frankc

I agree with you as it pertains to stackoverflow. I vote to close non-technical stuff all the time there I appreciate that is kept technical q/a. I do not agree about programmers. This particular question was long-winded but it boils down to "What are effective strategies for countering analysis-paralysis"? If that is not a relevant question for programmers than I don't what is. I'd rather just ignore that particular stackexchange and stick to stackoverflow then.

That's exactly my point. I understand why this is not right for stackoverflow; that is for technical question and answer. But isn't this kind of question exactly the point of programmers stackexchange? How to overcome analysis paralysis is not relevant to programmers? Insanity.

The moderation on programmers.stackexchange.com is completely overbearing. How can a question about analysis paralysis be closed for off-topic? If stackoverflow is for technical question/answer, what is the point the linked stackexchange if not for discussion of a common programmer problem like this? I see stuff like this closed all time time and it's really annoying.

There is also plenty of research that shows once your rewards are extrinsic instead of intrinsic, you do not enjoy the activity as much. That means once it's a job instead done for the sheer enjoyment, it stops becoming enjoyable.

I think this presents a false dichotomy because it is possible to bring in outside support to develop areas of your organization without changing the leaders of those organizational areas. This is one of the rare times where business consulting is not a scam. You have to be careful because you don't want some junior consultant, who is really a fresh MBA with no real world experience, coming in and reading you things from his textbook. But if you get real seasoned consultants with actual industry experience, you will get the benefit of that real expertise without losing the overall organizational expertise, loyalty and trust you have in your inexperienced friend.

Not in the way you think it is. It's true that if you gain weight then you must have consumed more calories than you burned. It is not true that if you consume more calories than you burn that you will gain weight. This is not a closed system. You could literally poop out the difference.

As far as it goes, it is a useless statement anyway. The point of calories in/calories out rhetoric is not about the physics; it's about how animals regulate their weight. You could make the same case that body temperature is about heat in/heat out but that would be missing the point of how humans regulate body temperature. The criticism of calories in/calories out is in this vein. Do you think you control your body temperature by consciously monitoring heat transfer? Then what makes you thinks complex animals control their body weight and composition by consciously controlling their calorie usage and intake?

Have you done the same for every study that points to calories in/calories out? In fact, there aren't many such studies actually. Somehow this was given the benefit of being the null hypothesis, which is an underserved benefit in my opinion and many others including Taubes. One of the other things he does in GCBC is go through the anthropological evidence as well. We know quite well that our ancestors ate a very high fat/low carv diet because they mainly ate the organ meat. I don't think that is actually in dispute. Its also part of the foundation of the whole paleo/primal movement.

At the end of the day, Taubes might be wrong about some or all of what he thinks. But the reason why he is generally well liked on HN, a community of very smart, very analytical people, is because Taubes is highly analytical and highly rigorous in his approach. This isn't some woo-woo magic stuff. I've never met a more methodically and rigorously researched book than GCBC. I can't review every study he cites because that would take 5 years at least.

Every study I have ever seen that put low carb diets head to head with other diets result in at worst, equivalent weight loss and usually more weight loss, with better other bioindicaters. Unfortunately many of these studies are brain dead in that they only weight body weight and not body composition, but given that other studies have shown that high protein diets lead to better muscle preservation, and a low-carb diet is generally higher protein than a low-calorie diet, I would bet money that even in studies where low-carb diets produce equivalent weight loss they have produced superior fat loss and superior muscle preservation.

Part of the point here is that you don't know you daily caloric burn. It's not even possible to measure the calories in the food you eat precisely enough so that you could actually maintain weight homeostasis by literally counting calories. And if you get it wrong by even 20 calories a day? In 20 years you will gain over 40 pounds, by the calories in/calories out way of thinking. Clearly there must be some homeostatic mechanism controlling the weight in humans and other animals in the same way that homeostatic mechanisms control your body temperature. The Taubes argument in a nutshell is that excess carb consumption, especially fructose because of how it causes fatty liver issues, throws that homeostasis out of whack.

that's not quite true. He implicates sugar more than anything as well, and has come around to that more and more over time. His next book is going to be about sugar. Part of the thinking is that while fructose may be causing a lot of problems, the fructose/glucose combination may be especially bad.

I'm not sure why you would say not Taubes. The reason people like him is because of how relentless he is in quoting real studies and interviewing the actual authors of those studies. There are like 200 pages of notes in the back of GCBC.

This is being wildly overinterpreted. It could just as well mean that the FBI is investigating CarrierIQ for misconduct. You can't FOIA this stuff during an active investigation for obvious reasons. I'm not saying this is necessarrily what's going on, but we shouldn't be jumping to the worst conclusions either.

Thanks, this is what I was looking for. I understand completely that ggplot2 is a much higher level abstraction of graphics. I want to build my own abstractions from first principles, but though I have a lot of programming experience, I have essentially zero experience with programming graphics from the ground up. It sounds like this will be a good place to start.

Could anyone recommend something similar for 2D programming in opengl, or anything else, or would that be covered in this tutorial? I'm mostly interested in building custom data visualizations beyond what is offered in the kind of visualization libraries I use like ggplot2.

Not always appropriate, but what about simply not using proper sentances. What would be the implications of using this kind of form:

Directories scanned: %g

Files found: %g, Directories with files: %g

I see this a number of posts here arguing for/agaist this with an unsaid dichotomy where the choices are

1) don't critisize, create instead 2) Criticism is good, even if is kind of mean.

But I think this a false dichotomy. Words and tone do matter. If you put the object of your criticism in a defensive position, you are unlikely to effect any change at all. This is not some new insight; it's been well understood at the very least since Dale Carnegie. You might acheive the goal of making yourself feel good, but then that certainly isn't worthy of any external respect.

What's the difference between: 1) You app is ugly and it fucking sucks. If you used abc to do xyz, at least I wouldn't be vomitting.

and

2)Nice effort on your app. You might consider using abc to do xyz. It might improve the aesthetics and usability some.

Some might say it says effectively the same thing, but the there is a world of difference in the way the reader reacts to those statements.

This actually flys in the face of my recent published research, which recommends low-glycemic impact diets that do not count calories. I largely agree with you that aerobic exercise is overrated for weight loss, but we should be explicit in that the goal is not to lose any kind of body mass, but to lose fat. The best ways to maintain muscle mass while losing body weight is to lift weights and and eat adequite protein (also backed by up by research, though I don't have the links handy). One of the nice features of low-glycemic diets, like the Atkins diet, is that you get a lot of protein and thus maintain more muscle mass.

It renders a lot faster if you change the x11 type type to Xlib, e.g. X11(type="Xlib") before displaying the plot.

My favorite programming question to ask is: Write a function that given an integer n returns the number 1 to n in random order

I find this is a good mix of not too trivial but not overwhelming, I don't expect people to come up with the fastest possible algorithm on the spot. If they code the naive solution, that's OK if it makes sense and they can describe the performance characteristics. Then we'll talk over the algorithm and I lead them to something better and see how the conversation develops.

Solid state drives can boost boot time quite a bit, and there are plenty of metrics online to prove it. I suppose a bios upgrade could improve the time it takes to go from POST to the intial OS bootstrapping, but once you get to the OS loading, I don't see where the bios can make a difference? The OS load time seems to be the biggest bottleneck to me, which is where the solid state fast access times get their big wins.

It's not that it isn't interesting or creative (at times). It's that there isn't much social redeeming value. You might as well be a professional poker player, except your are hated instead of admired. Now that the status is gone, it really hits you that you are pretty much a leech on society. I say that as someone who works in this industry and has thought often about an exit strategy, but the money is still too good be to justify a the risk of a startup.

There is actually rseek.org just for this purpose.

This is quite the definition of "unselfish". When I think unselfish, I think of the guy who steps in to help you out with something and doesn't ask for any credit or imply a quid pro quo. I don't think of glory hogs who go out of their way to make a spectacle of their work ethic.