skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hence net calorie balance. All the words are meaningful in that description.

For the same reason, I say "long term average mass". Weight is sufficiently noisy that I can be pinned to the mat on a silly debate-club technicality while the larger issue remains unaddressed.

When I say "net calorie balance" I'm not talking about subtracting the calories on the elliptical machine from the calories on the chocolate bar. That's an approximation, at best, because of the stunning complexities of the underlying system.

Actual net calorie balance is unobservable.

What you can observe is the outcome of net calorie balance, which is long term average body mass: aka whether you're getting fat or not.

You don't need to actually observe all the complexity of the underlying system. You need only observe the inputs and outputs. Are you getting fatter? Eat less, or change what you eat. Want to get bigger? Eat more, or change what you eat.

There's no need to build a blinkenlights dashboard of every variable of every bodily system. You just look at the scale or the mirror and change your behaviour.

[edited for larger reply to your edit]
No, it's Haskell, but strict and with dynamic typing.

So it's actually closer to Lisp.
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I must say this is a pretty weak argument. However honorable the activity is, he's still a hired gun.

Another question you have to ask - if his income was subject to income tax versus a LTCG tax that's currently in place, would he stop doing what he does? Reading his original post, most likely not. Maybe he'd raise a larger fund next time to justify the 2/20 fee structure, maybe the structure will be changed to 5/20, but investors will still chase the yield, and there will be someone on the receiving end happy to accept investors' money.
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Because he is just showing an example of macros, not giving a tutorial on how to add list comprehensions to Clojure.
I have 11.04 too and I'm going to stay there for a while. It does what I want how I want it to do it.

12.04 had horrible performance issues on my machine when I tested it and the overall UX was poor and too dumbed down.

IMO, the whole Unity/Dash thing sucks to no end. It looks like the Ubuntu guys and me have different views on the purpose of a personal computer.

When I feel like upgrading my system, I'll probably look elsewhere (Xubuntu, Mint, Debian…) anyway.
They're pretty useful, but once they get long the pagination is irritating.

Also, they kind of expose the "Silicon Valley circlejerk" some people talk about. I have to sift through to find companies outside the "big-data social mobile local b2b web-analytics finance" realm, which is a real pity because I'm actually quite excited to hunt for a summer internship at a technology company.
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Learning about feedback loops has definitely been enlightening.

Somewhere I have the bones of a super ginormo followup post to my original "fat and simple" one where I discuss causality itself in more depth (for example, I came up with 4 axes for categorising kinds of causality; I can only imagine that some long-dead philosopher has beaten me to it).

Lots of these debates actually resolve around definitions.

Anyhow, the other stuff I've written under the Systems heading may be of interest to you[1].

[1] http://chester.id.au/category/systems/
Very cool, thanks! I actually never really planned my diet, for most of the time as a vegetarian I consumed a lot of dairy products and bread, both things I'd rather cut out of my diet. It is not so easy to find suitable replacements, though.

In recent years I have also consumed more and more sweets, which are probably a factor, too. Currently I'd like to lose ~15kg (about 33lb I think?). 10kg of that I gained in the last three years. It's not that bad, but it's scary that I don't really know how to reverse the trend.
All tax rates are going to go up until the US and CA stop living beyond their means. Its not a matter of left or right or whether that hurts incentives any more.
It's not quite what you suggest, but http://www.konkura.com is run by my brother - it lets people create fitness-related challenges (which can be entire workouts or even workout schedules, or just a single exercise) to share with friends. You can compete with people who have similar interests around the world, or keep challenges private to just a circle of friends who have a common fitness goal. There's a wide range of challenges already created by fitness enthusiasts so there's always something new to do. Worth checking out.
Your logic is flawed. The only limiting factor is calories in. It is impossible to gain weight for calories you have not eaten.

None of your analysis in anyway shows, or even hints at the 'fact' that Eating more will necessarily make you weigh more. It is totally possible that someone can eat 3k calories a day, but no carbs, and this could have all types of effects; like a slight increase in body temperature due to a different rate of caloric burning, or maybe not everything is getting digested and he is shitting out 1.5k calories a day for some dietary reason you don't understand.

In the same way you cannot say "well logically, I put 5 gallons of gas in a car and went 25 miles, therefore there must be 1 gallon of gas left" without knowing specifics about an engine; you cannot do the same with humans, which you essentially are. Further, our bodies/engines are dynamic; and some of our internal systems are more or less effecient depending on a number of factors that you don't understand (for example, it is possible that eating certain types of calories have chemicals/enzymes related to them that cause other systems in the body to change effeciency). You have one side right:

If you want to lose weight you can be absolutely sure that by cutting down calories, below a certain threshold, you will lose weight.

But, then you go too far and say this is the only thing at play. In fact, you don't have any logical reason to make the second statement; it admittedly seems to make sense at face value, but ketosis is absolutely real, and people are shedding weight and still eating a ton of calories, regardless of whatever graphs/analysis you are making.
How does he at all sound self-impressed? I just read the article twice and still don't understand this comment.
I am a programmer because it's the closest I could get to being a wizard.
Saw Fez on Indie Game: The Movie. Glad to see it worked out, I'd recommend the movie to anyone that hasn't seen it yet either its a great watch.
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You're right on the flow of capital. I think the big venture firms will still survive (a lot of East Coast endowment money and foreign sovereign funds), but angel investments will go down significantly, or just rely on smaller rounds, as there's less money to throw around.
Palo Alto, CA. Full time. H1B okay.

AMA Capital trades billions of dollars per day in the foreign exchange market.

We are all engineers, and we all do a little bit of everything. We design and implement our own trading strategies and infrastructure, down to the networking code that ties us in to financial markets.

We are a very small team looking to hire employees number 2 and 3, who will focus on strategy or on infrastructure.

No experience or specific knowledge of finance is required. However, you do need to be at least interested in financial markets and to be able to implement your strategies carefully in C++.

http://amacapital.net/careers.html
me too ;) though the problem is not rely bootstrap but the lack of customisation of bootstrap...
I haven't been developing for windows, but I'm most comfortable in Python, Objective-C and C++, having used all three for work.

I haven't used C++11 yet, because the project I work on is tied to an old compiler version, but the one thing I found when doing some iOS development this week was that I really, really missed the declaration type inference (var).
The article is showing off the -> operator and then proceeds to talk about indexes and using them for querying. Unfortunately, -> can't take advantage of indexes.

You'd have to use the @> operator and compare a partial hash.

So instead of

SELECT * FROM comics WHERE properties -> 'story_arc' = 'Throne of Atlantis'

You'd use

SELECT * FROM comics WHERE properties @> 'story_arc=>Throne of Atlantis'::hstore

The first query will not use an index on properties, the second one will.

See the first paragraph of F.16.3 on http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/hstore.html
Net calories alone don't tell the whole story. A big factor in weight loss and gain are hormones and calories don't say a thing about those.

For instance, to gain weight (muscle), bodybuilders will consume large amounts of carbohydrates (for a variety of reasons), but the most important is spiking insulin in the presence of protein to shuttle the protein to the muscles to begin building them after breaking them down.

Similarly, obese people should be cutting all carbs out b/c of the same insulin spike.

But there are other foods which are highly insuligenic. Whey protein, for instance, can spike insulin. MCT oil at high doses can. Heck, egg whites with no fat (no yolk) to balance it can spike insulin.

The point is that calories are, at best, an incomplete picture. At worst they are misleading and a distraction. I'm of the believe that net calories still matter, but only to the point that you actually know what you are doing and are eating the right macronutrients in the right ratios.
Sometimes it bothers me that consumption is very cheap. It makes us unaware. Unaware of environment issues, ethical issues, safety issues, and so on.
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It was water and glycogen.

When I'm running low carb (for whatever reason) and have a carb refeed, I routinely gain 8-10 pounds in a 24 hour period.

Same for people making a weight for powerlifting/boxing/wrestling. They manipulate their water/salt, getting all the glycogen out of their system before reintroducing them to "pump" them back up etc etc
I'm over 6,7, or as a European 2m height, and 90kilos.

Being tall means you could weigh more and be healthy, and it depends on your body structure, like bones and so. But probably you need someone else and not you to judge what is your ideal weight.

"I can maintain focus at a consistently high level throughout my typical 14 hour work day"

I have yet to see a person that really works 10 h/d, let alone 14 hours a day, but probably your definition of work is different than mine.

"Being overweight isn't always indicative of laziness, failure or a lack of discipline."

I have a very close family member that is taller than you and also weights more, agree with the laziness thing but I will call it a failure in some way, thinking on the contrary is just deceiving yourself.

For me being morbid obese is the result of the culture and the way of living, specially work routines and eating, everybody could see the statistics of 40 years ago in Europe and US, The only thing that significantly changed is that, what we eat, pre made food with lost of sugar and bad quality fats(enormous unbalance between Omega 6 and 3).

Discipline means nothing if you don't know what to do.

My advice to you is to develop different routines,improve what you eat, let the torture thing for the masochistic fanatics. Start thinking that you are in a hole and you need to get out of it and your life will be better when you get out(if its so good it will be even better).
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I , too, would love a list of 'casualized' textbooks. I was interested in the premise of this, but the flaws i've caught thus far (the newton/natural number thing got me too) have made me lose confidence in the rest of the book.
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I'd content that is absolutely awful advise for people. It gives them free reign to drink soda, eat pizza and sugar without knowing what it is doing to their body so long as "they are within the calorie limit".

This is bad.

See my other comment on hormones. They play a HUGE role and not understanding them leads to statements like "it's all about the calories" or "I'm only eating 1000 calories" etc etc.
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> Net calories alone don't tell the whole story.

It's all you need to know to lose or gain weight.

> A big factor in weight loss and gain are hormones and calories don't say a thing about those.

It depends how we're drawing the boundary of the system being modelled. But if the boundary is a single human body, then net calorie balance is a forcing function. No hormonal configuration can alter the laws of physics. If you maintain a net deficit, you will shrink and, if you don't stop, you will eventually die from starvation.

It needn't be linear. Heck, I've lost so much fat in the past year that my base metabolism has actually dropped by a meaningful amount. But so long as I adjust my inputs, I can affect the outputs. I am my own controller.
Some would even say that there is no end result.
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Design Feedback:
The teddy bear is somewhat distracting and makes me think this site is for selling old junk/toys. Since you are targeting students, I assume your focus should be more on used textbooks, calculators, etc. Make that clearer on your landing page.

Business Feedback:
Why limit this to .edu emails? How is this different than eBay or Craigslist, other than artificially limiting the market to college students? In other words, what special ingredient do you add?
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Start thinking that you are in a hole and you need to get out of it and your life will be better when you get out(if its so good it will be even better).

I think you missed my entire point. I've been heavier. I'm already losing weight. I don't consider myself to be 'in a hole'. I consider myself to have an affliction that's easily cured with a bit of discipline.
Write that followup please, I'd love to read it.

As for the causality things, I don't know about philosophers, but there is some good writing on the topic by Eliezer Yudkowsky, both the older texts[0] and the new ones about causality, like [1]. I found them very insightful.

Anyway, off to reading systems stuff ;).

[0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/ev3/causal_diagrams_and_causal_model...
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Yes, but I'd expect them to at least be able to tell good programmers from bad programmers better than someone who couldn't code.
I get the lose weight part, but what about influencing people? :)
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The post I replied to said:

> I am programmer because I am naturally curious and because I love creative problem solving.

Which is still an excellent reason to be a programmer.

> What honestly pisses me off, is that these days programming is way more boring than what it used to be.

Completely disagreed! He's just focusing on the wrong things.

> The paradigm has shifted from low-level to high-level and as such we've lost steady, stable interfaces and systems and moved to very rapidly changing playground

I was trying to say that moving from low to high level does not mean losing stable interfaces, and it doesn't mean we need to have a "rapidly changing playground".
> By "going colo" they would need to layout all the upfront hardware costs.

Leasing still ends up substantially cheaper than EC2. Never paid upfront for any colocated hardware I've been responsible for. So does managed hosting at a number of providers. Last time I priced out this, EC2 ended up 2-3 times as expensive as managed hosting (with no upfront costs for the managed hosting either), and the gap to leasing servers and putting them in a colo was even larger (but there you do need some scale before you cover the extra ops costs).

> They would then have all the operational overhead of maintaining all that gear.

If you're small enough, sure, your savings won't pay for extra ops people. But you don't need to be very large before the savings outweigh the cost of more ops people. And with managed hosting this is a non-issue - at that point you don't have any more ops issues than you have with EC2.

> Further - if you need to scale, it can be done in seconds rather than weeks/months given lead times for procurement, design time, implementation time (i.e. scheduling the install in the colo, coordinating the need for more space etc...)

It's not either/or. In fact, being prepared to use EC2 to handle peaks means the cost difference between self/colo hosted (+occasional EC2 use for peaks) and EC2 gets even larger, as you can run your own servers at far closer to full capacity without the risk you'd take if you didn't have that ability. Handling occasional peaks with EC2 is a great use of it, and definitively cost effective.

> Further - if you need to scale, it can be done in seconds rather than weeks/months given lead times for procurement, design time, implementation time (i.e. scheduling the install in the colo, coordinating the need for more space etc...)

See above. But also consider that if instead comparing against the managed hosting option, a number of providers with auto-provision in minutes to a couple of hours once an order is placed. And many providers now also offer a mix between colo, managed hosting and EC2 like cloud solutions, so you can put your base load in a rented rack, scale in the mid term via managed hosting, and spin up cloud instances as needed if you want to deal with a single provider.

EC2 is great for "quick and dirty" temporary solutions, batch jobs or handling peaks that last less than about 6-8 hours a day, and I use it now and again for that reason. But the moment your instances are up more than about 8 hours a day, and you have more than a few of them, it will quickly start costing you more than the alternatives.
That's nice for you, but as long as capital remains a legally separate category from all other income, the only thing accomplished by differential taxes on "capital gains" is to give a government favor to a narrow class of "capitalists".

As others in this thread have pointed out, there are plenty of highly productive, successful people like top Google engineers who aren't part of the financial sector, the executive class, or the investor-for-a-living class, and they get hit with higher taxes than the capitalist class because they dare, the sheer chutzpah, to take home most of their very-high incomes as salary rather than dividends, interest, or asset appreciation.
> This is bad.

It can be, sure. Tooth decay, vitamin deficiency, muscle and bone wasting, all that jazz.

But are we still talking about weight control or not? Because people love to make it super ultra complex when the basic control mechanism is fairly straightforward.

My hyper-elaborate advice for the more general "health control" case (as opposed to "weight control") is:

1. Eat more to gain weight, less to lose weight, and about the same to stay about the same.

2. Make sure you get plenty of protein. It's good for you.

3. Eat a variety of foods.

4. Lift weights.

5. Do something that makes your heart pump really hard for a while.

I mean for myself I have zillions of tweaks. But it's easy to go off the deep end chasing that 1-2% optimisation when all most people want is the 20% of information that gives 80% of the result.
Oh shut up with this already.

Private property is just as coercive as taxation in the first place. You do not have a God-given right to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by investing millions of dollars and pay nothing towards the upkeep of society. Basic freaking social contract theory, and, in fact, basic law: financial instruments and corporations could not exist as they do except by government fiat.

Second, yes, he will make the sacrifice if everyone else does it. That's sensible. You don't solve large-scale systemic problems by individual action, not even mass individual action, but only by collective action. Again, this is just how the world works.
Checked it just a few minutes ago and it seems like facebook had changed some settings.. A friend of mine whom I have NEVER interacted with appears SECOND on my list..
I'd suggest that education campaigns and the natural human desire to not get lung cancer may have also played a part.
"Eat more --> weight more"

HOW much more? (HOW much less.)

Lizzie Velasquez trivially demonstrates the inadequacy of your observations.
Ditto for Perl with modules like List::Maker and List::Gen.

However like the Ruby example this only works on a single list. Which reminds me that I keep meaning to write a port of CL loop in Perl using Devel::Declare.

ref: https://metacpan.org/module/List::Maker | https://metacpan.org/module/List::Gen | https://metacpan.org/module/Devel::Declare
My lesson is slightly different - regulation really does matter. I know many (myself included) subscribe to a small (ish) government - but infrastructure is one of those areas that has to be regulated.

The markets did not correct the situation (jacques gas station is not now the preferred suppliers for all Ontario)
So a simple regulation (you must be designed to keep your service flowing) seems to deal with a huge amount of this - power companies that don't have rolling brown outs get to be in business the next day etc
It is not a cost. The number is free to get. It's also only necessary if you setup a company developer account - it is not needed for an individual one.
Yet Silicon Valley regularly supports candidates and policies that would place large burdens on the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We have plenty of examples of high-tax, high-regulation economies around the world with no startup scene. You can't grow one by punishing success and preventing innovation.

Taxing capital gains and ultra-high incomes is not placing a burden on the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Hell, it's not even really left-wing at all.

Further, in counterpoint: the Israeli economy supports a start-up scene larger than that of New York or Boston, second only to Silicon Valley, while paying marginal taxation rates that would have Americans squirming in their seats. We need high tax rates over here, because if we don't pay for the Army, we all die (or so the thinking goes). But also because a society without universal sick-fund membership or public higher education or scientific research grants or infrastructure projects would be uncivilized.

(Seriously, if you think "progressive Democrats" are left-wing, allow me to introduce you to my friend Karl Marx.)
If you have a 'home office' then the interest you pay on your mortgage is an expense, and is thus a business deduction, as are hydro, gas, communications, etc.

Only in proportion to the fraction of the house which constitutes your home office.

If you have a business that borrows to buy and then rent houses, the same principle pertains; the interest on the mortgage is an expense.

Right -- mortgage interest is a business expense when it's paid for a business reason. A principle residence is not considered to be an investment; it's considered to be a home.
> None of your analysis in anyway shows, or even hints

The words "net calorie balance" are carefully chosen to encompass your objection (I have it filed under "Diet Debate Gotcha #3,947: Thermogenic Effect of Food").

> But, then you go too far and say this is the only thing at play.

I do and I don't. What I say is that it's all you really need to know in order to control your weight. It's also, in the strictest narrowly-drawn causality, the completely explanatory mechanism of weight control.

I'm not arguing that folk on ketogenic diets lose weight. I'm not arguing that there's no such thing as ketogenesis. I'm just saying that in the long run, the direct, immediate cause (such as it is) is one of net calorie balance modulo noisy oddities like water retention.