When I ran the numbers, I came up with a change from 50% to 55% on my odds of surviving to the year 2100. It's definitely not much, but I deemed it worthwhile. It's also substantially more than the gain I would get if I were to divert that money towards a charity like the SENS organization, even though donating to SENS would almost certainly be a higher global optimum.

No, I don't have the previous calculations around anymore. I'll probably be redoing them in the next couple of years to make sure it's still worthwhile.

The real answer is: Whatever you can get yourself to do regularly.

If you don't exercise regularly, deciding on a sport is like a picking a programming language before you've learned even one of them. There is no one-size-fits-all sport or exercise. It really depends on your interests, physical abilities, social circle, the weather, what's near you, etc. This discussion might help give people ideas, but so could a list of sports. The most important thing is to get out there and do something.

Also, your quoted example sounds like a just-so story. I thought bowling and football were popular because they're an excuse to drink with friends.

Apparently SSL v2 is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, but it's only used by obsolete browsers (IE v6) and it can't leak your data if you don't use it. So this particular vulnerability is not one I personally need to worry about, but secure servers are supposed to have SSL v2 disabled - and if it isn't, it generally means that the people who set up the server either don't know what they're doing or don't care.

I see, that makes sense, but I think that you might be better off with a hybrid approach: build an index first, and do real-time search on all files that have been changed, and thus haven't been [re-]indexed yet. I'm not sure if any of the existing systems do that, but it's worth checking out. Of course, if your codebase is relatively small, performance won't be much of a problem...

Persistent dry eyes is probably the most significant risk. Sounds minor, but isn't.

I defy your assertion that both societies are similarly happy. Unless the telepath society is extremely accepting of fringe thoughts, it's going to be worse. Knowing that others will read your thoughts and judge you for them causes you to censor yourself. But at that point, it's already too late. People will know that you thought of something objectionable and suppressed it out of fear of judgement.

Really though, the two options are silly. Ems allow for so many more possibilities. A society in which people could voluntarily expose their thoughts would have quite a few advantages. Ditto for a society with perfect (optional, voluntary) lie detection.

Do you have an Amazon wish list? You are awesome.

My co-founder and I launched Floobits, a tool for remote pair programming. We'd been soft-launched and were slowly growing through word of mouth, but we hadn't tried to get publicity or told the world that we're a Y Combinator startup.

We got coverage on:

• Hacker News
• TechCrunch
• Y Combinator blog

...and a couple other places I've forgotten about.

I also wrote an insubstantial post about getting into YC. It doesn't contain any special hints, just a summary of the journey so far.

Demo day is next week, so maybe I should have waited to post in this thread. :)

This sounds like simple confirmation bias to me.

The number of times something interesting happens is probably much lower than the number of times something un-interesting happens. But the former are the only ones you notice, because they are interesting.