mjac

Thank you! Native apps not released yet but you are welcome to try the web app at my.strengthlevel.com

I'm working on a workout API and native apps (iOS/Android) for Strength Level [1] as another interface for my.strengthlevel.com [2]. Strength Level helps you understand your relative strength - how strong you are for your bodyweight.

Using PHP Slim Framework, MySQL, and vanilla Swift/Java. Prioritizing reliability and efficient sync between local storage and server. Currently finalizing API endpoints and feature matching the web app. Next up is adding a subscription model.

It's challenging as:

- Users want to use the app offline which means we need to sync

- We have to match our existing features on [2] in the first version and evolve the API and database to support reliable sync

- Users want to also track their cardio too e.g. Running Level [3] and Rowing Level [4] but that will have to come out in a future version

[1] https://strengthlevel.com/

[2] https://my.strengthlevel.com/

[3] https://runninglevel.com/

[4] https://rowinglevel.com/

The Faber Book of Science by John Carey

I’m a professional HN lurker but I can’t not contribute this one. The book all scientists should have read and would love, but haven’t heard about…

“The editor of the internationally acclaimed Eyewitness to History now charts the development of modern science. In this first anthology of its kind, Carey chooses accounts by scientists themselves--astronomers and physicists, biologists, chemists, psychologists--that are both arrestingly written and clear. Contributors include Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Lewis Thomas, Rachel Carson, Sigmund Freud, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and scores of others.”

Hope you enjoy!

Thank you for the encouragement! Did you find any areas to improve?

The seed standards reference data is mainly from publicly available race data in CSV form and common running formulas used in the industry (e.g. Effective VO2 Max / VDOT). There are plenty of online calculators and literature (mostly based on Jack Daniels' Formula). However this is just a baseline and it'll be based on its own data set in the future (e.g. survey input).

Some links: Brian Mac - https://www.brianmac.co.uk/vo2max.htm Age grade tables - https://github.com/AlanLyttonJones/Age-Grade-Tables Jack Daniels' Running Formula - https://runsmartproject.com/calculator/ (and related book)

I built Running Level https://runninglevel.com/ recently along the same lines as my other site Strength Level https://strengthlevel.com/ but have only done a soft launch. Gyms are closed here in the UK so a lot of us are out running instead.

Running Level has running standards for your age/gender over many distances like 10k/marathon/mile. The calculator on the homepage helps you rate your running performance against other people your age/gender, predicts race performance and recommends some training times.

I was hoping to do a Show HN or Product Hunt but marketing has never been my strong suit. Hope someone likes it!

We would love to provide that kind of guidance. By training age, do you mean age of user?

Yes, so we have to say you are better than 75% of other users instead of 75% of humans. Do you have any advice in this area?

Understood, thanks for the explanation.

We really appreciate the positive feedback.

Good point with the back button. The original page was made in 2007 and the full page form submission could be refined to use an AJAX post.

Would it be possible to explain "you could remove the last result when an item is deleted from the page" a little further? Do you mean resetting the page back to its initial state?

Originally http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards.... (Starting Strength tables) but later refined with 500k+ user results.

What were you expecting to see? Could you explain further?

Yes, you are exactly right about the original source data. However, Strength Level has been around since 2007 and we use 500k+ user lifts to refine the estimations.

Thanks for the positive feedback. It would be great to monetize Strength Level, to fund further development and expand its capabilities. We have two ideas at the moment:

1. iPhone app - people want to rate lifts at the gym

2. Premium accounts - see workouts older than 6 months/personalised recommendations

The source code is very well commented, a high quality piece of engineering.

I like this a lot. Could we make it the default theme?

That's a great point. Photoshop has extensive capabilities for visual rearrangement and transformation. Once the core design is created it can be cut up and extended with further XHTML/CSS elements (minimally for consistency).

Quora does not compare with even basic designs found in CSS galleries (http://cssbeauty.com/). Most are graphic heavy and use intelligent slicing for fast, aesthetic experiences.

For rapid design, you can use the 960 grid system (http://960.gs/) to speed up mockups, then implement the layout on top of 960's positional CSS. I tried this for the first time with my new design (http://mjac.co.uk/) and I think it produced a significant improvement in aesthetics and organisation over my previous XHTML/CSS mockups and completely custom Photoshop layouts.

In the first year all of us do Computer Science (2 papers), Mathematics (1 paper), and a science subject (1 paper, I did Physics). It is predominantly theoretical (something I found hard to cope with):

1st year: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0809/part1a-cst.html

2nd year: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/part1b.html

3rd year: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/part2.html

Although I think there is far too much content to learn thoroughly in three years, it does provide a broad understanding of what there is to know. Does Oxford have online course material, I'd be interested to take a look? I expect the universities overlap a lot but there might be some worthwhile additions.

As a student at Cambridge, I doubt Oxford is "far" more theoretical. The London Universities like Imperial are also notable for focusing on theory over practice.

I think they assume we can learn practical skills on-the-fly and they are not as beneficial as a solid theoretical grounding.

These Oxford interview questions are more difficult than I expected, especially under Oxbridge interview conditions. Like mentioned above, they want to see how you think over what you already know.

Reading that letter makes me proud of the Security Group at Cambridge University. Ross Anderson took us for a couple of Security courses in second/third year Computer Science and was interesting, direct and completely no-nonsense. He emphasised that policy and ignorance were often the main causes of failures, especially with LAS, NHS centralisation (UK government projects). I find strong individuals like Anderson inspiring when they take on organisations who attack knowledge rather than being hands-on and fixing their systems.

The Security II course is especially relevant. I am not sure that everyone can access these resources but the lecture notes cover a variety of modern hardware approaches to security (including chip-and-pin). Try: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/SecurityII/

I highly recommend Anderson's Security Engineering, the first edition is available online: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

I went into the theatre not knowing what to expect. I left dumbstruck, somewhat in doubt of the world. What if I was three levels deep and this wasn't the real world? It was great seeing the viewers dazed, stepping tentatively towards the exit.

Many of these ideas were presented in The Matrix but the "idea" of n-deep illusions was central to Inception. I appreciated the time multiplication, even given the 20x fast brain function bodge.

Why were the acceleration changes only go one layer deep? Perhaps inner ear sensation (balance, acceleration) in the dreamer's world are the only modifiers. It doesn't matter, the construct produced intriguing new effects that I was pleased to experience.

We should be arguing about interesting ramifications. Personally I'd like to believe that Mal was correct and Cobb was dreaming all through the film.

The film reminds me of a couple of Red Dwarf books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Life (especially) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Human These are definitely worth a read if you are interested in science fiction.

That would be great.