chesser's comments

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Even so, the media described in the abstract makes no mention of body composition; without that, there is no way this study can be considered adequate, let alone "impressively well done".

> Your liver has glycogen stores on board that will keep your blood sugar rock steady

Your reply is confused. There are two different points that you are conflating.

One is in regard to keeping blood sugar steady to prevent binging by AVOIDING high GI foods; the other is performance-related, and the NECESSITY of using high GI foods in specific instances.

> for the first 20 miles of a marathon

All you're saying is that if you carb load in advance, you will have glycogen until you run out of glycogen.

You're incorrect about "rock steady". Typically, blood sugar will actually spike at first, as the liver releases glycogen / glucose at the onset of exercise. And guess what happens following a spike...

> Unless you are exercising at a heart rate of 160-180 for 2.5 or more hours, this is useless trivia.

I specifically mentioned sustained cardiovascular exercise AND the Tour de France in regard to this. I give specific examples, and you scoff and say it wouldn't matter -- unless someone were doing something I specifically mentioned as an example. Are you objecting just for the sake of objecting?

By the way, heart rates are generally lower (in the 140 range, not counting time trials and climbs) and eating is fairly continuous in the TdF.

> Normal adult human brain uses, 120 g to, maybe, 220 g of glucose per day. At the outside, that's 750 Calories.

Is this supposed to be an objection? Also, your math is wrong, unless you're using some kind of magic low-calorie glucose (220 x 3.81 = 838).

If you're eating sucrose to get glucose, double the calories. That's a lot of sugar.

Also, things like playing chess or programming all day are a lot more mentally taxing than "normal" activities.

If you know of studies with either group, I'd love to see them.

> These facts about elite athletes do not bear on

You apparently missed where I specifically cited Phelps's herculean effort.

The only difference is the scale; I used Phelps as an illustration of what I stated at the top: You can't separate diet from activity. I'm not sure how you managed to miss every point and misconstrue every example.

> A far more useful factoid is that your glycogen stores are depleted overnight,

I mentioned this already in passing.

> so a 2-3 hour cardio session in the morning will force you to burn fat.

Anything increasing metabolic demands will result in increased oxidation of fatty acids even if you aren't fasted.

> (No, it won't burn muscle).

That's sheer nonsense. The body is already in a catabolic state after fasting, and adding 2-3 hours of cardio will absolutely burn muscle.

> Are you saying they loaded these cats with fructose?

Low-protein, low-GI diets can well be high in fructose. Do you have the food diaries?

> If they did, then these results are even more impressive, because we would expect a high fructose diet to promote fat gain.

They gained weight.

> First, this is why we enroll more than one patient. The noise averages out.

Once again, you missed the point. If a certain diet makes it very likely that people will cheat, you can end up getting a lot of dropouts (as they did) and the ones who stay in will be shifted toward the higher end. This makes the entire result set suspect.

> Two: the unit of measure was kilograms

Do you get points now for stating the obvious?

From the article: "The average weight regain among all participants was 0.5 kg". I took the liberty of translating that into about a pound.

> they quite nicely demonstrate sufficient granularity to appreciate signal

I already proposed the factor of water retention which would quite plausibly account for a kilo of difference.

> See Table 2 of the study.

I can't see it, but I can read the description, if you mean Figure 2:

"Panel B shows the change in weight for each of the dietary groups during the weight-maintenance intervention, adjusted for body-mass index at randomization, weight loss during the low-calorie-diet phase, sex, family type (single-parent family, two-parent family with one parent as participant, or two-parent family with both parents as participants)"

Absolutely nothing about body composition. It's just weight and BMI. They don't determine body fat percentage, lean mass, water weight gain.

It's also amusing how all the points got sucked out of my post and went into yours. I assume people saw "I'm also a doctor" and assumed that an argument from authority was valid. And you're not even an authority when it comes to sports medicine, which is the bulk of what I was referring to.

That's pretty disappointing, but I suppose the average reader of HN has even less knowledge about these things than you. Even so, your reply was obviously objecting spuriously and the rest was either repeating my points or stating the obvious. Very weak.

Being a bariatric intern has no bearing on sports medicine; it's practically the opposite end of the scale. You're concerned with gross measures like BMI. Do you even care about a kilo of difference on an obese subject? Yet for this study, with figures that small, body composition is the only way to figure out if it's relevant. A couple pounds of "weight" is meaningless.

They are simply reflecting the social mores of their day. IBM had the socks and garter police -- for men! In addition, men tend to tease each other much worse than ragging on someone for not wearing enough makeup.

Additionally, we all carry the evolutionary legacy -- or baggage -- of the past. EVERY species with sexual reproduction discriminates according to gender!

Sexual competition enters the picture unavoidably as soon as you introduce a member of the opposite gender to a single-gender group.

If I have 5 guys in a room working on a startup, and I add a "cute girl", it will immediately change the dynamic and become a distraction and likely become divisive.

You're NOT going to be able to counter both biological and social factors built up over time.

I would hypothesize that if you took any productive small startup, and swapped out a male for a female of equal ability, it would probably destroy the cohesion.

I also noted it listed MEAN score instead of MEDIAN.

This would allow for a small number of people to spike the score. For example, a group of friends, or a study group. I have tutored students from a 60 or 70 to close to 100% in the space of a single math test.

If the divvying up happened to put a few more brainiacs in one group and a few more dullards in another, this could account for the entire swing.

The specifics of dividing up the groups is very important. For example, if one entire classroom got Essay A and another got Essay B, even if there were equal numbers of bodies, it would only take one good study group to account for the discrepancy.

Even if you start from a point of complete genetic equality in aptitude, all it takes is any kind of cultural or social bias to create a selection pressure which will lead to genetic difference.

Given the historically different roles of men and women, it would be vanishingly unlikely for there not to be genetic differences.

If being very good at a task leads to more reproductive success, and only one gender performs that task, then only one gender receives the benefits of that selection pressure (to the extent of sex-chromosome-specific loci).

On the flip side, there is evidence that being TOO much of an outlier is negative. The smartest people tend to be more socially marginalized, both voluntarily and involuntarily. So it's possible that the top people are essentially evolutionary mistakes (as they are LESS likely to reproduce), and as evolution seems to roll the dice more with males than females, more males will turn out like this.

In a post-Darwinian society, this all goes out the window. It's just a historical relic of not being able to tinker with our genome directly, and having to rely on sexual reproduction.

There is also the issue of having children. One article I read ascribed a great deal of disparity at the top simply to time: If you take time off from your career to raise children, you have thousands fewer hours to devote to your profession. Even if the male partner is willing and able to do the child-rearing, it doesn't follow that the female partner will therefore abdicate.

Assuming reproductive opportunities as a major driver of behavior, professional success leading to increased social status is a far larger differentiator in males. People are lazy and if they don't have to try hard in a certain category, they generally won't. This says nothing about males being smarter; simply that they try harder because they have to in order to get laid. (Or think they do.)

This is somewhat akin to an evolutionary arms race with predators and prey getting better each generation because their counterpart was better in a previous generation.

If a guy is a gamer, so what; everyone knows guys who are gamers. If a guy is a scientist, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. If a guy makes $100k a year, so what; everyone knows guys who do that. You have to do even better in order to stand out. (Note the attention you'd get, however, if you were a female in any of these categories.)

Likewise, nobody is surprised when Grandma can cook, to take a traditional gender example. But a guy who can cook like Grandma? Now that stands out.

So to some extent it doesn't even matter which gender did which thing -- divvied up randomly, whichever category is overrepresented may start a self-feeding evolutionary cycle within that category.

This could mean that something which was purely social ends up leading to a genetic difference. For example, male 3D spatial relation ability.

By the same token, I would expect female lions to be better at this than male lions!

By contrast, there is nothing about a female being predisposed to be a good scientist which would make you stand out as a good mate in, say, Saudi Arabia. And it could be downright dangerous in Afghanistan under the Taliban. If your abilities aren't recognized as a positive then they won't result in positive selection pressure.

All it takes is selection pressure and you eventually get a noticeable genetic difference. Social differences are a huge selection pressure, so it would be astounding if there WEREN'T genetic gender differences in aptitude for certain subjects.

Hmm, I think I just shot down the political correctness lobby by working from first principles.

Just for example, raw foodists tend to have low-protein diets that may be low OR high-glycemic index, and tend to be very thin.

Without a comprehensive listing of specific meals, I would guess that people in certain groups in this study would be much more likely to cheat on their diets. The selection of low-protein, low-GI foods for most people used to typical Western diets would lead to very disappointing meals and thus more cheating over a 6-month period.

Further, gaining a pound of fat over a period of 6 months works out to less than 20 extra calories per day. This is essentially noise. Cheating with 150 extra calories once per week (e.g. a single sugary treat) could account for this.

Keeping your blood sugar in check is a major factor in preventing binge eating and fat storage. There are various ways to do this, including low-GI foods, exercise, and eating small meals frequently. The recent standard for Hollywood stars and starlets is working with a personal trainer and eating every 2 hours. This helps keep blood sugar steady.

On the flip side, people engaged in sustained cardiovascular exercise must eat high-GI foods or their performance drops. Riders in the Tour de France chow down on every sugary snack and drink known to man (not just "performance formulas" of energy bars and drinks), and Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day while training.

You don't need that level of Herculean effort before this becomes important. Even if you are completely sedentary, if you are engaged in a mentally taxing task, your brain is burning through a lot of glucose. Eating sucrose means half glucose and half fructose, and only the glucose can be metabolized immediately. Fructose can be stored by the liver and converted, but if the liver reserves are full (e.g. late in the day, as opposed to waking up from fasting during sleep), fructose will end up as fat. Fructose has a low glycemic index, so guess which sugar is more likely to be included in a low-GI diet. (Glucose is of course used by diabetics in order to raise their blood sugar quickly. It is also called Dextrose.)

Finally, without body composition analysis, they haven't shown anything about fat loss. High protein diets require more water to process, and a difference of a pound or two on a human body can easily be down to differences in fluid retention. High protein diets can lead to slightly more dehydration.

AIs can create pop music in your virtual world if you like that sort of thing. All the other AIs will be talking about it, so you won't need some central source of anything in order to have common ground with people in your reality.

It will be fine if random permutations lead to people in your virtual reality listening to "Yeah, Girl" instead of "Girl, Yeah" or "All Right Girl".

Movies won't be very important when you can interactively experience anything you want. Climb K2 but without the risk of permanent death. Movies will just be a Machinima subset of the interactive simulation if you still want them.

I wasn't aware that this had been definitively established as a myth.

Last I checked, there was a gender gap. There are a lot of interpretations that wish to ascribe this to a social difference rather than a physical one.

Further, this is an introductory course.

The overwhelming number of top scientists are male. IQ tests (FWIW) also place more males at both the top and bottom ends, with females clustered more around the middle. One interpretation there is that nature can afford to take more chances with males, so there are more extremes.

I can think of at least one factor that is physical, even though it doesn't have to do with mental capacity per se. A major impediment to learning tends to be psychological laziness; anything that gets us to push past this means we are using more of our capacity. Testosterone increases risk-taking behaviors and reduces complacency. This drive to constantly seek out the new and challenge the old might be sufficient by itself, even if there are no relevant neurological differences otherwise.

I also don't understand this push to try to equalize gender distribution. Even if the ONLY differences are social, it doesn't follow that it's better to socialize females in ANY given arbitrary manner just because they're female.

Clearly any field should be open to any individual who wishes to pursue it. Trying to equalize the numbers, given the current disparity, means pushing a lot of females into pursuing subjects they aren't interested in. Even if we posit that these fields have been traditionally male-biased, the majority of males are not interested in them.

This has to be open on an individual level, and whichever way it shakes out with regard to gender, it shakes out.

It's profoundly unfair to cite social differences and then blame colleges who only get people after 18 years of social indoctrination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_theft

Essentially it's a way to accrue benefits while pushing any negative consequences on someone else. Those negative consequences can be material and not merely opinion. (E.g., your actual bank account can be drained and your checks can bounce.)

Further, opinion does translate into material consequences. Your options largely depend on the opinion that other people have of you.

Even narrowly construed, a mere credit score is a source of opinion that can affect everything from housing (buying OR renting) to employment, to getting a cell phone or any other type of service. Straightening out your credit can be very difficult, and even if you are successful, the fraud was a denial of service attack against your time. Credit bureaus rarely if ever face penalties for maintaining inaccurate information, so the onus is on the person whose identity was stolen.

If you don't think the individual is victimized, I invite you to post all your credentials and see where the experiment leads.

When we have sci-fi nanoreplicators that can copy luxury (flying) cars, food, etc., all scarcity will be artificial.

Alternatively, when we have very convincing VR, everyone will be able to experience what he or she wants to as much as he or she wants to. There won't be anything to trade because you can't give someone something they can't already get. Strong general AI will fill in for everything.

Our puny mammalian brains with their limited sensory inputs will be entertained by not-very-advanced technology that eventually becomes effectively free. It doesn't even take that much fidelity to fool us -- think of how unconvincing dreams are after you wake up. There's seemingly some credulity switch that gets flipped which makes us believe something to be reality without really questioning it. Switch that on while awake and World of Warcraft is probably more than good enough.

Incidentally, I noticed that asking yourself the question, "how did I get here?" ala Inception is really annoying when you're awake. It's difficult to question your reality when you subjectively feel it to be true.

My awake existence is mostly in one place staring at a monitor. I almost never do that when I dream, I'm "physically" doing something completely unrelated.

"Wow, you can't type ANY form of lamebook.com, lamebook DOT com, lame+book DOT com...NOTHING! How can I trust Facebook as a messaging system if it's going to block entire words and phrases?!? What if I just wanted to ask my friends what they think about the Lamebook case?? WTF"

This would be like if I asked you for examples of which sites were banned, and you couldn't even post to tell me.

It would not have been kind to them.

Nobody "forced" them out of business, they voluntarily quit when they realized their sham was exposed.

In aggregate, their behavior easily qualified as multiple felonies; and damages alone would most likely have been ruinous.

I know I would not want to roll those dice.

So I think you're mistaken about essentially everything you said above.

Even though computing resources are cheaper now, the bar is much higher, so if your project needs a cluster or significant bandwidth it's still expensive in relative terms.

1) A lot of things have the "potential" to work out, but you can only count the ones that actually do.

Besides, even a billion-dollar exit isn't "The Next Google". By Paul's own binary metric, that's still a failure. Let's say they owned 6% but that got diluted to 1/4th from follow-on rounds; their cut would be 15 million before taxes. They (Y Combinator) took $2 million in 2009 and then $8.25 million in 2010 from investors including Sequoia, so it's either going to be divvied up a dozen ways or has to pay back the $10.25 million first or whatever the terms are. Or maybe that's only for 2009 and 2010 startups, so it only has to be split between the 4 partners they had at the time (of funding Dropbox).

It's a win for the founder, but there are other wins that this model can miss.

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08:

http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/b/259414909 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

This applies equally for being talked out of good ideas.

And if your idea is good to start with, then there would be no point in changing it until you've pursued it long enough to see where it leads.

The thing to remember about YC is that it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, let's say that Cal State Chico (not a top school) somehow convinced all the top students to attend next year. Pretty soon, it would start to be known as a top school. And let's say Stanford only got applications from the bottom 5%... you see where this is going.

Paul Graham's evangelizing means that, regardless of the utility of Y Combinator, if he convinces the top start-up prospects to join the program, it will make the program look good. They are looking for people who would be successful even without them.

Y Combinator could be minorly helpful and they would go on to success; it could be a wash, and they could go on to success; it could be a slight negative, and the strongest candidates would mostly still go onto success.

People could also FEEL that it's an incredible experience, even if this isn't objectively the case. Many people join various kinds of self-help or self-empowerment groups and enjoy the events and believe in them strongly, even if there is demonstrable practical harm.

Y Combinator could also have a net negative effect on the startup landscape, because NOT getting in can be so disappointing that it can lead people to give up (I wrote that before your post, but the link expired; I reloaded, and made this a reply instead of top-level comment); in other cases, they've found people who applied and got in, who considered getting in to be the accomplishment. Paul's viewpoints have been increasingly dominating the national conversation on startups the last few years, so the hypothetical indictments are meant to address its success as propaganda. Obviously if it really WERE the best approach, criticizing it for being too successful in its results would be disingenuous.

There's also a huge emphasis on getting funded being an accomplishment, which is a big distraction from the real priority for a business, which is making something that makes a profit. (A nice big funding round also means now you need an even BIGGER exit. This can actually reduce your chances for personal success. Xobni couldn't sell to Microsoft for $20 million because it wouldn't have been a big enough ROI for its investors. Perhaps they really thought they could be a billion dollar company and didn't want to sell anyway, but you see the point.)

Paul's talk about angels and super-angels and valuations focused on the main point being "the percent chance that the start-up is Google," if I recall correctly.

To me it looks like Y Combinator has the wrong model for that. The resources and timeframe favor much smaller ideas. According to the unofficial YClist.com, the top exit was 280 North at $20 million, which means not only have they not had another Google, they haven't yet had another ViaWeb.

It would be interesting to find a list of angels and their investments for the last 5 years and see which ones had bigger deals than that. I'm guessing a lot. So, that covers instincts and judgment, at least so far.

As for changing your idea, there are market segments that have been goldmines which I have yet to see a single YC company delve into. Thus, I'm not so sure on the advice portion.

There is a pretty big generation gap with the hot web properties and I don't know if any of the YC principals really grok it.

If PG reads this I expect to be told I'm wrong on every point except perhaps for a token concession for decorum. It's hard to talk people out of bad ideas when they're stubborn ;)

It also makes it very difficult if you ever need to go on the lam, because they'll know every place you might go. Every friend and relative. Whether you're trying to avoid a gambling debt, a stalker, or the government.

That isn't why they closed.

Think what would have happened to them if they stayed open, from the ACTUAL non-mob-justice legal system.

It's in my comment just a bit up:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1912643

How would you feel if your start-up was ripped off? Would you want HN people to rally around you, or would that be "mob justice"?

And what if it turned out the same people were also ripping off, say, Microsoft and Apple and several other large corporations?

If everyone had been so civil and polite, they wouldn't have felt pressured to shut down.

I don't know about you, but I'll take Facebook comments and phone calls over getting served with papers from half a dozen massive legal departments any day.

Lawsuits are expensive even when you're innocent.

If the penalties are draconian for not even distributing but just "making available" mp3s with NO commercial intentions whatsoever, what do you think the penalties are going to look like for massive distribution of hundreds or thousands of discrete willful infringements for profit?

This so-called mob justice is immeasurably nicer than what the actual legal system would have done to them.

For MySQL, using the standard format (MyISAM), you can just do a file copy if you bothered to do a proper backup of the binary files.

These are categorical mistakes.