meursault334

I think this is likely the explanation. There isn't a food that "flips it on" it's always been on in some people and in others they are either highly resistant to this process or it is age-dependent. Fortunately the solution is to not eat the foods that this process depends on. I think this an important point because you can either wait for therapies that target these processes or simply stop eating crap and accept that some people are more able to eat crap than you are.

Since I've cut processed food and bread entirely out of my diet I've lost a lot of weight pretty effortlessly. I don't think this experience is unique. I also know people that can eat lots of these foods without weight gain.

Massively obese people have "slow metabolisms" after losing large amounts of weight. This change in their metabolism is independent of changes in lean mass or body composition[0]. This makes reaching a normal weight much much harder for them than for people who are a normal weight to stay at a normal weight.

Do you really think that 1/3 of the population is "weak-willed" or has other moral failings that means that their problem is not worthy of spending public money on? Solving the obesity epidemic is much harder than people simply becoming "better" or "choosing" to stop being obese. If this were the case less than 5% of the population would be obese.

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3387402/

The argument that we could end artificial trans fat with tons of sugar is a straw man. The most sensible replacement which in most cases only affects the cost and shelf-life of food is either healthy or less-damaging fats.

Banning trans fat may be bad for orangutans but it's good for consumers' health.

It's pretty well documented that over the counter pain killers such as acetaminophen, aspirin, and ibuprofen can have long term negative consequences with long term use. Allergy meds appear to be joining this group. In many cases the threshold for harm is fairly low in terms of lifetime cumulative dose. In some cases there are long-term benefits to these drugs(aspirin for instance) but there are definitely downsides. That isn't to say that pursuing alternative treatments to colds and allergies makes sense.

This explains a lot. Every time I use my car stereo to play music from my iPhone I wonder if any decision maker at Ford tried to use the entertainment system for its intended purpose.

Do you know the source of this? I tried and failed to locate it. I would be really interested to watch this talk.

As the other poster indicated this sense of being detached can occur in other settings where drugs are not present.

When I walked the Camino de Santiago, I felt a major difference in interaction with other people and detached from the rest of the world. At least for me the experience gave me a megadose of a kind of empathy for other people I hadn't often experienced before. This combined with the fact of taking off each day not knowing where you would stay or what your sleeping conditions would be created a powerful sense of detachment from the cares of the "real" world.

I'm really glad to hear this. I have been loving Firebase for the app I'm making but one of the components has to run in C# and talking to Firebase from the C# app was much more painful than the other Firebase portions of the application.

This is amazing! I wonder how well distance accuracy would compare to something like the structure.io sensor attachment (same as in project ATAP). I wonder if there are other applications to this more coarse/less accurate depth information.

The worst aspect of this change for me is the knowledge that because of my sub-500 status I am not even allowed to see pending comments. I am cut off from the full discourse.

PG indicated that he might add show pending/dead comment buttons so maybe that concern will be alleviated.

I was driving back from meeting with my co-founder so came late to the party. I posted then deleted this in the old thread.

As a long time lurker and reader of HN I really hope that you reconsider this change. I made an account just to explain why I dread the impact of this change on the quality, openness, and character of discourse at HN.

Put bluntly this change inspires a visceral feeling of loss and disappointment in me. I have viewed HN as a community where anyone can participate fully if they have something useful to say. This change feels like it will destroy this character of HN and turn it into a system where elites will have all the knowledge of a discussion and the rest of us will not. They will be able to incorporate ideas into their own posts before others can and can choose which ideas get general airtime. Particularly in low traffic stories this feels unjust and noninclusive.

I really enjoy reading the comment threads at HN and some of the best comments come as replies to comments that are unlikely to get endorsed in this system. This is because this system contains powerful disincentives for approving anything other than comments that will universally be viewed as high quality. If you approve enough comments that are viewed as low quality by moderators you will lose your ability to even view non approved comments and therefore your ability as an elite to fully participate in discourse at HN.

When this goes live hopefully people will be very very liberal with approving comments and people will do the public service of approving most comments in a pending global queue quickly. For me it will be very sad that I cannot read the lone, often very informative, comment to a story that will never make it to the front page but that nonetheless I and other lurkers want to see any response at all to the story. I am willing to read the trolls if I am allowed to read those who will be neglected by +1000 karma users.