the order of hours or days. But if you're 50-years-old and want to live another ten years? We just can't wait around for 40-year feedback loops. It simply won't work.

So I'm convinced that some improvement is possible over the next decade: perhaps on the order of 10-20 extra years of life. But treatment is going to exist in a really weird grey area. You could either travel to a country with little or no drug oversight or you could try getting off-label or black market treatments. The drug approval system in the U.S. is simply not equipped to make serious decisions about medicines with these kinds of effects.

Sidebar: the interesting question is whether or not we're close to the point where increases in lifespan happen faster than aging itself: have we reached the 1000-year person point? I'm almost certain the answer is no, but I think we may be within 100 years of it. My intuition is that as we keep pushing the human biological machine, it will find new and unique ways of breaking down. The most obvious example is cancer. The longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer -- and we're a long ways from a cure for cancer. Still, this is a very fascinating field to watch.

<comment><USER8> [Ignoring the moral/legal problem ...]

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

<comment><USER9> [Ignoring the increasing moral problem ...]

If you know the source of your blood transfusions because you're paying someone for it then that problem can be removed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1%

It's probably significantly lower than that as well if you take out all the accidental deaths that occur in people's 20s.

On a more skeptical note, I'm very doubtful of any claims to predict timelines related to medical or technological advances. We've been trying for a long time and with much better funding to cure/treat things like AIDS and various cancers and only recently have we made significant progress on those fronts.

My general impression of modern medicine based on conversations with friends and family members in the medical field is that, while the cures are getting better, the best course of action is to take a conservative approach to life (avoid smoking, severely limit drinking, exercise and lift weights regularly, stay active, and keep using your brain), as this has much better odds of maintaining a high quality of life as you age than hoping modern medicine will be able to fix whatever's wrong with you.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fortunately, their approach seems to take into account the fact that most people's quality of life degrade _very_ steeply after hitting, say, 70, and aim to augment this "quality" lifespan at the same time as the "total" lifespan.

Just ask Scott Adams if he would have wanted his father to live "well beyond 120".

<comment><USER11> Another important point is that the relation between children, their parents and the society they live in would be changed in ways that are hard to predict.

See, the current assumption (or rather, the assumption that socially still stands but that is already shaken by the _current_ lifespan augmentation) is that once a child is an adult, it won't be long before they will eventually see their parents either die (before modern medicine) or retire (the current paradigm), and have to replace them.

They will get hired fast, to get enough experience with their notional parents while those are still in the workforce, and then quickly be needed in a full- time, important gig.

It's also worth mentioning that the society, right now, is built on the idea that full-time stable jobs are widely available, on one hand, and a strict necessity for anyone to reach any kind of reasonable level of material comfort, social adjustment and general happiness. When not the only way to get basic human dignity.

 _That_ assumption is _old as balls_ , and it's hard to see it surviving the current state of technology and medicine, let alone what's about to come.

So what will probably happen is that we'l keep telling people that working 40 hours a week in a job you had for the last, like, 5 years, is a basic necessity, yet that it's nearly impossible to get 'em, because old people are a) living forever b) holding on to those jobs because _they 're a strict requirement_ c) creating machines that do other people's 40hrs/week jobs.

So yeah, now that stable, full-time work has been overloaded with all that junk, the conditions that make this paradigm possible have to be saved whenever they're menaced. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only one here who thinks that the point of working is to make the world around me a better place, rather than a way to reach some kind of social status and _incidentally_ keeping a relatively helpful system up and running.

With those prospects of limitless healthly lifespans, those limits would look like either

\- capping the timespan people are allowed to work, so that they can't hog those precious, limited 40hrs/week stable jobs that young folks need to get some kind of implicit economic citizenship

\- creating demand for those, by doing the old sorta-Keynesian thing and just creating jobs. This has worked great in the past, 'cause those jobs looked like building the Golden Gate, the Hoover dam, nailing down the basics of nuclear physics, getting jet engines to work, and then sending people on the freaking _moon_. But now it looks more like working as under-trained wannabe- SWAT police teams raiding teen's bedrooms for small-time weed deals, building the like five thousandth M1-A1 the USArmy doesn't need, and stuff like that.

My ideal, which I can't even seriously hold as I watch how most governments deal with their respective economic crises, is to strip that socioeconomic status away from stable employment.

I picture guaranteed basic income as the very first economic stepping stone of that project. See, I would gladly accept a basic living wage to stay home, cook for my family, take care of the house, and whatever, while dedicating exactly all, and not one second more, of my daily intellectually productive work timespan to something relevant, I don't know what. I think that, all things considered, I'd be more productive at my programming job working 3 hours per day than my current 8-ish.

But this is an socioeconomic rant I need to refine and turn into a set of attainable political measures, and then get off my butt and militate for them.

<comment><USER12> Jobs are not a finite resource. More people = more jobs, and vice-versa. You make it seem like "jobs" just pop into existence, and then the labor force consumes however much of it it finds.

It's as if you can't conceive of the possibility that the two are intertwined and feed off one another in a constant feedback cycle. One method is "no job = no money = not a good idea to have kids = less workers". Another perhaps: "have job = have money = spend money = buy product = job needed to make said product". Or how about: "No job = try open a business"

<comment><USER13> Or how about "No ownership of materials = no need for jobs", or at least no need for jobs in the usual sense. It's worth questioning whether possessions like money help us live rewarding lives or whether they hold us back (or both).

<comment><USER12> I'd say that it would be quite against what most would individuals would want. And if ownership/possession is indeed a natural concept that we as a species have, then you'd probably have to resort to some sort of pervasive government clamp down on instances of it occurring. And that would hardly be a utopia that most proponents of such a concept would make it out to be.

Whether it hold us back in general is not something we could easily answer. You could look at the communist (or any communal ownership concept for that matter) communes and mini-experiments that have been attempted in isolation over the years. As far as I know, they were all failures.

And these communal-ownership ideas can only operate and possibly chug along if they were to operate in complete isolation. Otherwise, free trade (as a black- market if it were banned) would quickly ruin the entire thing. You could argue that free-trade isn't even possible under a system of communal ownership, as there is no private property to trade with.

Back to your initial point about no possessions requiring no jobs. I'm not entirely sure what you're proposing there.

<comment><USER13> "I'd say that it would be quite against what most would individuals would want. And if ownership/possession is indeed a natural concept that we as a species have"

Do you really want ownership, or do you really want access? For example, if you could hire a car at no cost and at no inconvenience, what benefits would you gain from owning it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!

From HPMOR.

</comment><comment><USER15> And if you thought it was hard to get hired in tech at the age of 50, wait until you try at 100 :-)

On a more serious note, it is going to be a huge financial disaster if folks "suddenly" start living to 120. There are many many things which have nominal lifespans "baked in" and if that changes gradually the algorithm can be adjusted gradually but if it changes suddenly, that results in insufficient money collected to pay out promised payments.

When you get to a certain age (varies by individual) you start talking to or consulting retirement advisors. Those advisors will ask you something like "when do you want to retire?" and "what sort of net income do you want?" and they will take your expected lifetime (say 100) and tell you when you can stop working such that paying out at that rate will exhaust your savings when you hit 100. But if you roll with that plan and at 75 get a treatment that extends your life to 120, well that is something of a problem right?

<comment><USER16> This would be a problem of course, but I'm betting this is a problem most people would like to have. If my two options are: Die at 100, and not have to work for the last X years, or live an extra 20 years, with required working, I at least would prefer to live and work than to die and not work.

<comment><USER15> Since I don't think changing the lifespan will change societal values much, and because of that I believe that statistically the likely outcome is 'want to work but can't find it.'

Being at the end of your life and unemployed is a markedly different experience than being at the beginning of your life and unemployed.

<comment><USER16> That does make sense - definitely something to think about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In 1850, the average 80 year old lived to be 86 years old.

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

[1] [http://ourworldindata.org/roser/presentation/online/Improvin...](http://ourworldindata.org/roser/presentation/online/ImprovingHealthAroundTheWorld/ImprovingHealthAroundTheWorld.html#/Life- Expectancy-by-Age) (press the right arrow key for the graph to pop up)

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

Modern medicine has mostly benefited the young, not the old. The last 150 years of little progress makes me skeptical of claims about future life extension, though of course I'd love to be mistaken.

<comment> D-Coder Six more years vs nine more years is a 50% increase. Or looking at it another way, it's three solid years of life. That's pretty decent! Not even considering that for the first several decades after your starting point, medical technology hardly changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are so many inter-related factors involved with changing a system of this complexity. My fear is the creation of half living zombies that don't die, but who's brains have long since moved on. Zombies, who not incidentally, keep title to accumulated resources for very long periods of time and presumably hold office and vote.

This might sound bad... but as it sits right now, many people in their late 80's - 90's (not all I grant, but in my experience...) don't seem to be fully alive right now. They are often kind of half in and out of reality, and not at all the people they once were. They can't really contribute much (don't bother posting a link about a 90 year old who did such-and-such... it's a very glaring exception and we both know this). They take a lot of care. And, I can't imagine this is very pleasant state to be in either.

If the state of aging progresses, but somehow death is forestalled, I don't see this being any advance at all, but rather one of the nastiest things that could be done for the human race, both old and young. It seems like forestalling death without solving the problem of aging (likely a much harder problem) might be very doable soon. And it is not a good idea. There are many evolutionary reasons for death. It's not altogether a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER19> Well with the plunging birth rates in developed countries, I think this would be feasible. Robots and automation would solve the economic issues of having an inverted pyramid entering the workforce. We would in a sense become long- lived rich eloi.

However in pockets of the world which won't use contraception - such as religious states, or poor areas, there will be age-old issue of producing a lot of babies who go and consume the resources of the "1st world". These places still exist on earth and the lives produced there are just as valuable so the ethical question would be, how would the rich countries deny the life extending medicine and procedures to others? It almost has to be a function of population growth.

I wanted to write a novel one day about the year 2278 when a couple of married Elders finally decides to have children and therefore forfeits their access to prolonging their life more than 50 years. The idea is that it would become one or the other.

<comment><USER20> I guess there could be religious arguments for not using the life extending medicine, since god didn't make humans with that longer life-span. So if there are arguments against contraception, they could also be used against long life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I always see anti-aging research as an expression of our inbuilt need for hope and significance (a desire to be _known_ for eternity). It's far more philosophical than scientific. Many have concluded there is no meaningful eternity, and thus they seek to construct their own hope through anti-aging research.

So it's slightly ironic that the article mentions anti-aging research as needing to address a "root cause", when in reality there's a deeper spiritual need at work. And so the religion of science presses onward, simultaneously discarding all notions of spirituality while (quite obviously) answering the same fundamental philosophical questions and needs in it's own way.

<comment><USER22> Because the desire to conquer aging couldn't possibly be a simple preference for living over dying.

<comment><USER23> What kirse is talking about is a real thing:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory)

<comment><USER22> Given his emphasis on religion, and especially the use of the phrase "religion of science," I don't think that's what he was referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This scares the hell out of me from a retirement planning perspective. If I outlive my savings, what then?

<comment><USER25> If people lived forever, why would they ever retire? I imagine you'd take a 5 year sabbatical every 20 years or so and you'd probably even head to school a bunch of times to change careers if you got bored of centuries of the same vocation.

<comment><USER18> Who is going to hire you? Try getting a job at 62 right now.

<comment><USER26> A big part of that is employers not wanting to invest in someone who is about to permanently leave the workforce. If the retirement age scaled with lifespan, or adapted along the lines of what landryraccoon suggested, that would probably change. If you went back 200 years from today, most people would probably think it's not even possible that 63% of my generation would be unmarried by age 30.

<comment><USER18> Part of it might also be that employers may not feel a 62 year old can do what a 32 year old can. (Unmarried at 30 is an unrelated issue.) Are they wrong?

Where are 95 years olds going to work? What are the going to be capable of doing? Uber drivers? They are going to have to fix a bunch of stuff rather than just extend life for this to be feasible. I hope they do that first, and worry about extending life after they have fixed degeneration.

Or we, are going to have to re-arrange our social/economic systems considerably so work isn't such necessity.

<comment><USER26> If I understand correctly, the implication is that if science can make us live a thousand years, a 62 year old would be almost every bit as vital as a 32 year old. The life extension would be at a fundamental level, not just keeping older folks on life support for longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just hope such medical advances would be available to everyone and not just a privileged few who can afford it.

<comment><USER28> The target market is very, very large. That bodes well for prices, since the costs of R&D and red tape can be amortized across a huge number of people and long spans of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> One of the things that rarely makes it to the press is that all of these efforts are not equal in their likelihood of producing therapies that are useful for old people.

A good 95%+ of the funding and interest in aging at present still goes towards investigation only, no attempt or thought on therapies. The Ellison Medical Foundation fell into this category, as aging was only an incidental part of the Foundation's plan. The point was molecular biology, and aging just happened to be one of the better fields to exercise that goal. So the EMF simply expanded some of the NIA study programs and arguably did nothing meaningful to advance progress towards therapies for aging.

Then 95%+ of the sliver of funding and interest that does aim to extend life goes towards things that have absolutely no hope of meaningful results. They are generally focused on trying to understand metabolism sufficiently well to slow aging slightly. An over the top ambitious goal in this area is adding seven years to life spans over the next 20 years - that's the Longevity Dividend proposal. There is no concrete plan, nowhere near the level of understanding needed to even have a plan, and so people pick at proteins and mechanisms one by one that might be linked to calorie restriction or autophagy or other longevity-associated mechanisms. Look at the past fifteen years of very expensive and entirely fruitless sirtuin research to see how this will go over the next decade. The research community is gearing up to spend billions more on mTOR-related work, and the expectation of outcomes should be exactly the same: knowledge, but not therapies.

Genetics is another area of favor at the moment, but is just another facet of "let's mess with metabolism" to try to find ways to slow down the accumulation of damage in this vastly complex poorly understood system. There is an argument to say that all of this focus on things that won't really help much is in fact just a new way for researchers to draw in new funding to the established goal of mapping metabolism.

Since aging is damage, slowing damage is pretty useless for old people. They won't benefit from that approach at all. If we're going to wait around for the next few decades for treatments, I want to see rejuvenation at the end of the line instead of merely tinkering the system to damage itself more slowly. Rejuvenation means repair: if aging is damage, then rejuvenation is repairing that damage.

So the vast unknowns in aging are not related to the actual damage itself, but rather how the damage interacts and progresses in the highly complex apparatus of our biology. There is a very good catalog of the biochemical damage that causes aging, the direct results of the correct operation of metabolism, not caused by other forms of damage. This is the list of distinctive differences between old tissue and young tissue. That catalog was built over the past century and hasn't been expanded since the late 1980s, so it is reasonable to think that all the important stuff for now is captured.

We could bypass the vast complexity of the "mess with metabolism" approach to slowing aging and instead try to repair the damage. This is much better as there are concrete plans for doing so, and so much is known of the damage that there are numerous very detailed proposals for producing repair therapies. If you can repair the damage then you don't need to know how it progresses in detail from moment to moment, or which form is more important, or how exactly it causes age-related disease. Just fix it. The analogous situation is rust in an ornate, complex, load-bearing metal structure: rust is simple, the structure is complicated, so the results of rust over time will be very complicated. Do you build models and analyse the molecular progression of rust in ever more detail to figure out how to build better structures, or do you just paint the thing and rustproof it every now and again? One of those paths is clearly better than the other.

This is why I don't expect great things from Calico, as Calico is funding the same mainstream approach to aging (mess with metabolism, drug discovery, try to slow aging) that will do a lot for knowledge and next to nothing for practical outcomes to extend life and rejuvenate the old. They won't fund the right path, which is to say SENS and related repair-based approaches, until those approaches have completed their disruption of the aging research field and gathered sufficient support that no-one has to specify repair-based approaches as being their approach, because it is just assumed that that is what is meant by aging research.

<comment><USER30> Well, if SENS has the answer, the TFA has a $1M incentive for them to prove it, since this prize isn't about mechanism at all.

I think the idea of focusing on understanding and slowing the accumulation of damage is partially based on the assumption, or hope, that the body can repair itself, or be stimulated to repair itself, if damage accumulation is slowed enough. In particular, if damage to the repair mechanisms themselves (e.g., stem cells) is slowed sufficiently.

If you have kept up with drug development news you will know that target-based approaches and other highly complex interventions have almost uniformly failed. To this day, we can't and don't design interventions based on the understanding of systems, we just see that a drug inhibits, say, gliomas, and find out the mechanism later, possibly after FDA approval. If we can't even do this for diseases that are simple compared to aging, how do you think a highly complex and interdependent set of interventions as proposed by de Grey is going to work out?

Many repair-based approaches are proposing we build a rocket to the moon when we can't even build airplanes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This calls for a reform to the penitentiary system, someone condemned to life in prisson that can live 120 years will cost more to the state than someone that can live 80.

As always, goverment is to late to react.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've always wondered what are the implications of extending life span and curing certain diseases that kill millions every year. What happens when all the sudden everybody lives 20% longer and some of the major killers heart disease, cancer) aren't a problem. Things like over population, resources and such.

<comment><USER33> This has proven to not be a problem in Europe in general and in Asia in Japan.

In other continents, yes this would become a huge problem. Well, it actually is already today.

<comment><USER22> Japan's looming demographic crunch is thought to be a massive challenge for the country in coming decades. To say they've proven not to have this problem is like saying that falling off a building isn't a problem, because this guy is halfway down and still doing fine.

<comment><USER34> The post-WW2 baby-making bonanza is literally dying off. That's it. Japan's population is slowly returning to its equilibrium level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is a very well reported article and I'm grateful it was submitted here for discussion. The article definitely deserves a thoughtful read from beginning to end, as it raises a lot of issues that will have to be considered as research on human aging continues. The comments here posted before this one are interesting too.

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

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

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

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

[1] [http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...](http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

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

[3] [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html)

[4] [http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

[5] Various life-expectancy calculators:

[http://www.livingto100.com/](http://www.livingto100.com/)

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

[http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html](http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html)

(My life expectancy a year or two ago as calculated by this was lower than for the website above. This website is especially cool, because it shows a confidence interval around the estimate.)

</comment><comment><USER36> 120 but to do what? Sometimes I think it's better to have a short but intense life than a long one and do nothing because you know your life will be long.

<comment><USER37> You don't know your life will be long. You can die at any time for any stupid reason, no matter what your life expectancy is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Please hurry up. I want to live for thousands of years.

<comment><USER39> You might be interested in joining the effort. Leaving a task to others is a failing strategy when everyone adopts the same strategy.

<comment><USER40> Of course, it's only a failing strategy if adopting that strategy _causes_ everyone to adopt the same strategy, which is very unlikely for most people.

<comment><USER41> This may be wrong for complex reasons. Similar minds making the same decision for the same reasons do not _causally_ influence each other, but that doesn't change the outcome, nor does it make it any less bad. For a fairly deep view into how one might formally describe this particular aspect of decision making, I strongly recommend: [https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf](https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice to see more press on the Palo Alto Longevity Prize; the whole point of the exercise is to do what they are doing very loudly.

Establishing a research prize is a form of investment in progress only available in the philanthropic world. At the very high level it is easy to say that philanthropists pay people to work on specific tasks. This is simple enough for smaller amounts: transfer a few thousand dollars to a research group and you have bought a very small slice of the time and equipment needed to achieve any particular goal. When we start talking about much larger amounts of money, millions or tens of millions, then there are important secondary effects that occur when making such investments. In these amounts money has gravity, money makes people talk, and money changes behavior and expectations in a far larger demographic than just the recipients. This is well known, and thus investment activities, philanthropic and otherwise, become structured to best take advantage of this halo of effects. Most of the experience in doing this comes from the for-profit world: it doesn't take too long spent following the venture capital industry to see that investment is a lot more complicated than choosing a target and writing a check, and this is exactly because there are many secondary effects of a large investment that can be structured and harvested if investors go about it in the right way.

I theorize that the reason why research prizes remain comparatively rare is that firstly they are an investment strategy restricted to philanthropy, and thus people with the money to burn have little direct experience, and secondly the whole point of the exercise is not in fact paying people to do things directly, but rather creating a situation in which near all of the benefit is realized through the secondary effects generated by the highly publicized existence of a large sum of money. A research prize works by being a sort of extended publicity drive and networking event conducted over a span of years, a beacon to draw attention to teams laboring in obscurity, attract new teams, and raise their odds of obtaining funding. Connections are made and newly invigorated initiatives run beneath the light of a large sum of prize money, but at the end of the day that money becomes more or less irrelevant. It wasn't the important thing, it was merely the ignition point for a much greater blaze of investment and publicity. By the time a team wins, they are typically in a position to raise far more funding than the prize amount provides.

The ideal end result is that a field of science and technology is rejuvenated, taken from obscurity and thrust into the public eye, made attractive to investors, and numerous groups are given the attention and funding they need to carry on independently. This is how it worked for the Ansari X Prize for suborbital flight, and more quietly, for the Mprize for longevity science: in both cases the entire field changed as a result of the existence of the prize and the efforts of the prize organization to draw attention, change minds, and build new networks. But the award of money wasn't the transformative act, and in fact that award didn't really occur at all for the Mprize, but rather change was created through the sum of all of the surrounding effects.

So consider this: people who arrive at the state of being wealthy and wanting to change the world through philanthropy, often after decades of for-profit investment participation, don't have much in the way of comparable experience to guide them in the establishment and operation of research prizes. Thus creation of a research prize falls low in the list of strategies under consideration by high net worth philanthropists. Few people do it, and so there are few examples from which others can learn. It is the standard vicious circle of development, in which steady, grinding bootstrapping is the only way to create change.

Why care? Because research prizes work well. They work exceedingly well. Depending on how you care to plug numbers into equations, a well-run prize of $10 million will generate $150 to $500 million in investment in an industry, and that is just the easily measured result. Just as important is the following change and growth enabled by that initial burst of attention and funding. The Ansari X Prize spawned a number of other prizes in various industries, but I think it remains the case that medicine and biotechnology is poorly served in this respect. Outside of the efforts of the X Prize Foundation, the New Organ prizes, and other independent efforts such as the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, there is little going on. Given the proven utility of prizes there should be many more of them, and yet there are not.

</comment><comment><USER42> Finally, we will be old enough to rent "ultraporn" (160+ years old). [1][2]

[1][[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Futurama](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Futurama)] [2][[http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Hubert_J._Farnsworth](http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Hubert_J._Farnsworth)]

</comment><comment><USER43> If we extend life to 120 it buys us more time to go for 150, then that buys us more time to go for 300 etc.

<comment><USER44> Yes, this, exactly. I was trying to explain this to a friend the other day. We don't _need_ to "cure death" all at once in order for humanity to achieve practical immortality. It will take significant effort, obviously, but I have no doubt we'll attain it as our understanding of biology gets ever more sophisticated. Whether or not we'll personally be around to see it is another matter.

<comment><USER45> A good parallel is an escape velocity.

But in practical terms in the here and now it is a nonsense. Life expectancy has been going up 1 year in every ten for a hundred years, and the pace of that increase has not increased.

<comment><USER43> So were stuck at IQ/EQ too. Not so. We will adapt and thrive throughout the Multiverse as we have done throughout history. We will discover intellect that is greater than ours. Any other thought is a fastrack to suicide in terms of Time/Energy/Light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What about an invulnerable no form factor with beyond-time communications.

</comment><comment><USER47> I don't want just to live longer, I want to live longer while in a relatively good shape. Because if we are to live 30 years more with the physique of a 90 year old man then what's the point. If on the other hand I could have the physique of a 70 year old man while I'm 100+ that sounds like a good deal.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, although I'm holding out for 30 year old physique.

I would rather live 60 years in a 30 year old body/mind than 120 years in an 80 year old body/mind.

From my perspective, aging is a more serious problem to be solved then death.

<comment><USER48> > I would rather live 60 years in a 30 year old body/mind than 120 years in an > 80 year old body/mind.

As someone who's lost both parents and all four grandparents before I turned 31, I take the experience of my grandfather in his late 80's to mind. He was often told that the surgeries that he could have done to relieve the pain of a body that was breaking down weren't worth it because he wouldn't likely live long enough to really benefit. I imagine that if, at age 90, you had another 20-30 years, science could do some amazing things to your body to keep you moving forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea. Of course _I_ , selfishly, would love to live longer but doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster.

While we're at it why don't we just solve aging, provide infinite food supply, and eliminate predation for deer. That would be a great idea right? No way that would have any negative side effects, right?

<comment><USER50> "doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster"

Over the past centuries, human life expectancy has increased greatly and yet we have a much higher quality of life. It's an extraordinary claim to suggest that the continuance of this already-existing trend is 'almost guaranteed to be a disaster'.

<comment><USER51> The decline of global pirate population has correlated strongly with the rise of global temperatures, too.

<comment><USER52> While the pirate population might have something to do with the price of tea in China, it has nothing to do with this conversation. The comment you replied to did not make a correlation=causation argument. The comment did, however, make an argument that historic behavior, in this case of society as a whole, may be used to predict future behavior. I don't believe that is an entirely unreasonable argument to make (though more data from more fields is always better). It is certainly a stronger argument than was made by the previous comment, which provided no evidence to back the assertion that it would be a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> _Larry Ellison, co-founder of computer company Oracle, told his biographer Mark Wilson. "How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?"_

Succinct summary of the vapid naivete of zillionaires who can't incorporate death into their "but I've gotten everything _else_ I want" mindset.

I applaud the research. But I don't mind a finite life. Death is part of the cycle that has nourished our planet from the beginning. There are definitely a host of unintended consequences we'll face when it's only poor folks who die "young".

Look at the bright side: future generations can enjoy a world without Larry!

<comment><USER12> The world loses something when the sum of all a human's experiences are lost, forever. All that knowledge, experience, comprehension and interpretation of so many events and facts... Gone, in usually an instant.

It seems awfully wasteful, and I sincerely hope some day we overcome it. I believe we will all be better for it.

But sure, let's excuse the topic/problem by blaming it on the "naivete of zillionaires".

<comment><USER18> "Gone in an instant".

That's why we have books.

<comment><USER12> You mean that's why we invented many means to persist information past our inevitable fading? Of course, not everyone writes, and not all knowledge can be transferred with books or other tangible media.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux Power Usage Regression in 2.6.38+ - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTM2NQ

<comment><USER2> It isn't just me then, huh? I tried to bisect my way to a precise patch but it's really hard when you have ~15 steps, it's hard to tell if it "works" or not in anything less than an hour, and if you're wrong once you're guaranteed not to find the correct one. And the results I got almost make me think it's actually more than one patch combining together such that it has actually gotten gradually worse over time, which makes it even harder to finger.

<comment><USER3> As Linus already acknowledged the kernel is getting dangerously bloated.

<comment><USER4> I think it's time to have some unit tests written and get bolder with refactoring. I remember smarter-than-me developers claiming it's impossible to have tests in the kernel, but I never quite got a satisfactory answer. BTW, is there a USB connected power meter that could be used to reliably measure power consumption? It's easy to setup abox that continuously deploys different kernel configurations and measures power consumption. With something like that we could have a good map of power consumption x kernel x hardware in a couple days.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you could actually see a difference in current with a Kill-A-Watt or similar.

<comment><USER4> But that would be a manual step. The idea behind this would be to let the box build and test a succession of kernels, patch by patch, automatically, to find a regression.

I wouldn't want to manually test a hundred kernels, but I can easily spare a box for a week.

<comment><USER5> Ah, now I'm with you. I believe the high-end model does indeed have a USB connection though I would expect the software to be terrible

<comment><USER4> All we would need would be some way to gauge the instantaneous consumption at reading time. I would assume the tested kernel is capable of, at least, boot, check its power consumption under some workload (maybe compiling the kernel with the next patch set to be tested) and dumping that information to a file or a remote machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I installed/upgraded ArchLinux (which is at 2.6.38 now) on a bunch of laptops lately and noticed a raise in power usage (in the range of 10%), with mostly some high kworker activity (100+ wakeup/s when idle, that's 80% of overall wakeups) in powertop. But the worst contender has been s2ram power usage: the laptops go to sleep yet leaving them sleeping overnight pumps 40% out of the battery (should be 2~4%, tops). Unfortunately I can't downgrade easily as .38 introduced proper support for core components of those laptops.

</comment><comment><USER7> .38 introduced lot's of new stuff [1], so regressions can occur I guess. But I know that it'll get fixed. By the time this news got to HN there's probably someone working on it.

[1] <http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_38>

<comment><USER8> Transparent huge pages (also new in 2.6.38) have caused about 5% degradation in memory bandwidth (measured by STREAM benchmarks and other kernels, independent of the use of software prefetch) on my machines. This is somewhat strange because huge pages should help this benchmark.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It will be interesting to see how this plays out when Ubuntu 11.04 which uses 2.6.38 is released.</comment>


Great HN Idea: Grinch Mode - <AUTHOR>

Add a single text button that changes the user coloring back. It's interesting that to some, it's an insignificant change, and to others, it's a huge change in readability/usability. <comment><USER2> ...and all the Hoos down in Hooville will cry BooHoo!</comment>


Inability to switch off? A Time to Tune Out - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/opinion/cohen-a-time-to-tune-out.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> Great article, thanks.

Kudos to Volkswagen for enforcing the blackberry 'opening hours'. (And here's hoping more companies start to ban internal email!)</comment>


Looking for a teacher - <AUTHOR>

ok so recently i been looking for information to how can i learn web developing. i gother a clue but i think is way too much infor for proccessing so here by i came here to ask if someone could be my teacher or could be my guide pd: happy Xmas :D <comment><USER2> Omar (I am assuming that is your name by your username). I am pretty slammed right now, with some projects but should be freeing up here soon. If you want to drop me an email, it is in my profile I may be able to give you a hand. I have mentored a good deal of developer and have found that it helps improve my ability to transfer knowledge to others. Just shoot me an email and I will see if I can help.</comment>


Ron Rivest: Keys Under Doormats – Mandating Insecurity [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqacHM6Wm0Q <comment><USER2> This talk is (as expected) a very level headed summary of why exceptional access in encryption is a _very bad idea_.

The only point I think it's worth adding to those in the talk (which may be covered in the original paper) is one of temporal trust. That is, even if you manage to convince yourself that there could be a way to safely solve the technical problems of setting up exceptional access in the current world, and you decide that all LE agencies that get access are currently trustworthy, and you believe that other issues such as LE agency corruption and spying are currently minimal to non-existent, There is no way to ensure that this "ideal" (and somewhat naive) world will continue into the future.

I think any person or government that tries to argue that exceptional access is a good idea either hasn't considered historical precedent, hasn't thought the situation through to it's logical conclusion, or is being deliberately disingenuous.

<comment><USER3> b-but terrorists and pedophiles

<comment><USER4> lovejoy's game: when you invoke lovejoy's law, you lost the argument</comment></comment></comment>


Statistics on Cause of Crashes in the US (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811059 <comment><AUTHOR> I recalled a fatal accident in San Jose a few years ago where the driver was suffering a hypoglycemic event and lost consciousness after reaching an exit on I-280. He did not reduce speed and crashed into another vehicle, killing both passengers. [0]

That led me to search for statistics on how many crashes are caused by incapacitated drivers, and to this NHTSA report from 2008 [1]. Page 30 shows driver-caused, critical pre-crash events involving "Heart attack or other physical impairment" as the cause of 2.4% of accidents where the cause is attributed to the driver (as opposed to mechanical failure, act of God, etc.), numbering an estimated 48,822 crashes from 2005 to 2007.

However, scanning the table, I note that _40%_ of crashes attributed to the driver are due to:

\- Inadequate Surveillance

\- Internal Distraction

\- External Distraction

\- Inattention (i.e. Daydreaming, etc.)

All of these are resolved, to a large degree, by the proliferation of driver assistance technologies that are coming into the market today.

From my perspective, the moral question is that some people will die because of this technology. Other people will be saved. In the end, it is like vaccination in that the peril is shifted from one population to another, but overall, life expectancy is improved. It's here to stay.

[0] [http://www.protectconsumerjustice.org/two-wrongful-death- cas...](http://www.protectconsumerjustice.org/two-wrongful-death-cases- involve-diabetic-reactions-while-driving-company-vehicles.html)</comment>


iStoleYourStartup: A story of an iPhone Company Con Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.connersc.com/blog/?p=58

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the author and co-founder of this failed start up. And you guys say a lot of things that were definitely true. The comments here made me realize I left some important information out. I'll try to clear these things up here.

1\. I never really thought that what we were doing was revolutionary. We were creating cool looking applications on a new device and that excited me. Once we had a reputable name that had the marketing acumen, I thought that we could push a lot of $0.99 units.

2\. The poster about saying I stayed around for the loyalty of my friend was spot on. I probably stayed too long, and in the future I will definitely pick my friends a little more carefully. His arrogance didn't help.

3\. My fascination with "The Secret" was true and simple naivety. Had I had walked around the block a couple more times I would have realized that this was complete snake oil wrapped in a snappy, marketable message.

4\. "Tanner" hasn't been that successful since. His business relationship with Ryan rotted after the poor handling of their eventual contract and his Dojo's attendance has been suffering as it has apparently clearly affected his charismatic performance. I've been told he is in a mountain of personal debt as well as over $100,000 in the hole at his Dojo. This is merely what I was told by a source I trust but take from it what you will.

5\. I made a lot of dumb mistakes and wanted to "play business" like it was some game and that if I sat in my room and wrote code all day the mail man would deliver a pile of money to my doorstep. I was an ass hat and I've learned a great deal of humility since then.

6\. It was emotional, and maybe I played that up a bit here. Its a personal story and its taken a long time to get over it. Simply knowing I've had people read my story is enough. It was my first true business endeavor outside the safety of a large corporate structure and I got burned.

7\. The company is still operating, but still haven't managed to get even one of their 12 applications onto the app store. They have since produced zero revenue, the seed money was probably a lie from Tanner, and there's so many cuts in the pie these days that I'd be surprised if anyone made their investment back.

Half of me had wished I had posted for advice here earlier on, I get the feeling I would have been served up a large slice of reality pie. I'm doing my best not to walk around with my head so far up my own ass this time around, seeking professional advice where needed.

Thanks for taking the interest and time to read and respond to my story. Hopefully someone avoids making the same mistakes I did from it.

<comment><USER3> There's one point this highlights - even if you're working with friends, you must have a contract.

You don't need a lawyer to write it (it's better, but in the early stages you can economize), but _anything_ written on paper that divvies up the IP amongst the founders will prevent a lot of heartache later on.

I guess that guy would have complained about creating "negative energy" though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "To this day I simply can't believe that someone out there exists who would con and manipulate people like this"

Yeah, truly shocking that there could be someone out there able to manipulate people who think The Secret is "just so true".

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm always fascinated about how we see one of these articles every month or two.

You don't have a business until you have an organization. Get a contract in place. Determine ownership before even 1 second of time is dedicated to the undertaking.

It's really not that hard.

<comment><USER6> I've been trying to study up on how conmen succeed, and how to innoculate myself against them. I've been taken to the cleaners a lot in my adult life, but one thing I've figured out is that when someone tries to manipulate me with fear ( _buy now or be priced out of the market forever!_ or with the typical threats from a lawyer), I _have_ learned that the most effective technique I can do is dig my feet in and do the exact opposite of what the fearmonger preaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scott, thanks for the story and I sympathize that things did not work out as well as you would have hoped.

BUT having re-read your post a few times, and obviously not being involved at all, I am not sure that Tanner is the malicious con man you make him out to be.

ie being a douche != a con man && things not working out != being manipulated.

For example: 1\. Additional cut to Zen Club \- Zen Club the company is separate to Tanner, the individual. If both are contributing to the App Company (eg you mention the brand, the photoshoot etc), then it seems reasonable to both to be part of the split. I agree that you should probably have negotiated both Tanner's and Zen Club's contributions together, but it seems irrelevant whether you split it as Tanner gets X% and Zen Club gets Y%, or Tanner gets (X + Y)% and Zen Club gets 0%.

2\. "We started reporting to Tanner like a boss" and Ryan always agreeing with him. \- These seem to be interpersonal dynamics that doesn't necessarily point to Tanner being a con man. I assume there was no backroom deal where Tanner paid Ryan $X to always agree with him etc, in which case Ryan made his own decisions which simply happened to disagree with you. Similarly if there were no deals that forced you to start "reporting" to Tanner, then it seems like everybody simply fell into this dynamic.

3\. Invisible Lawyer and Boilerplate Contract \- Did you ask to meet the lawyer? \- The lawyer is presumably busy, and you mentioned he wasn't being paid for his services, so the fact that you got a fairly generic first draft and the whole process took a long time doesn't mean anybody was being malicious. Even in the best circumstances contracts take some time and always with multiple revisions first.

4\. If the runway ran out you would have no income while Tanner still had his gym. \- you not having an income if the runway runs out is a standard risk for founding a startup \- yes Tanner still has his gym. He presumably spent some separate time and investment to set up and keep running, so this also doesn't sound malicious.

5\. After you quit, domain / email / ftp accounts were changed \- standard practice I would think

6\. Ryan got 5% \- I agree it does seem low, but it is possible this is a fair deal. Think of it this way - the investor put in $250K, Ryan did not put in any money, was working part-time, and none of the apps got approved into the app store (is that a technical responsibility?).

7\. Other 'grievances' (eg drives BMW, not using real names, acting career, charging you for an 'overpriced' gym membership and DVD series, alcohol, charging for $30 pillows, 'squatting' in the spare office, etc) \- apart from adding color to your story these details are irrelevant at best \- at worst it makes Tanner a douche, or wasteful with money, but does not necessarily make him a con man

Obviously I don't know the full story so take what I wrote as you will. It just seems a shame if you take the belief that you were conned (and more importantly, take an overly-sceptical / distrusting view into your next project where it could become self-fulfilling) based on only 1 of several possible _interpretations_ of what happened.

<comment><AUTHOR> You make a lot of great points and in some cases I will agree with you.

The cut to Zen club had little to nothing to do with its brand or the photoshoot. While it was "helping" - I will agree - he owned the gym and blurred the lines between what was his partnership and what was the gym - <USER2> wanted an equal share cut between him AND his gym.

2\. Absolutely true.

3\. I asked to meet the lawyer plenty of times. If he was the best partnership lawyer in town, I would think a google search would turn his name up. It didn't.

4\. You make a good point and I realized those risks. That said I wasn't confident enough that I wouldn't get screwed as I had already set the precedent for how I could be pushed around. Plus, its not like HE was quitting his gym to go full time with us, he simply wanted it done faster and didn't care if it put us into harms way.

5\. Yes, yes and yes. I was stupid for not getting my e-mails and records off the servers first, but its like at this point my friend didn't even trust me. This was an emotional response.

6\. The investor did _not_ put up $250,000, in fact, he barely even marketed the product to his own consumer base (so far, Nov 2009), which was the only reason I was playing along because I thought it would work (which is still a mistake).

7.I agree here too. There were other comments as well. He was taking a business coaching course run by the Joe Ansaldi and a couple of times said to us "There is a science to making money. Like you hear sometimes, step 1, 2, 3, profit. Works every time" There were similarly scammy things he said that rubbed me the wrong way.

You have a completely unique and valid take on the situation. My emotions blurred a lot what happened and while accurate from my perspective, wasn't necessarily everything.

Thanks for your input, as it is posts like these that help me get the full story and stop my inner-brooding on getting pounded in the rear by business partners (my failure was from a long series of my own mistakes).

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 What rubs me the wrong way about this story is all the references to "the iPhone millionaires" and "the millions to be made" and the "iPhone gold rush".

Gee, when you're only aim is to get rich quick, it's not too surprising that you are vulnerable to being taken for others than want to get rich _even quicker_.

</comment><comment><USER8> _"he paid $300 for a manual on how to make money on Twitter and gave it to me"_

I'm assuming that's how to make money on twitter. Sell books on how to make money on twitter for $300!

<comment><USER9> I once picked up a book at someones house titled "Everything Good About George W. Bush"; It had a nice fancy cover and everything. I opened to the first page, blank - the second page - blank..the middle of the book? Blank!

I picture this $300 manual to be very comparable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a squalid petty affair.

I think you need to keep a little perspective. You aren't the first guy to waste a bunch of time on a side project that didn't go anywhere.

1\. this was a side project!?! you can't expect great results from a side project. if something happens, then great, if not, well .... you still have a job.

2\. Don't you first need to _have something_ before it is conned from you. I certainly didn't hear of any great technical achievements that would have lead to success.

3\. Maybe you didn't like the direction the project took. But it sounds like your partner was right about one thing, dealing w/ your dojo guy did get the attention of the Secret guru. It seems like the involvement of the Secret guru is the only thing the project had going for it at one point. And as I mentioned prior, you didn't mention any great technical successes that would have lead to a breakout.

Like i said, welcome to the club of failed side projects.

<comment><USER11> I'm biased to defend founders, but in that story, I'm not particularly on the author's side.

Yes, the guru was probably abusing the situation. But the author refuses to quit his job and rejects an offer for a $250,000 seed investment. The guru does provide a key connection.

Even a legit guru would have become frustrated with the author by then, and tried to get rid of him.

I'm also not shocked by someone who spends $900 on flowers for their home. If you have the money, why not? The author is just showing how young he is. Driving a BMW is also not proof of cardinal sin :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> The money never came - the work continued after I left, and the guy is apparently in a lot of debt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All parties involved seem super flakey.

Even though he was made out to be the 'villian' and is in fact probably a douche, the guy running the zen dojo or whatever sounds like he has a good thing goin.

This story has given me the idea of collecting stories about failed startups from the perspective of those involved.

That way if you find yourself in a shifty situation you have something to consult that should confirm whether or not you're in a textbook train wreck.

</comment><comment><USER13> Never trust a hippy

My two worst business experiences have been with ostentatiously 'spiritual' people. It's not that they're insincere in their beliefs, it's just a lot easier for them to deceive themselves that the selfish things they do have justifications in them somewhere.

Give me a straightforward 'coin-operated machine' (as an old partner described himself) any day, you can at least trust them to behave as advertised.

<comment><USER14> Congratulations. You just blew off Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER13> I spent 5 years at Apple and Steve spends zero time blowing smoke about spirituality. He may be a private hippy, but at work he's pure business.

<comment><USER14> Which Steve was that, though? The pre-NeXT Steve who was kicked out of his own company, or Steve the White who came back from the abyss to throw the usurpers out and save the day?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _"This dude even got his black belt from a man trained by Chuck Norris"_

He got his black belt from a man trained by Chuck Norris? Wow! That's like, so impressive. Amazing. That must mean he IS Chuck Norris.

More seriously, yes, stay away from those uber-charismatic types, and trust your gut! Never do a deal with someone if it smells fishy or doesn't seem to add up. Your gut is your best weapon.

<comment><USER16> _trust your gut_

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Secret? Is this a joke?

<comment><USER18> Ha I actually had a similar take. The story started very nicely like a good startup story should and in my mind i thought here is possibly another good story about the pitfalls of doing startups that one can learn from. Then got to the secret part and it kind of just completely vaporized that notion and the story became how a sucker got suckered. but the real downside was that he didn't even get suckered out of that much. he did some prototyping, almost partnered up and then decided they were not a good fit. it's not like the couple and his friend made it so no other yoga apps can be made.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure I would call the author a sucker. He had serious reservations from the beginning. His friend? Definitely gullible. But many of the decisions the author made were out of loyalty to his friend, not out of gullibility. From the start he considered the possibility that his friend was brainwashed but gave him the benefit of the doubt. I think that even the least gullible people on HN are susceptible to this.

<comment><USER18> right, sucker is a bit harsh. Using it emanated more from him loving the secret more than the story that was told. But the point I pretty much failed to make was that if he felt the enterprise to be worthy, but the people not to be, it is something within his control to find new partners or continue, nothing that happened prevented that. But the story dramatizes events to the level of someone having stolen his business dream or some such. Basically, yes it is a crushing experience to lose your innocence and find out someone you highly respect is just out to exploit you, but there's no reason to get it so mixed up with everything.

<comment><USER19> Yeah when I read that "just so true" part I thought he was either being sarcastic or would come to his senses later in the story. Neither seems to be the case. It is a shame because positive thinking in the form of good old- fashioned optimism is a great thing so long as it is balanced with a healthy dose of realism. Applying positive thought naively and waiting for good stuff to happen to you is sad and embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article reads like a case story out of 'Winning Through Intimidation' by Robert J. Ringer (a book anyone who is thinking about starting a startup should read). "Tanner" sounds like a Type Number 2 Master Intimidator.

The author escaped with only getting the tips chopped off a couple of fingers rather than losing his whole hand (read the book and you'll understand what I mean).

</comment><comment><USER21> How horrible for you.

It just shows that you have to choose your partners extremely carefully, and you must write up legal contracts that will back up your agreement.

More importantly, don't partner with anyone you don't know and trust already.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can't please everyone. If you try, you will eventually leave yourself open to manipulation.

A lesson best learned as early as possible.

I call it a win.

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of you are being pretty hard on this guy. It's a good story, and if you don't have business experience you can learn a lesson from it.

Just because he liked "The Secret" doesn't mean he's some asshat who deserved what he got. Hindsight is 20/20 and it's obvious he had a lot of reservations throughout the ordeal. But when you're dealing with a good con artist (I have), they can make you believe anything. Reading this story brought back a lot of memories of what I went through. But I could see all the sings from a mile away while I was reading it.

Once you've been conned, it will never happen to you again. Unless you're an idiot.</comment>


Ask HN: Synthetic data for machine learning - <AUTHOR> I just started working on machine-learning project involving the interaction with a home appliance. You can think of it as a sort of Nest Thermostat. We do not have data that we can work with, so I'm developing a model of human behavior to generate synthetic data and bootstrap the process. I'm now asking myself how many of my fellow data scientist would like to use a service that generate synthetic data sets with well-known statistical properties or well-know underlying physical process, to test, calibrate and validate models. Would you use it or do you always prefer to cook it by yourself? <comment><USER2> My initial take is that if you're generating synthetic data to train up something then either you'll need to spend some time to make sure that your fake data has the critical properties of the real data or you'll be able to do something really simple and easy to code up.

Either way, it's not really something to outsource. If there's a lot of work necessary to understand the data, you need to do it yourself and not offload it to some remote service (or worse, expose your data/metadata to a third party). If there's not a lot of work necessary, just do it yourself, it'll be faster (there's a reason nobody's putting out things like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Random_Digits_with_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Random_Digits_with_100,000_Normal_Deviates) anymore)

<comment><AUTHOR> good point, thanks!</comment></comment>


SQL Performance checklist: Avoid index filter predicates. - <AUTHOR> http://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/testing-scalability/system-load

<comment><USER2> This is where databases that support row values can be helpful. The original query:

SELECT count( _) FROM scale_data WHERE section = ? AND id2 = ?

would be re-written with row values as:

SELECT count(_) FROM scale_data WHERE (section,id2) = (?,?)

In such a case, the database will revert to a table scan if it can't find an index that matches all of the columns (in left-to-right order) in the row value on the left-hand side of the expression, which would be immediately apparent in the actual performance of the query and the query execution plan.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't seem more helpful to me... it's just making the worst case worser.

In a situation which other queries would benefit from the id1, id2 order, and it wouldn't pay off creating another index, using a index seek instead a table scan is way better.

<comment><USER2> Making the worst case worser is the point. My assumption here was that the issue was catching this type of optimization problem during development, in which case using row values would help. The idea isn't that a table scan is better than an index scan, but that an index scan that isn't very selective will progressively get worse in terms of performance as the table grows, and possibly not be caught during development. Row values are the developer's way of saying "I want this condition to match an index on all columns, or not match at all".</comment></comment></comment>


The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9068903/the-toronto-raptors-sportvu-cameras-nba-analytical-revolution

<comment><USER3> Great article. As a huge NBA & NFL fan, It's intriguing to see the front offices of some of these teams begin to think outside of the box when it comes to player development. I think that's the most interesting opportunity here -- the practice of "watching film" is now innovative enough to not only help prepare for opponents, but also provide coaches a better macro view of what to work on with specific players in the short & long term. Especially in coaching behavior "off the ball". Thats always a game changer.

The ghost AI is pretty impressive as well. I was skeptical at first as to how authentic this type of "player AI" would be, considering the program makes assumptions based on historical numbers and any athlete/coach would certainly argue that its different in-game, however this says a ton:

> That's brutal, and it's not a coincidence that the only team that > consistently mirrors the help defense of its ghosts is Miami, Rucker says. > The Heat have three of the best wing defenders in the league in Shane > Battier, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade, and the latter two are among the > NBA's most gifted pure athletes. James can mimic DeRozan's hyperactive ghost > in a way no other player can, Rucker says. "LeBron basically messes up the > system and the ghosts," Rucker says. "He does things that are just > unsustainable for most players."

Not a huge Miami fan (Go BULLS!) but you can't deny their defensive effort.

Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER4> Btw. Shane Battier (back then with the Rockets) was mentioned in a new york times piece on NBA and Stats some years ago: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, memories. In 1998 I worked on the FIFA World Cup graphics, and two guys on the team were developing a camera player tracking and stat acquisition system. Back then, raw CPU power was a real limitation; the fastest PCs were PII 333 Mhz and they just couldn't track automatically 22 players from 4 cameras (one atop each corner of the stadium).

In the end the system was _almost_ working, however we needed two people watching the TV stream and clicking on players to identify them when the automated system lost track. However it provided already tremendously detailed stats, but unfortunately nobody really cared :)

<comment><USER6> Some former classmates of mine are still working on it, they provide analytics for the Uruguay soccer team among others:

<http://www.kizanaro.com/web/index.php?lang=en>

most of the input is still manual as you mention.

They were recognized by MIT Technology Review :) (in Spanish)

[http://www.technologyreview.es/tr35argentinayuruguay/profile...](http://www.technologyreview.es/tr35argentinayuruguay/profile.aspx?trid=1334)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a long-time Raptors fan and the co-founder/owner of the most read Raptors blog, I can confirm that none of this technology has helped the Raptors.

<comment><USER8> Seems to me like too many players in the Raptors are lacking stamina for such an intense defense system as that system produces. They would be gassed in no time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The "ghost" players in these animated replays that show where the system thinks a player should have been are fascinating to see. I wonder how automatic it is - if games could be analyzed like that without much expert input, this would be a really cool thing to have for recreational teams who want to get better but can't afford expert coaching. I'm thinking my late- night adult league hockey team would probably benefit from some replays like this.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately the cameras are pricey enough that only 15 of 30 NBA teams have purchased them, not to mention the half decade of work it took the Raptors to build the code to actually generate the visualizations. Maybe someday it will be commercially available and affordable, but that day seems a long way off to me.

<comment><USER11> I'm wondering why the 15 other teams aren't on board yet. If the price is only 100k, it's nothing to an NBA team. If those other 15 teams don't already have an advanced analytics team in place, then it makes sense not to have the camera until you have a structure in place to make sure of the camera data.

It will be interesting with this huge push in basketball over the past couple years to see where this type of analysis leads. The NBA model right now is pretty simple: get two or three superstars, align them with solid role players, and play in championships. It's hard to imagine analytics pushing a team like Houston to be able to beat a team like Miami or Oklahoma City in a seven-game series because the talent gap is so substantial. Houston can play a smarter game but the other teams still function better. What I could see happening, however, if a team like Oklahoma City, while slightly less talented than Miami, can implement insights from this analysis to raise their EV, it might overcome the slightly smaller talent gap. Even in that small sense, it makes more to spend a couple million a year on analytics than it does to pay an average NBA player several million. Since the NBA has both a salary cap and maximum contracts, it pushes the price of an average play up quite a bit, so better value may be had by raising the effectiveness of your current talent than trying to bring in new players.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree, but, as referenced in the article, there is still pretty strong resistance to analytics-driven decision making in the NBA. Many NBA coaches and GM's are former players, who generally resist advanced stats. Hence "it can't measure personality, chemistry, heart." That quote fails to mention neither can anything else, so it makes much more sense to focus on what _can_ be measured than on what can't (I'll concede personality should in some cases be taken into account if there are clear clashes).

<comment><USER12> Forget the advanced stats, it also elucidates the best defensive/offensive scheme for the team. That's part of a coach's job description right there. It's probably also not much of a stretch to encroach on the scouts' & GM's territory too - How will our team look if we trade Lopez for Howard? - <USER2> example.

When the system gets more optimized and easier to use, the role of a coach & GM could get diminished, and with it, their salaries. Of course they would do everything in their power to stop that.

<comment><USER10> Except for the coaches who embrace it. When the Mavericks hired Rick Carlisle, a big reason they hired him was that in Indiana he had consistently used his teams best lineups, and in his interviews expressed a strong interest in embracing analytics (which, with Mark Cuban as your owner, you won't ever lack the resources to get the best analytics). In baseball, the best (in terms of wins/resources) team is the Rays, who hired investment bankers as their GM and have a coach who listens to the sabermatricians, platooning like crazy and shifting the infield all over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To the uninitiated, and those who like sports analytics (specifically the NBA), you should absolutely follow Zach Lowe's articles on Grantland and elsewhere. He's the best sports writer on the subject, and probably the only coherent one at that.

</comment><comment><USER14> All the analytics in the world won't save you if your GM is Colangelo.

</comment><comment><USER15> The camera presumably is overhead. From that perspective, what could be a useful feature for person tracking? I am assuming it wont be that easy to pickup just numbers of their jerseys. Faces are also not easy to get from that angle. Or do they have multiple cameras in place?

<comment><USER16> probably use 2 - 3 camera to triangluate location

if you only have to idenitify 24 people, you could probably do that on height plus some other physical dimension

<comment><USER4> Or with some Machine Learning: Identifying Players in Broadcast Sports Videos using Conditional Random Fields, CVPR 2011.

<comment><USER16> cool link, thanks

found this:

Our natural gait, it turns out, defines us as humans. Not speaking broadly — that we're only truly bipedal mammal on the earth, blah blah blah — but as individuals. Researchers are increasingly convinced that how we walk can identify us as unique individuals, much like a fingerprint or retina scan.

This sort of research has been underway since the late 1990s, picking up more urgency after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the London train attack in 2005. DARPA and Homeland Security, among others, are keenly interested in video analysis programs that can separate out and analyze an individual gait, then use this like fingerprints. DARPA has been sponsoring "human identification at a distance" studies since 2000, which often combines gait analysis with facial and gesture analysis. It's a hot field right now, and has been heralded as a less invasive approach than retina scans or blood tests or fingerprinting. One study I read on the algorithms of walking put the appeal simply: "Advantages include the fact that it does not require subject cooperation or body contact, and the sensor may be located remotely."

<http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article01181302.aspx>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> that is some really cool tech. I wonder if the camera reads the player's numbers on their jerseys when they go onto the court?

I could imagine a cool realtime consumer version of this for all kinds of sports where you get an instant replay type of thing projected onto some kind of madden/video game type avatars: unpause and play any game from any instant in the game you're watching.</comment>


The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2020-04-21-the-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/ <comment><USER2> I suspect that the low scripting CPU time on jQuery sites is because it's quite common that it's just being used for a few things (and even nothing at all), while the other frameworks are likely doing a whole lot more.

Something like JS LoC excluding the framework itself might give a better picture of it.

<comment><USER3> I suspect you're absolutely right! :)

Using jQuery is definitely a different style of development than using something like Angular/Vue/React. I tried to clarify in the post (under "The Big Picture") that the data shouldn't be construed as me saying "React is slower than Vue or jQuery" but rather that there are characteristics of the way we build when we use React (combo of ecosystem, documentation, technical approach, etc) that leads to a lot more work happening on the device. The question is whether that's something that we're ok with.

Hopefully that came across in the post! I certainly don't want anyone thinking this is like a benchmark or anything that is pitting jQuery execution versus React execution or similar.</comment></comment>


Useful Jquery Examples - <AUTHOR> http://techflame.posterous.com/useful-jquery-examples

<comment><USER2> This is just a selective repost of some of the tips from [http://www.opensourcehunter.com/2010/02/27/26-cool-and- usefu...](http://www.opensourcehunter.com/2010/02/27/26-cool-and-usefull- jquery-tips-tricks-solutions/) \- and they're not particularly good tips (using .html() to check if an element is empty seems pretty dodgy, for example).

<comment><USER3> > they're not particularly good tips

I agree - not entirely sure how this climbed up so high on the front page. There are far better resources available, including the jQuery documentation itself, or [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript- ajax/jquery-1-4...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript- ajax/jquery-1-4-released-the-15-new-features-you-must-know/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know I'm being a stickler here, but setTimeout() is conventional JS...

<comment><USER5> Yep. jQuery does have .delay() now, though. You can use it like this:

$('#thing').fadeIn(300).delay(2000).fadeOut(300);

<comment><USER6> Which is precisely the type of thing I'd think would be in the article :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mike Susz's crazySquares is one of my favorite jQuery examples/tutorials: <http://squaredesign.com/lab/crazy-squares/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Personally, instead of

$('#id').replaceWith('
I have been replaced
');

I prefer

$('#id').replaceWith($('
').text('I have been replaced.'));

</comment><comment><USER9> As for empty elements, I believe you can always just use the :empty selector.

if($([selector]).is(":empty")) { // do stuff }

</comment><comment><USER10> I would recommend having jQuery Cookbook on your bookshelf. It's a great resource.

[http://www.amazon.com/jQuery-Cookbook-Solutions-Examples- Dev...](http://www.amazon.com/jQuery-Cookbook-Solutions-Examples- Developers/dp/0596159773)</comment>


Sinatra clone in PHP - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/brucespang/Frank.php

<comment><USER2> Looks promising! I've actually been developing my own Sinatra clone in PHP5. I've called it "Slim". It has RESTful GET, POST, PUT, DELETE routing. It has before and after callbacks. It has Page Not Found handling, halting, helpers to set custom response codes, and easy-to-extend templating (use Smarty, Twig, or whatever you want). See more at:

Documentation: <http://slim.joshlockhart.com/>

GitHub (with Download): <http://github.com/codeguy/Slim>

Still very much a work in progress, but thought I'd go ahead and get the word out.

Enjoy! Josh

</comment><comment><USER3> Aside from this being "Sinatra clone" #100, I think most people do not understand that Sinatra is about much more than its query and before/after- filter DSL: Its about its plugin API, its great integration into Rack (which PHP doesn't have, middleware solutions or not), its ability to host multiple apps in one process and its large and well-written documentation.

It is easy to implement the query API in any language that supports anonymous functions, but that doesn't make it Sinatra.

This one is not even a good example of a clone: its really bare, only implements the minimal set to "look like sinatra". It doesn't even have a good request or response object.

<comment><USER4> Heh, it's funny you should mention that.. I had a go at a Sinatra + Rack style framework in PHP a little while ago.

Check it out:

<http://github.com/dhotson/kelpie>

<http://github.com/dhotson/kelpie/blob/master/demoapp.php>

It's got its own Rack style web server built in ... kinda crazy huh? ;-)

<comment><USER3> It looks nice and much cleaner :). Is there a reason for the use of doc comments?

My problem in the PHP world is: you have your Rack-style server. Another project has a different style. In Ruby, every framework nowadays is on Rack.

<comment><USER4> No particular reason it uses docblocks.. it's just what I thought looked decent at the time. I'm usually not a fan of comments as code, but in this case it's kinda neat.. :-)

It's a real challenge to make nice looking mini languages in PHP. At least Ruby gives you a bit more rope to make clever little languages. /envy

But yeah, I really wish PHP had a web server interface like Rack that was more widely accepted. The two that look the most promising are:

<http://mongrel2.org>

<http://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php>

Also, the downside of implementing your own web server is that basically zero existing PHP code will work with it. It's because you have to re-implement all the usual superglobal stuff $_GET $_POST $_SESSION etc..

.. I consider that a plus. ;-)

<comment><USER5> Can I get some thoughts on <http://github.com/luciferous/pip>? It's an interface and a web server (and framework). Its a ways to becoming near a standard. I think it "fights" PHP style in its current state.

<comment><USER4> Looking pretty good. Nice one. :-)

I can't claim much credit for the design of Kelpie, it's mostly a direct port of Ruby's Thin web server. I guess there's a couple of notes I'd make:

\- I'd recommend using the mongrel http parser rather than implementing your own. I wrote a PHP extension for it - <http://github.com/dhotson/httpparser- php>

Also, some cosmetic stuff (feel free to ignore):

\- I prefer camelCase for methods

\- public/private access control on methods

\- PHP namespaces look and act weird to me so I don't use them

\- I prefer using underscores in names and a classloader to avoid require statements

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that! I _was_ looking at your PHP extension a few months ago, but didn't come to a decision on integrating something that users would need to install in addition to the standard PHP package. I'm definitely thinking a lot about the cosmetics of the code, especially since looks different from PEAR etc...

<comment><USER4> Ah yep, I guess it'd be good to have a pure PHP fallback for HTTP parsing.

Also, I've pretty much developed my own PHP style. I don't follow PEAR conventions.. I go with what looks clearest to me. So obviously you'll want to take my advice with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.sinatrarb.com/>

For those (like me) that had no clue what sinatra was before this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've written one too called Hoboken, the city where Sinatra was bron. I don't have a complete set of docs, but it's definitely useable.

<http://github.com/leftnode/Hoboken>

My personal site uses it: <http://leftnode.com>

I'll have to check this out to see how it competes :).

<comment><USER8> Nice, I liked Hoboken (lived there). Great steak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some other ones:

<http://github.com/sofadesign/limonade>

<http://github.com/jim/fitzgerald>

<http://github.com/fabpot/Silex> (based on Symfony 2)

<comment><USER10> Used limonade in a few projects recently that required me to code in PHP. It's easy to get rolling with and free of outside dependencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty early but nifty, and might help us in our ongoing efforts to move away from our Ruby prototypes. Needs helpers and halting to be properly useful, but will definitely keep an eye on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll get to helpers and halting as soon as I can, and email you when they're done.

Update: Done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What those PHP guys are unable to understand, is that all the coolness and beauty of Sinatra comes from the lack of () {} $ and other meaningless (it this context) symbols and words, like function and echo.

The same effect is in Clojure, but it is a little bit more difficult to explain.

They're lost the beauty of Lisp (especially Scheme) when they broke the clarity and unambiguity of the syntax pushing all those foreign symbols into it. Moreover, they also renamed and broke most of common idioms, using words that could be better as a variable names instead of keywords.

So, it is not a Lisp dialect, even not so-called Lisp-1. It is just yet another JVM-targeted pseudo-functional language, which, OK, looks like lisp to those who never seen a Lisp before.

But, its cool (and ugly), I must admit. ^_^

<comment><USER13> _What those PHP guys are unable to understand, is that all the coolness and beauty of Sinatra comes from the lack of () {} $ and other meaningless (it this context) symbols and words, like function and echo._

i think "those php guys" are well aware that their language is not ruby and care more about getting work done than whether they have to type dollar signs and brackets.

<comment><USER4> I think c00p3r makes a valid point.

PHP makes it very hard to write "beautiful" frameworks like Sinatra. There's a whole bunch of crufty looking stuff in PHP that is unavoidable.

That doesn't stop me from writing PHP and getting-shit-done. That's an entirely different argument though.</comment></comment></comment>


Awesome Books for Learning Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.zeroequalsfalse.press/2019/02/09/learn-python/ <comment><USER2> All book links are Amazon affiliate links (zeroequalsfals-20). Second time submitted today alone.</comment>


FT: Galaxy S3 to beat iPhone on sales - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/113457471429583444041/posts/GDsk3fVWSEs

<comment><USER2> Two things:

1) The HN title of this doesn't tally with what the article actually says (which is that the iPhone 4S is still outselling the S3 and it makes no predictions about future sales of the S3)

2) Is brand new phone sells nearly as well as 9 month old phone due for a major upgrade in 3 months really a story?

<comment><USER3> Regarding #2, no, it's not a story, it's linkbait and happens every year.</comment></comment>


Your Shortcut to Lightning-Fast Speeds. AMP Landing Pages Come to Unbounce - <AUTHOR> https://unbounce.com/product/amp-landing-pages-with-unbounce/ <comment><USER2> Friends don't let friends use AMP. AMP pages aren't really "85% faster", they just are preloaded by Google, in exchange for letting Google hijack page navigation and serve content from their own domain, and this "benefit" only works if you're using Google Search to get there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Back in September Google started taking steps to distance themselves from AMP. They even adopted a new governance model so that it's less about 'them' and more about speeding up the web in general. There's also the option to use alternatives to Google's AMP Cache, but folks tend to use Google's since it's already readily available.</comment></comment>