Techowl
Joined 13 years ago
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Aug 9
I'm a Software Engineer at LendUp in San Francisco who has studied biology. You can email me at dkkimbel at (Google's popular email service).
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Comment · 8 years ago
Wouldn't car parts be a much more accurate analogy, though? Apple isn't suing anyone for not using Apple-branded electricity to power their phone.
Comment · 8 years ago
You'd be surprised. Heart disease, for example, is one of the deadliest age-related diseases, but it's by no means exclusive to the wealthy. See for example the World Health Organization's statistics[0]; they report that three quarters of deaths from cardiovascular disease occur in low-income and middle-income countries.
Comment · 9 years ago
The Buck Institute [0], featured in this article, is a pretty outstanding organization -- they're unique in being a sizable research center devoted to researching aging. I'm excited to see their idea of age-related diseases as biological maintenance problems gaining some traction.
I'm not entirely sure where the interviewer was going with this statement, though.
> There’s a lot of Silicon-Valley buzz about longevity and many startups working to develop immortality pills.
I've yet to hear of a startup working on an "immortality pill."
Comment · 9 years ago
I've personally gotten a lot of value out of the CSS-Tricks flexbox guide [0]. It's visual, and sufficiently comprehensive.
Comment · 10 years ago
A similar article about Hoffman was posted on HN in April, with quite a bit of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698
Comment · 10 years ago
Surely the projections cited in this article aren't accurate.
> Already operating in 191 countries and 34,000 cities, analysts at financial services company Cowen & Co predict that, by 2020, Airbnb hosts will be taking 500 million bookings a night, rising to a staggering one billion by 2025.
If the population of the world is about 8.2 billion in 2025, which is the UN's expectation [0], that'd mean one Airbnb booking a night per eight humans on Earth. Perhaps they mean yearly, not nightly?
[0] http://www.unfpa.org/news/world-population-increase-one-bill...
Comment · 11 years ago
Much of this article (and all of the images) was taken from a WWDC 2015 talk [0]. If you're interested in typography, that video is definitely worth a watch.
Comment · 11 years ago
This was also on the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10208792
Comment · 11 years ago
There are some wild 404 pages outside of campaigns, too: Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/404) has a pretty nutty one.
Comment · 11 years ago
A few years back, Bill Gates said that he'd be working in biology if he were still a teenager [0]. There's a lot of exciting work happening in the field, and if anyone finds this sort of thing particularly inspiring, I'd encourage them to read up on bioinformatics -- there's plenty of programming work to be done in the biosciences.
[0] http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biolo...
Comment · 11 years ago
In contrast, I believe that reversing aging would likely also improve a person's quality of death. Death by aging can be a horrifically prolonged and painful process. In the case of Alzheimer's, you slowly watch your mind and identity slip away. In the case of cancer, you may submit to vomit-inducing therapies to prolong your life; whether or not you do, you may end up dying slowly and painfully while bed-ridden and utterly exhausted. Spending years in a nursing home while someone else wipes your bottom isn't exactly a glamorous, graceful way to go. On the other hand, the "brutal" deaths you complain about involve what -- something between a fraction of a second and a few hours of physical pain? When my time comes, sign me up.
As an ancillary point, there is no such thing as "aging in good condition". Aging is the process by which your body gradually fails to function until it can't function at all. It can be better or worse, but not good.