wdewind

This is all interesting, and warrants more actual research, but it's on a rat study that did not control for calories, so it's not super useful because we also know that:

1. Rats metabolisms are very different from primate and specifically human metabolisms

2. Even if they are the same, we already know that eating a caloric surplus contributes to inflammation, so it's difficult to disambiguate the effects of eating keto vs. the effects of eat fewer calories (which people on keto tend to do).

Nothing against keto, if it allows you to comply to eating the right amount of food that's great, but controlling for calories there isn't a ton of evidence in its efficacy over carbohydrate inclusive diets.

Yeah, in the context of usefully effecting the obesity epidemic it's just not even worth discussing because it has no impact.

Please don't get science news from BBC. This is a sample size of 1, in a person who was probably already eating a ton and not absorbing it much due to a massive infection. There's not a ton we can take from this.

There is some evidence to think that a fecal transplant could help treat obesity, but not a ton. There is no evidence of the existence of people who can eat whatever they want and stay skinny. The thing is, with all the tweaks etc. that we've discovered, like gut flora effecting how many calories you absorb, none of them are hugely impactful. None of them explain obesity by themselves. So far nothing outside of massively over eating explains obesity in any kind of useful way that could be turned into a medical intervention.

This is sort of true but not really usefully true. Yes, your metabolic rate will go down slightly when you eat less food, but the idea of "starvation mode" comes from a study done in the fifties on extremely underweight people, who were then put on extremely calorically restricted diets. If the person is within reasonable weight, or overweight, "starvation mode" simply does not apply. People who are in this condition cannot lead normal lives due to low energy, and will frequently have massive health issues due to their body having to give up on a ton of base functions it's doing every day. It's a very extreme thing, and does not happen to many people, especially in America.

> the rest of the world has multi billion dollar low hanging fruit begging to be worked on

go on...

Well in this specific case LinkedIn makes it so you have to report your salary to see other salary data, so that right there is one place where people have an incentive to add junk just to get the data.

But the more important problem is the selection bias.

Self reported salaries are just never going to be a good data source. I was hoping since this was LinkedIn and they have tons of resources they'd be doing something different, but they don't seem to have made any progress on the many attempts people make each year to do salary analysis in this way. Anyone have any good ideas for actually gathering accurate salary data?

I disagree. Airbnb has always had a really really simple solution to all of this: make it so people can file complaints about specific addresses without being involved in the Airbnb system. Airbnb lost the public support because they ignored externalities: so many people were adversely affected by living next to people who irresponsibly rented out their Airbnb. Personally in one building I had my lobby and elevator destroyed by Airbnb guests, as well as many loud party nights in an otherwise quiet building. In my next building I've dealt with noise and partying again. But I have effectively no recourse.

A system like this would vastly limit Airbnb's market: it would make it so landlords could easily tell when people were Airbnbing their apartments out, and thus would vastly shrink Airbnb's market.

I like Airbnb a lot. I use it when I travel, my friends use it when they visit me in NYC. But I am happy about this law because Airbnb chose short term profit over long term sustainability. The zoning laws that support hotels are there for a reason. And there was room for innovation there, but Airbnb has not been successful in traversing the space between the economic inefficiency and the zoning issues.

None of this even touches on the macro issue that Airbnb demonstrably increases rent prices.

> Contrary to the hive mind you don't need some special encapsulation class to pull your post and get variables.

The hive mind is like that for a reason. Making it easy to do the right thing and wrong to do the wrong thing has massive effects, I'd argue the magnitude of which scale exponentially with the growth of an engineering team. Really really talented engineers make mistakes all the time. To the extent that we can systematically limit those with little to no downside we absolutely should, especially when it comes to security.

> Smoking is pretty unambiguously bad for you.

Stress is a killer. Smoking can reduce stress. Nothing is simple.

Thank you!

Thanks, but I'm not smart enough to digest this haha. If you have time could you break it down a little? My main question, I guess, is how do you calculate P-value?

Yes please

> The number of users clicking on Coderwall from Google increased 14.8% (yes, this was statistically significant).

Would be very curious how they calculated significance here.

Yeah I think that's totally right, and in that case my argument is Japan has great "bacon" but pretty lousy "pork chops" :)

Thanks, but you know that Miyazaki is just a region as well right? And Miyachiku Co-Op is made up of hundreds of different breeders (and does not encompass all Miyazaki beef). And I've had it. It tastes roughly the same as Kobe, despite being a different breed. Most Wagyu tastes the same, honestly, there's as much variation between samples of the same type as there are between different types.

Even for a relatively defined palate, it's very difficult to tell the difference between anything above a grade 6 in marbling. But really, we're talking about a very specific kind of beef, and I have no problem admitting that most Wagyu is very high quality. But it's not representative of most of the beef in Japan.

Japan's Michelin Stars are almost exclusively for Sushi and other seafood, which I would never imply is low quality. If you love seafood, which I don't, then yes, Japan probably has a good claim for the best food in the world.

> What about Hida? Not as well known in the US but many believe it's better than Kobe beef.

I've had Hida and a few others as well, and found them all to be basically the same. Extremely negligible differences that are similar in magnitude to different servings of the same style of beef.

> Japanese style beef is just different than the types found abroad. Every piece of Japanese raised beef I see in the supermarket here is beautifully marbled with fat and extremely rich in flavor. High quality Australian and American beef are also imported but are used for different purposes and lack the white flecks of fat.

Totally agree, I would never want a full Kobe steak! Way too rich. But for a few bites it is quite good. But still does not beat a good NY strip in my opinion.

> I assert that anyone who has visited Argentina or Uruguay

I have not myself been to either of these places but know several knowledgable people who have who all say the beef was fine but not as good as American.

> I would easily be disproven if you had some kind of authoritative source.

Check out the movie http://steakrevolution.com/ (it's available on Netflix as well). They talk extensively about why American beef is the best, but when it comes to comparing it to South American beef (including Brazilian) it basically has to do with climate, and what cattle need to be bred for that climate.

> I would agree with your assertion that Japanese beef is not high-quality compared to Australian or U.S. meat. I think the parent poster was talking about produce, though.

Parent poster specifically mentioned meat.

My source is going to Japan and eating the food.

> Japanese produce and meats are just fussed over to such a degree for which an American consumer has no frame of reference.

The Japanese are famous for high quality Kobe beef, but the truth is most meat in Japan is actually not very high quality at all and Kobe is a relatively rare exception. Same with poultry. Most people don't want to believe it but, despite all the McDonald's and factory farming, America has the best meat on average, and at maximum too.

Do you have links to any of those demos?

Right, which is why I'm more excited by "fake" meat vs meat alternatives. There are some trying to recreate literal meat (chemically indistinguishable) but without the animal. If you consider the stomach of a cow to simply be "input grass, output beef" it's obviously a vast oversimplification, but is sort of what is being aimed for, and where I see most of the potential in this market. Numbers I've seen have been close to 1/9 the caloric cost to create a calorie of "fake" meat as opposed to real meat (3:1 as opposed to 27:1).

When it comes to Morningstar's black bean burger, we agree it's not an adequate alternative in terms of taste, but I'd argue it's also not an adequate replacement in terms of health. I mentioned most existing meat alternatives do not provide enough protein. Black beans are generally fine and normally thought of as high protein, but they actually aren't a great source protein since they do not have complete amino acid profiles.

You're talking mostly about the aesthetic part of fake meat, but there is another huge advantage over existing products which is health/environmental. Current vegan/vegetarian incarnations of fake meat (Boca, Morningstar etc.) are typically actually not that healthy in terms of protein/amino acid content and sort of end up being eating a cake made of grains.

The ability to create, cheaply, a high protein, high calorie, amino acid packed product, regardless of whether or not it is aesthetically pleasing, could have massive impacts on our ability to support the human population of this planet, in a way that existing meat and vegetarian solutions do not.

Yeah, totally fair point. Similarly there's a lot of code that pretty definitely isn't being depended on in life or death situations.

Interesting post, a lot I agree with, but I think if you aren't working on bridges or things that can kill people when they go wrong credentialing would probably be a negative.

I added a sneaky edit (sorry!) that may address some of this, so I think we probably largely agree. I'm responding to a relatively specific claim, frequently heard by bootcampers and inexperienced engineers in web development, that foundational CS isn't useful, which my experience is somewhat representative of, though you are correct it's still anecdotal.

I totally agree with this. In one of my other replies I mentioned the concept of having multiple paths for a candidate to be successful through, and I agree that "whiteboard coding" should not be the only way to prove you are smart and competent.

BFS queues are not particularly difficult to describe, and deciding whether or not to do breadth or depth first is something I think about all the time. Frequently, for instance, in data access patterns, that decision can have a very big effect on performance. I can't agree that it's a random trivia question.

Edit: Ok, let me add some nuance here. I think we both probably agree that implementing a shortest path algo perfectly in an interview setting is beyond reasonable or useful. But I would expect an engineer to be able to have a discussion about it that shows me they understand the basic concepts and given google and a bit of time could relearn that. But without the complexity of shortest path I would not expect basic BFS to be outside of the scope of an interview. I guess that's just where I draw my lines.

Well the idea is that they aren't memorized by chance first, they are known pretty well because ideally you have a track record of applying them to real life problems (even if they are just school projects or side projects). I can describe times I've used queues to solve various problems, for instance. The other thing is, as others have pointed out, seeing how someone breaks down and approaches and unfamiliar problem is very valuable.

It sucks that we have to do it under the pressure of a 45min-1hour conversation, and I totally get that the stakes are high and so nerves are a problem. In general I think the best way to handle this stuff is to give candidates multiple paths to succeed.

I think the nerves problem is slightly overstated though, because I do think many companies do give candidates multiple paths to succeed. For instance, if you have trouble performing well in an interview setting it's pretty crucial that you have a wide array of work on github proving you can code and that will give you an opportunity to have some complicated but familiar code that you can talk about in the interview. If someone comes in with this but is shy or gets frustrated or something, as an interviewer I'm really going to try and pull the magic I see in their github out of them in that interview. Keep in mind that people hiring engineers really want the candidate to succeed in most cases. It's so difficult to find good talent that while I'm never going to lower my standards to hurt the company, I'm definitely on the candidate's team in an interview, trying to get them to shine as best I can.