wdewind

I used to believe this myself, mostly because I didn't have a strong CS background and was still successful at carrying out software projects at a relatively high level.

The truth is, as I learned more CS I learned that these things are actually pretty crucial. Not necessarily for executing one single project, but for building a large system that scales reasonably? Absolutely. I spent years reinventing the wheel of basic data structures and algos simply because I did not know them or how to use them.

Bottom line: I would not want to work with the me of 5 years ago because I wrote shitty code while proudly proclaiming that CS was theoretical bullshit that didn't matter in web development, and I think many people who make these types of claims really just don't understand how applicable a good CS foundation is.

I'd agree that ideally you want some kind of work sample as well. Either an OS contribution, github or even small project written specifically for the interview. You can't ask someone to write enough code on an interview that you really see what happens when they have to structure a real project (ie: thousands of lines) or work within a real system (ie: millions of lines). This is where CS foundations in interviews have their relevancy.

The idea that you can isolate it down to fat vs. carbs is "not even wrong." It doesn't ask the right questions, and ignores many other confounding factors. I don't really want to keep restating this point.

There are healthy high fat diets. There are healthy low fat diets.

> data showing a correlation between doctors advocating low fat/high carb and obesity in America

No there isn't because no doctor advocates that without the other nuances I provided in my post. I still feel like you are ignoring my posts, because my last post was literally entirely devoted to addressing this nuance. The simple fact is that there is not a large group of people eating according to the medical communities recommendations who are obese. The rise of obesity in America is people largely ignoring medical recommendations. Yes, low fat was in fad for a while, but there is plenty of evidence that a low fat diet can be healthy, and that a high fat diet can be healthy, so, as I've repeatedly said, it depends.

> I think the one point we do agree on is that this is a complex issue.

100%

> But it's quite obvious that the advice doctors have been giving for the past few decades has not had the intended effect.

When you radically simplify their advice, sure. When you actually follow what is recommended, no not really.

> This is the last comment that I will make... I don't want to offend anybody.

No offense taken, I greatly appreciate the conversation and apologize if I've implied otherwise.

> Remember: Fat+Carbs, not just carbs, causes insulin resistance and leads to type 2 diabetes. If you eliminate the fat your diabetes will improve. If you eliminate the carbs your diabetes will also improve... but you will reduce your energy levels by forcing your body into ketosis and greatly increase your odds of high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, digestive problems and more.

I would totally agree except that all of the things you mentioned as bad effects of a ketogenic diet are well studied bad effects of moderate fat moderate carb diet, not a high fat low carb (ie: keto) diet. I'm not here to argue for keto, just to say that there are many roads to the same place. A vegan diet may even be the best one for the most people, but if you believe that science is the best way to understand this stuff (and I do) then there isn't science to support that position.

You've offered introducing fats as a way to stave off hunger (aka increasing satiety) but introducing fats are far from the only way to increase satiety. Introducing fiber, for instance, is another way.

You also seem to be in favor of a ketogenic diet. Let me say that I totally believe that a keto diet is a great way to eat healthily and boost compliance for some people. Others have a really hard time tolerating large amounts of fat, and so we still need to find alternative solutions for them.

I agree that simply telling people to have more willpower is not the solution, but I think it's important to recognize that the diet is not causing physiological damage to the vast majority of people (it's not the insulin spike in and of itself that causes damage, it's what happens after that, ie: more food intake). So maybe we can attack this from the pure will power front and leave the diet alone (or maybe not, but let's be deliberate about what we are doing).

Regardless, the UofM study is heavily discredited and I still maintain that it is not relevant to what you are arguing either way: the study is designed to study extreme starvation and famine. Brink of death type stuff. Obese people who feel hungry are not that. We know this because if you don't feed them they don't die.

FWIW I actually have read/watched all the links you've posted (I had before this conversation as they are all relatively well known), and I still hold by all my points.

I totally agree that the nutritional "science" community is filled with snakeoil salesmen and that you have to careful.

But also, note that there is a difference between increasing your fat consumption absent of any other changes to your diet, and moving to a diet based mostly on fats, and that those changes have been pretty well described by me, to you, in our previous posts. I would agree that if you make no other changes, for the every day person increasing fat is bad. But literally no one is telling you to do that. NO ONE.

Let me repeat: There are zero (0) medical professionals advocating for a high sugar diet. The "high carb" part of the recommended diet is meant to come from vegetables and whole grains (which contain a fair amount of fiber).

There isn't any evidence I'm aware of showing people eating a calorically balanced, low fat, high carb, low sugar, moderate fiber, micronutritionally balanced diet and having diabetes. I understand that's more complex that saying "low fat/high carb" but again, there aren't doctors out there recommending cutting out fats and subsisting on sugar. So yes, it's a complete and total straw man, but when you only consider large macronutrient groups and ignore the rest of nutrition it's easy to see why that seems ignorable.

This is a nice digest of a lot of the science around fats, that while somewhat biased, is a pretty good summary and includes links to studies should you want to dig deeper.

There is basically no science that allows you to state this confidently.

> The fact is: fat tastes good. Nobody want's to give up bacon and cheese so we keep looking for ways to say it is "OK". Big Pharma really wants you to keep eating your fats too. They make billions of dollars a year selling people drugs to offset their lack of will power.

It's been repeatedly shown that basically all fats, even the once thought of as "bad" like saturated fats, do not clog arteries (or raise cholesterol, while we are here) when not in the presence of caloric surplus. I don't follow it, but the success many have had with the keto diet is one great example of this. It's just not as simple as you are saying.

No I'm asserting that what happens to people's bodies at 4% body fat when in severe caloric restriction is very different than what happens to people's bodies at 40% body fat with severe caloric restriction, and so we can't apply the metabolic damage/starvation models to fat people. Fat people just need to eat less, and the issue basically comes down to compliance. How do we get people to stay on a healthy diet long term?

> do fat people get hungry? If they do, why?

Because, as even you have shown, hunger is not a reflection of your bodies actual caloric needs, it's hugely a reflection of blood sugar levels, among other htings. Given enough time (in the order of magnitude of minutes to hours) in an obese but otherwise healthy person fats will be broken down and blood glucose will increase and hunger will decrease. It's getting through that period that is a mental compliance issue, but not otherwise physiologically challenging.

> The failure rate is astronomical

Again, this is a compliance issue. People absolutely lose weight on caloric restriction, and starvation issues like low metabolism do not become an issue until you are very low body fat. You simply do not see obese people going into so-called "starvation mode." In fact there are a few cases, though admittedly not many, of obese people that abstain entirely from eating for months at a time without long term "metabolic damage."

> People can totally abstain from food for very long periods of time (depending on body fat), with very little hunger.

I think we basically agree, then, that it's mostly a compliance issue and not an issue of caloric restriction working or not, and also that hunger is not a reflection of the body's actual metabolic state (especially in obese people).

> Fat people can get energy from fat stores, just not in the way we are typically told.

Fat people get energy from fat stores in the same way skinny people do. Very skinny people on severe caloric restriction are not a good model for the general population.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17927751 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11157352

So while you actually might be right, that in many cases a low fat vegan diet helps T2 diabetes, it's only one of many strategies to arrive at a suitable diet.

No dude, you are ignoring the fact that these people did not have ample fat stores. It is completely unreasonable to expect that obese people would behave the same while restricting calories than people who are already borderline starving (4% BF). These aren't effects of caloric intake restriction, they are effects of caloric restriction in general, which is a state obese people are not, have not been in for years and will not be in for years.

> One major problem is that the basal metabolic rate does not stay stable. Decreased caloric intake can decrease basal metabolic rate by up to 40 percent

This is basically unrelated to your statements about insulin though, so don't conflate the two. This statement does not support the idea that obese people cannot harvest energy from their fat stores, it supports the idea that you get less energy output from less energy input which is almost tautologically true.

I don't think there is anyone recommending reducing fats and calories as the only thing. Both of those are positive things to do to your diet, but if taken while ignoring the rest of the actual "standard guidelines" (which include eating more fiber and fruits and veggies), then yes, you are basically simply reducing calories (which is good) and increasing glycemic index (which is bad, for some).

> In short, when people become overweight, which is a progressive condition of insulin resistance that grows slowly over time, or in other words and emergent hormonal dysfunction because of diet, they cannot "eat less and move more."

I don't believe this is true but would be interested in seeing a study.

> To that extent it is not self-inflicted especially since millions of Americans are doing exactly that as told by their doctors and it is having no effect...The only way to really change body composition long-term, is to change diet in a way that is at odds with what doctors learned twenty years ago in the two days they studied nutrition in medical school, which, as it turns out, is wrong.

People have success with every kind of diet program, and it's a bit of a strawman to argue that the medical profession is advocating a diet that is only low in fat, but still high in sugar (which is what produces the results you're talking about). In fact, millions of Americans are following only a small portion of their doctors' advice (ie: lowering fats) which has the effect of lowering satiety, increasing overall glycemic index of their consumption (while ignoring the advice that they should eat more fiber and less sugar). There is no doctor out there recommending that as long as you eliminate bacon you can drink all the gatorade you want.

Would you mind sharing your precommit hook? We have a simple one that prevents console.log etc., but nothing super fancy.

> Our goal is not to simulate day-to-day software development

You don't mean at all, you mean in its entirety (so you are leaving out the aspects you are less interested in, like reading stack overflow, and emphasizing the aspects you are more interested in, like reasoning about data structures). I think a lot of people on HN are getting hung up on that sentence, honestly. Thanks for the guide, though, considering something similar for Justworks.

What makes you think they are asking questions they know don't really relate to the sorts of problems you have to solve?

That being said, I'd also add that most values have those implicitly baked in. For instance, if you do say you value integrity, you're saying you're devaluing growth/money for the value/benefit of integrity.

Plus, there's nothing that stops them from adding a personal cover letter to this.

There are ways to temporarily spike muscle synthesis, and one of them is eating a protein rich meal. This specific mechanism has a refractory period in the order of magnitude of hours. Intermittent fasting robs you of the ability to spike muscle synthesis as many times per day as you could otherwise.

This effect is not massive. Your body is pretty good at optimizing this stuff. But when you are cutting, in particular, or trying to bulk without putting on significant fact, these minor optimizations can add up.

Put another way: tons of stuff in prod dev gets done without p-values entirely because it's the first time you have any data at all about something. I'm questioning whether this is hugely valuable and obviously better than using my intuition or not, since we really don't have a good understanding of the baseline.