ohmygodel

I am current on this research.

The group for anonymous communication in Dissent is formed using unspecified means. It could be everybody who signed up in the last month, obtained a credential from some authority, has a key within the web of trust for the group, etc.

Some of these methods obviously allow the adversary to create Sybils (aka sockpuppets). The ones that don't may not provide anonymity about who is in the group, but the protocol will provide anonymity for who said what during the group communication. This is still extremely valuable. Consider voting as an example: the group is known, but individual vote anonymity matters.

If the group formation mechanism does allow Sybils, that still doesn't violate anonymity. For a message from an honest member, the adversary cannot tell which honest member it came from. It also doesn't violate the accountability of the protocol - any disruption will be attributable to some Sybil, who will be punished.

For what it's worth, it occurred to me right away. If you spend any time learning about and solving continuous optimization problems, one of the first patterns you notice is the existence of criteria that narrow possible optima to a finite number of possible points. For example, using basic calculus on differentiable optimization functions these are the "critical points". In linear programming, we can consider only the vertices of the polytope defined by the constraints.

If such reasoning doesn't occur to you right away, you might also discover this fact by considering a candidate rectangle and considering how changing it slightly changes the discrepancy. A very simple kind of change would be one in which no points enter or leave the rectangle, which leads to this observation.

I'm so sorry. I was lucky to be able to spend some time with him (and you) at PETS08 in Leuven.

His arguments suggest that optimal nutrition is close to what we ate as hunter-gatherers. I wonder if Diamond believes in the paleo diet.

You need to divide by 3! and 2!. One way to look at it is that every selection of five from the 4M and 10F is equally likely. There are \binom{14}{5} (i.e. 14 choose 5) such selections. Of these, \binom{4}{3} * \binom{10}{2} have exactly 3M and 2F. Therefore, the probability is \binom{4}{3} * \binom{10}{2} / \binom{14}{5}, or (4 * 3 * 2 * 10 * 9) 5! / (3! 2! (14 * 13 * 12 * 11 * 10)) = 10 * 9/(13 * 11 * 7) = 0.08991...

P2P anonymization is tricky. Making it scalable means that each member of the network isn't aware of every other member, and therefore a small malicious set of peer may be able to "capture" the routes of nodes that only know them or rely on them to boostrap into the network. The most sophisticated current research proposals are probably ShadowWalker by Mittal and Borisov (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mittal2/www/shadowwalker-ccs09.pd) and Torsk by McLachlan et al. (www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/torsk-ccs.pdf). They are both certainly less vulnerable than MorphMix, which anyway is designed for high-latency communication.

I went specifically looking for this information a week ago when I was learning Python. It wasn't clear to me how a list was implemented, and in particular if random access and deletes were constant or linear time

I love this. It's an honest and unapologetic explanation of a parenting style that is not dominant in the US but has some real advantages. It teaches discipline and hard work, and it gets kids to acquire useful skills. Sure, it has its disadvantages, as noted by some commenters here. Let's not deny the obvious, though. It's no coincidence that they author was pushed insanely hard by her mother and ended up a professor at the top law school in the country.

Niche venues cater to specialists in an area. Even in specialized areas there is more output than an expert can keep up with, and these smaller venues generally perform valuable filtering as well.

"my brain hasn't collapsed from the inrush of poorly filtered information" Of course not. However, you are either wasting a ton of time or you are using some other indirect method to decide what papers are useful to read. I'd love to hear if you think your personal approach to filtering non-reviewed content is superior to relying on peer review.

"As a frequent reader of papers in CS I'm of the opinion that peer review is accomplishing very little outside of checking theoretical results with proofs that can be vetted."

As a frequent reader and reviewer of CS papers I totally disagree. Peer review helps narrow a huge incoming flood of new research into a smaller stream of results that are the most novel, important, and correct. Without explicit review, your options would be to either waste your time wading through the mess or use reviews from sources whose advice you consider on an ad hoc basis. I'm sure there are better systems that take advantage of the Internet, the wisdom of crowds, data aggregation and mining, etc. The current system of peer review does adequately perform a major service, though.

"the 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture is a very small evolutionary time step"

True, although those 10,000 (I've actually heard 20-40K) years are the most recent ones in our evolution and therefore have more direct bearing on our current state. In addition, humans experienced a population bottleneck around 60,000 that brought us down to 10-20K individuals. Since then, there have been repeated agricultural famines. These stresses should have favored people able to eat the grains that formed the basis of our diet.

First, I dispute that good-tasting foods all make you feel bad shortly afterwards. Just as one example, sugary foods make you release all kinds of happy chemicals as you eat it, and that high alone lasts for a while.

Second, simply eating any food AT ALL that keeps you feeling good all day probably increases your risk of cancer. Calorie restriction looks like it does increase our longevity in part due to a decreased risk of cancer.

OK, that is a valid data point. In my own experience, when I increased the amount of vegetables (mostly green vegetables) I was eating, I felt bad for weeks until I adjusted.

Thanks for the effort, but seems to be a pretty rough link blast. Maybe there are some diamonds in here, but many certainly miss the point.

"Weight Loss As the Paleo diet is by nature pretty low-carbohydrate": Paleo is not necessarily low-carb. You could eat squash, root vegetables, and fruit all day for nearly all your calories. I actually don't doubt that you can lose weight on the paleo diet, though. You can lose weight on almost any vaguely healthy diet.

"Cancer Patterns in Inuits" : Cancer has many other causes than diet, and this study in no way isolates diet as the factor in disease-patterns in Inuits.

"This William Lands paper": This solely studies omega-3/6 intake and health. Not the overall health effects of the paleo diet.

"Good Calories, Bad Calories" does have an explanation of why the medical establishment has made its recommendations. Still, it is written by one non-expert. Hardly enough to make radical lifestyle changes for.

"Dr Barry Groves" OK, this looks possibly legit.

I'm not going to try to figure out the rest, given the poor quality of the preceding.

I guess that could be the reason. It does strain credulity, though, that our bodily systems would be so brittle in this case. It reminds me instead of religious adherents, who, when faced with the misfortune of a fellow believer, blame the believer for not believing/praying/trying hard enough.

If you consume something out of the ordinary, your body is not used to digesting it. For example, the necessary enzymes and bacteria are not likely to be in large supply. Also, you may be hyper- or hypo- sensitive to neurotransmitters (like dopamine) that are released in reponse to the chemicals that are unusually present in the foreign food.

Cut out vegetables from your diet, for example, and you will experience serious intestinal distress when you reintroduce them.

"I'm slightly ranting but I think, food wise, the best way to judge whether or not something is good for you is quite simply, how it makes you feel immediately afterwards... I really think it's that simple."

Sorry, this really doesn't make sense to me. Do you think people eat fatty, sugary, salty foods because it makes them feel bad? No, it makes them feel great.

But, you may say, that is only temporary pleasure. They won't feel great a few hours later when their blood sugar crashes. One should, you could argue, look at how you feel all day.

But then why stop at one day? Why not look at your happiness over years. Maybe that diet that makes you feel good during the day slowly causes a disease, such as cancer, that REALLY makes you feel bad later. This could, for example, be the effect of eating a lot of red meat.

"Eat what makes you feel good" is simple and appealing advice. Like most complex issues, however, a simple and appealing solution is not likely to be the best.

I think it's irresponsible to recommend a diet to people that has little to no scientific support for the kinds of effects that you promise or imply: weight loss, improved physical and mental health, and longevity. In fact, some possible instantiations of the paleo diet are, I believe, currently considered unhealthy by the medical establishment, such as a diet high in saturated fats, cholesterol, and/or red meats.

I notice that none of your references have any serious qualifications to be giving nutritional advice. The most rigorously argued of your sources - "Good Calories, Bad Calories" - is written by a science journalist. The scientific establishment has spend decades and billions of dollars trying to understand nutrition, and these people think they can figure it out by thinking hard and reading some papers?

Morover, you can find equally convincing arguments, anecdotes, and "experts" for any of: vegetarianism, raw foodism, veganism, low-carb, etc. What makes the paleo diet different?

You can experiment with your own body all you want, but giving drastic dietary advice on such flimsy evidence seems pretty reckless.

I follow a paleo diet strictly on weekdays, and for probably 75% of my calories on weekends. I've been doing this for a few months. I'm basically doing this as an experiment - the argument that we should eat what we evolved eating is compelling as a general principle.

I haven't lost or gained weight. My workouts haven't been much worse or much better. I don't notice a difference in energy levels, although I find it harder to ignore hunger now. My major impressions are that a paleo diet is expensive and inconvenient.

This is just my experience. The scientific arguments that I've seen made follow the general pattern of this article: neolithic foods contain chemicals (e.g. lectins, phytates, etc.) that are bad for our bodies.

These kinds of arguments are extremely unconvincing. Digestion and metabolism involves thousands of chemicals and reactions. Trying to piece together how it works is important, but a couple isolated components are not nearly enough with which to make judgements for your health.

Arguments from personal experience are even worse. If you "feel better" on the diet, are you sure it's the diet? Is it the placebo effect? Is it the fact that you are likely eating more fiber and nutrients? Is it a difference in blood sugar levels that you notice? Even worse, is the advice to cut out foods, and then test how those foods make you feel when reintroduced. Any change can easily be interpreted negatively. Also, your body has adjusted to the new foods (which quite likely caused their own painful adjustment period).

Good arguments would make actual health claims, such as 1. The chance that you develop heart disease will fall. 2. The chance that you develop cancer will fall. 3. The diet will prevent some other diseases (e.g. diabetes). 4. Some specific symptoms from some specific diseases will lessen.

Currently, this whole fad seems like a big echo chamber of people seeing exactly what they want to see.