Techowl

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.

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.

[0] http://www.who.int/cardiovascular_diseases/en/

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."

[0] - https://www.buckinstitute.org/

I've personally gotten a lot of value out of the CSS-Tricks flexbox guide [0]. It's visual, and sufficiently comprehensive.

0 - https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

A similar article about Hoffman was posted on HN in April, with quite a bit of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698

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...

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.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=804

This was also on the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10208792

There are some wild 404 pages outside of campaigns, too: Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/404) has a pretty nutty one.

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...

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.

So, supposing for the sake of argument that scientists had discovered a way to allow humans to live healthily and happily until the age 200, how would your position change? Surely you wouldn't want to murder everyone at the arbitrary age of 80, because those eighty-year-olds are so darn 'ignorant' and incapable of change?

From there I ask: how great or small is the moral difference between preventing such technologies from coming to fruition, and killing people off once those technologies have been developed?

Antibiotics are a Good Thing. So is having doctors wash their hands. If we can use science to buy some more time for humans to live, all the better. I know it's hard to believe, but maybe not having people literally lose their minds and decay to the point of death between ages 70-100 would be kind of nice.

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I'm a full-stack junior web developer, more experienced in the front-end but equally excited to work the back-end. I have a genuine aptitude and love for code, and would be thrilled for the opportunity to demonstrate that by completing any given exercise, sample project, or contract job. My portfolio is at www.danielkimbel.com, and my GitHub is at www.github.com/techowl. I also love learning new technologies, and have most recently been playing with famo.us.

There are a lot of ethical arguments happening in this thread, and I'm concerned that most of them are missing the point. They tend to center on the idea that these technologies will help the wealthy, while leaving most of the world to suffer.

I'd love to see Google work on initiatives to give the world's poor access to clean water and basic healthcare. Those are awesome causes -- maybe the world's most awesome. But if we categorize pressing third-world health issues as the World's Most Awesome Cause, well, aren't age-related diseases the World's Second Most Awesome Cause?

We should for sure allocate more resources to the World's Most Awesome Cause. But why are people attacking funding for the World's Second Most Awesome Cause? Convince people not to buy top-tier smartphones, or expensive cars, or big houses, and donate to charity instead. But don't try to convince people to die of heart disease. Even if this new Google initiative isn't the absolutely most optimal way to spend money to serve humanity, it's pretty high up on the list.

Please remember that about two-thirds of all deaths world-wide are caused by aging [1]. It isn't just the elite who are getting heart attacks, and long-term, I'd be shocked if it were only the elite who were receiving effective treatments to prevent them.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

Edit: formatting.

Aubrey's reaction piece is listed on the front page of Time's website, and can be seen here: http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/18/finally-the-war-on-aging-ha...

Affording proper care is definitely a problem, but the diseases of aging are the greatest causes of death globally, not infectious diseases or other health problems [1]. Taking care of diseases like malaria is unquestionably a noble and important task, but if we're talking about the world as a whole, aging is actually the greatest burden on health right now. Cardiovascular problems in particular are a serious problem worldwide [2].

1 - http://who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/ 2 - http://www.who.int/cardiovascular_diseases/publications/glob... There are tons of statistics at http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.CODWORLD?lang=en for the full picture.