wdewind

Sorry I think we agree! My point is it is a psychological issue. All things being equal (calories, nutrients etc.) the speed/magnitude of the insulin response is not important for overall health (in the non-diabetic population). The study mentions things like:

> postmeal blood glucose and its long-term metabolic consequences.

and the point is there aren't long term metabolic consequences.

> but if we can put a finger on exactly what causes people to put on a few pounds it would be a significant advance in science that would affect billions of people

I totally agree! We know it's not the insulin response in and of itself that is causing weight gain, it's the subsequent increased caloric intake, so my point is by being deliberate about what we are studying we can get better results. I'm not saying we don't need to study the psychology of eating, definitely the opposite! That's really what we need to focus on, and stop worrying about the "metabolic consequences" of the insulin response.

This is a great study, for nutritional science I am very impressed with the methodology. It's very large and very thorough. It should be heavily noted that the goal of the study is not to create algorithms for healthy people, but for diabetic and pre-diabetic populations.

The only well supported long term consequences of post-prandial high glycemic response in otherwise healthy people is an increased psychological urge to eat. Outside of that, the importance of insulin levels in healthy people is extremely overhyped. These machine learning algorithms are cool, and may be useful for diabetic people, but for the general population monitoring your insulin levels is a waste of time.

Thanks for a very well thought out reply.

> By contrast, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are rather simpler, and even geothermal is fairly straightforward.

My understanding is scaling these technologies is where the complexity may lie, and that it would so extremely difficult to support the growing energy needs of the world's population using these technologies that they aren't really even an option. I'd like to be wrong. Am I?

I generally agree, but in the case of the environment we're not going to have clear data on what to do. How are you comparing the risk of building nuclear to the risk of not building nuclear? It's a very difficult thing to do.

It's worth noting that, afaik, none of the reactors that have failed have been built using the "newest generation" of reactors, which are supposed to be much safer. This is a double edged sword, of course, because that also means they haven't been tested nearly as long. But I don't think the math to scaling nuclear power is as simple as we've fucked up 4/500 times, just extrapolate the numerator and denominator and you've got it. As we get more experienced with the technology we'll get better. And any conversation about the safety of nuclear needs to contain the relative risk of not using nuclear.

> More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced.

Embracing those limits requires, as far as I can tell, eugenic-style control over breeding. Personally I'd rather the human race burns itself out than go down that path.

> Facebook, however, has been demonstrably successful since going public

Yes but you're ignoring that it took more than a year for FB to get back up to its IPO price after going public

Interesting, I had never heard of that.

> Garbage cans are hard to find too and everyone just carries their trash with them.

I was told this is a relic of the sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway.

Definitely true, and many times there are clauses preventing you from selling to a 3rd party before IPO anyway.

Mostly true but sometimes you can sell on a secondary market or through a tender offer.

> Did it not ring a bell that a company that can't give him cash but can instead offer compensation out of thin air in the form of options is in trouble?

This is not an accurate heuristic for "how good is a company doing." There are many legitimate reasons you'd want to pay someone in stock instead of cash.

> And then there are the golden handcuffs were an employee is scared to leave because their options have too high a fair market value and their tax costs would be considerable.

This is definitely something to consider. If your options agreement allows you to early exercise you can avoid all of the tax penalty and remove the golden handcuffs if you exercise immediately (before you have realized a gain) and file your 83-b with the IRS. If it doesn't allow early exercise you probably don't want anything to do with it.

> I recommend joining young companies that are willing to pay you a lot of cash for your exceptional ability and experience (execution is critical at this stage across the entire company from engineering to sales) and maybe take it easy on the option grants. Some stock is fun but don't count on getting rich on it.

I'd recommend learning as much about business as possible, and consider working at a startup an investment, and you an investor. If you aren't comfortable investing then you shouldn't be working in startups. There is basically no reason to work at a startup if you aren't favoring the equity ($, work-life balance, perks etc. are all going to be better at BigCo).

Yeah, that's a fair point, actually.

I don't think that actually speaks against the story, though. The story is: we started small to do our own thing, then a national review blew us up and we couldn't handle the stress in order to scale the business. A lot of the yelp reviews sound like scaling issues, especially since the great reviews are interspersed with the bad: they were capable of delivering great experiences just not consistently.

I think when you are saying "early" employees are getting screwed you have to be really specific. Joining Box etc. a few months before an IPO is not an early employee. You're joining at a point where the company is pretty thoroughly derisked, so you're taking very little personal risk yourself. You're probably not taking a pay cut (may even be getting a raise). So yeah: don't join a company 6 years in, get your ~10k shares with a price of $12 and a projected IPO price of $16 and expect to get rich.

Yeah I mean it really depends on where you are applying to work. If you are trying to join as a senior member of an organization negotiations have way fewer rules, but if you are applying to Google etc. below a level 4 position it seems pretty reasonable to not need to assert your individuality as an engineer by disrupting the system since you'll be ending up with a standard package anyway. Sometimes you just need to learn how that game is played and play it instead of changing it.

The actual dollar value is usually literally zero sum, but if you have a family and need a $200k salary with specific benefits as a hard requirement it's going to be helpful to get that out of the way up front. On the same note, if you want a $200k salary and only make $180k it can be useful to say you are currently making $200k. So again, this moment can be advantageous to both parties.

I guess you're right, that does happen sometimes. In those cases you also shouldn't be mad, though, because they just gave you a crystal clear sign they aren't worth working for.

Don't be so literal about it. I used to get defensive about that question too, but the truth is they aren't asking you how much you are making, they are asking you to start the salary negotiation so they can get a feel for what it's going to take to hire you and describe you adequately to a hiring manager. It's just an opportunity for you both to ballpark the situation and eject early if there's going to be a wide disagreement about comp. It can be equally advantageous to both parties if you use it properly.

> something better than PGP

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of the issues are in implementing PGP in email, not in the cryptography itself. If you made a messaging app that automatically used best practices PGP without any of the email holes/workflow issues, would there still be something significantly better for data at rest?

Pretty different from what? Afghanistan in the 70s/80s was almost exactly this: a destabilized national government, insurgent forces taking and holding territory, global powers being dragged into it. The only differences are the rhetoric.

Edit: here, this may be a link that helps you understand more of the history of the region as well as the context for the rise of AQ/ISIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maktab_al-Khidamat

I'm not really sure how you can read the history of the organization and come up with that. al-Tawid was founded at around the same time as al Qaeda (within a few years), and they merged to become al Qaeda in Iraq and then ISIS/ISIL.

In some ways the person I was responding to was right because, between Osama and al Zarqawi, Osama was definitely the moderate. But you're talking about wanting to kill everyone who isn't a muslim vs. everyone who isn't sunni muslim.

The idea that ISIS is something fundamentally different is driven by the media. It's sort of how DARE tries to scare parents by saying "This generation is smoking some really crazy stuff you're not familiar with!"

> I find Daesh far scarier than other Islamic fundamentalist movements because their techniques are more sophisticated and their aim is much higher.

Daesh are basically the same people with the same goals as the other Islamic fundamentalist movements you are familiar with. Read the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...

I think the reason no one has nailed the distributed list making part is because that's basically email, which it's really hard to improve substantially on, it turns out.

Yep, totally agree with all this! Just pointing out that the low blood sugar in and of itself is probably not a huge deal from a health perspective, just the bad decision that comes from it.

> If you plot the blood sugar concentration of the person consuming a solid piece of fruit you see a nice curve where the levels rise, peak, and non-violently fall.

There's nothing wrong with this except that it probably makes you feel more hungry and eat more. But the blood sugar surge isn't really unhealthy in normal people, it's usually the subsequent behavioral impact (the low that makes you feel hungry) that causes the real harm (ie: the total sugar matters more directly than the glycemic index).

> Finance remains the most heavily regulated industry, as it has for decades.

I'm not trying to be pedantic if you were just speaking in hyperbole, but I'm curious on the methodology for determining that.

I was surprised to see this study both written up so seriously in the NYTimes and then taken so seriously on HN because when it came out it was kind of used as a textbook example of how poor study design leads to bad conclusions.

Here's the asterisk:

> although adjusted percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) rates were lower during meetings (20.8% vs 28.2%; P = .02)

IE: there are nearly 30% fewer angioplasties during annual cardiologist meetings.

Unfortunately the study looked at admissions dates rather than treatment dates (which also lines up with there not being angioplasties during those dates). Someone coming in with heart failure is going through the same procedures regardless of who is there to stabilize them, the actual repair is frequently done later, ie: when the senior doctor gets back from the conference. Another, totally reasonable, possibility emerges then: doctors coming back from conferences perform better for a small period of time after the conference.

Let's see this study repeated with treatment dates instead of admission dates and see what happens.

Oh I didn't know that, sounds like this:

https://github.com/nicoSWD/put.io-adder/blob/master/README.m...

thanks, I'll try it out.

I use http://www.put.io for this and highly recommend it. If someone has already downloaded the tracker you are trying to get you get it instantly, so for anything even vaguely popular you are able to get it (or after the first person downloads the file the rest are just pulling directly from S3). They also have great customer service, ios and chromecast apps etc.

Yes but I think you might also find that a lot of times this mental abstraction/short hand is where bias lives. This is why it's so effective to verbalize problems. You frequently see patterns and logical fallacies only once you verbalize a train of thought. Therapy in general is a great example of this, but also the "rubber ducky trick" in software where you explain the problem to an imaginary rubber ducky sitting on your monitor (or call over a colleague and explain it to them etc.) and you magically figure out the problem just by verbalizing. Happens all the time for me at least, speaking of bias :)