Afton

I think that it's pretty obvious that simply 'money' isn't the solution to our educational needs. There are lots of ways of spending money that won't change outcomes, and probably several that would.

But I'm anti-school in general (note: not anti-teacher), so the whole point of this side of the argument misses my interests.

I feel like everyone in this thread should go watch season 4 of the The Wire. There is a lot of relevant work there, including the various pressures on, and requirements of the educational system.

tl:dr; Teacher's can only ever be a part of a solution to the complicated educational needs of our society. And given what we're willing to spend, they can't even be a particularly effective part in poorer parts of the country.

> And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game.

Well, that's one way. Any teacher who has used word-searches, acting, rhyming games, etc has found other ways. Don't get me wrong, there are a wealth of awesome startups in this space making apps, and I think they have a lot of potential, but they are certainly not the whole story, until we have something out of "The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".

Lots of good actual science takes place in the real world, and a video game can certainly be part of the solution, but there's a lot of room for engineering and whatnot that can be part of an autodidactical solution that won't live in an app.

Not OP, but while I've had a lot of success, the evidence doesn't support blanket application of 'Yoga' to back pain. The real problem is that back pain typically goes away regardless of treatment modality, which leads to a lot of people who grab the last thing they tried as "the real thing that fixed my back".

> > It hurts men and competition by devaluing the prizes.

> To quote jstanley again: "She's no better than me, but she is a WGM and I am nothing"

Well, don't they still have their score? I mean, I'm not into competitive chess, but everyone has their own ELO, no?

> > For whatever reasons, women aren't competitive with men (in chess, at this point in time)

> I'd also be curious to hear from you why you think the reasons for this are "whatever reasons" - I'm presuming by that you mean, that the reasons are inconsequential or they don't matter or they are not important. Why do you believe that to be the case, without first knowing what the reasons actually are?

I'm not the author, but what I would have meant by that phrase is "regardless of what the reasons are". I would have used it because the reasons are essentially unknowable, probably have many different overlapping reasons, and any discussion of those reasons is extremely likely to get bogged down in useless arguments given our collective scientific understanding of this issue at this time.

I want to start out by pointing that I'm generally in agreement with your points.

I urge you to consider that aggregate statistics are not individual experiences. It is a totally normal, expected outcome that there are individual men who have had deeply unfair experiences based on their gender. The fact that 'overall' men have better experiences will be cold comfort to such people. While in aggregate we tend to encourage men/boys to play chess, and as such there are a lot of competitive men, an individual man/boy may have a very different experience. Telling that one man/boy that overall men have it better in this scenario (and others) just won't be compelling. That's why I tend to argue that we should consider these incentives. It's a group-modification action, not an individual-modification. But understanding this may help you to have compassion for people who, for whatever reason, are blind to the 'tipping of the scales' that you mention.

Good luck.

Please rein in your dismissiveness. It is not insane to consider the ways that men and women have advantages. I'm not trying to step into this argument on one side or the other, but this kind of mocking is unhelpful.

> Women are consistently and institutionally disadvantaged across the board. Why do so many men fail to understand this?

I think because it isn't true? Assuming 'across the board' means 'in every aggregate scenario', then there certainly are places where it's men who are consistently and institutionally disadvantaged (two classic examples are judicial sentencing and when a victim of domestic violence).

One can think that women are disadvantaged 'overall', if one wanted to construct a score-card, without believing that women are disadvantaged in every (aggregate) scenario.

In this particular scenario I think it makes sense to say "We wanted more female participation, so we introduced an incentive". This addresses a particular point, and people can argue about whether the goal (more women at high levels of chess) is worthwhile, but at least that doesn't turn the whole discussion into an 'us against them' mentality.

IOW: Please try to raise the level of debate.

Disclaimer: I work at Tableau, but I don't claim to represent them, and I'm not in tech support or sales.

Two things that are likely: If you think the statistical tooling is limited you may not be aware that Tableau offers R integration built in. So if you're comfortable in R you can probably build what you want.

https://www.tableau.com/new-features/r-integration

If you find it slow, it may be something that tech support can help out with (changing config settings, or reworking your dashboards to be more performant). You should email whoever manages your account, or hit up https://www.tableau.com/support/request and include your contact info.

You can also email me (email in profile) and I'll get back to you from my work account with the right contacts.

The fogginess that the author describes sounds like the 'keto-flu'. But if he was eating carbs from vegetables and fruits, he shouldn't have noticed this.

I also found this odd: "I missed the sugar and milk in my coffee " Wait, why were you eliminating milk? Sure it contains some sugars naturally, but they aren't "refined sugar" that the article is demonizing.

The mental clarity and focus he describes are very likely due to the increased quality of sleep. I have no explanation for why his sleep improved.

My own anecdote is that I ate a high fat, super-low carb diet for about a year, and one of the primary motivations was that one of my friends couldn't stop talking about the mental improvements (calmness, focus, short-term memory). Sadly, I experienced none of that. It makes me think that either it is placebo, or sugar/carbs really does affect some people badly, but others not so much. I will say that I found loosing weight to be effortless when eating that way (in fact I had to go off it when I wanted to gain some weight).

Finally, I hate it when people point out things like "(a large Big Mac meal deal has 85 grams of sugar—236% of your daily allowance). That means if I were to escape refined sugar, I was going to have to spend more time at home cooking fresh foods than I was used to. " but then ignore the breakdown:

    Big Mac: 9g of sugar
    Medium Fries: 0g of sugar
    Large Coke-classic: 76g of sugar.

In other words, you don't need to cook more fresh foods, you could just get diet coke and double down on fries to get the calories you need without the sugar.

None of this is meant to say "No, we should all eat lots of sugar". I get that in the quantities that most people eat sugar, it's way too much. But I'm frustrated that we can't have an honest conversation about sugar and how it ought to be consumed. My personal opinion is that people should in general just stop drinking regular soda. If people did that, I suspect a fair amount of our sugar-consumption problems would just stop.

As someone in my early-towards-mid 40s, is it really hard to stay employed? I get that lots of folks are into consulting at this age or other versions of self-employed, but as a guy who got into this field fairly late, I'm concerned that I'm going to end up 50 and jobless which will really mess with my retirement plans.

Thank you. I completely agree that 'better' is not straightforward and am on record as claiming that 'healthy food' is silly, we should only care about 'healthy diets' (for example, simple salad isn't healthy if you have a protein deficiency).

Incidentally, green leaf lettuce has less than 5 grams of fiber for a whole head. So as far as it's use as a source of fiber, it seems underwhelming.

Thanks.

Is there some evidence that raw food is better for you? It's a lot more work to get through a giant bowl of cabbage than some sauteed in butter, but is it better for you? I imagine that there may be specific nutrients that don't survive heating, but is it significant?

Maybe the problem is the healthy halo on "fresh vegetables" in general.

Be charitable. If you haven't been exposed to actual linguistics (and know about things like PIE), you have the current, normal, common-sense view on language, which is that what you speak is normal, and what speakers of any other dialect or language do it wrong. I've heard intelligent, university educated people say things like "I don't want to learn $Language with an accent". The fact that no such 'accent-less' language exists is simply not a fact that they know. Such misconceptions about, and people who suffer under them are misguided, not stupid.

My two cents.

I don't actually understand the downvotes you are getting, unless people think that this just isn't adding to the conversation, but in the interests of making lemonaide:

We often use neuter (gender-neutral) pronouns in English, just not this one. I've heard native English speakers say things like "If a mother wants to use the nursing room, they can just key in the code in their pamphlet". There are definitely restrictions on using 'gender-neutral they' but this kind of usage is totally normal.

Which is a great sentence, because semantically the pronoun referent is obligatorily female and singular. And yet, we use 'they' in this context. Which shows (among other things) that syntactic requirements can be relatively divorced from semantics. C'mon, that's pretty cool, right?

It gives the DA an incentive to apply any charges that might possibly stick because it increases the likelihood of a plea deal by shifting the perceived risk to the accused. This is absolutely a bad situation, but presumably the DAs aren't amoral monsters who are deliberately trying to falsely convict people. :)

Of course there is. If you think that there is a 10% chance you might go to prison for life (for some crime), and the DA offers you a six month sentence, with a significant chance to be served as house arrest, then it might make a lot of sense to take the plea.

False convictions happen. So now it's just a question of taking the known cost now, or a gamble on a much higher cost after the trial.

I knew someone was going to notice that! :)

It's true, but it is 'open source', and many of my coworkers were not particularly discriminating among the different interpretations of OSS.

This statement is false as a blanket. I worked at MS in 2010, and I had vim and git installed on my machine. What they didn't want me to do was to install (or look at!) the source code.

The amount of FUD from rank-and-file employees was shocking though. Based on ignorance, but they just weren't part of the GPL world, and didn't care to understand it deeply. So I don't doubt that you may have asked someone and been told "Oh god, don't even look at that stuff". But it wasn't any kind of company wide policy.

I did end up talking to folks that were trying to make such a company wide policy, but even then what they were pushing for was some kind of GPL registry, where if you installed any open source software, you had to register it with the powers that be. I don't think that went anywhere though.

In my idiolect, those two words are homonyms. When I worked construction, you couldn't ask someone for caulk without raucous laughter.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/caulk

this link seems to agree, with the word represented in IPA as [kɔːk]

> I mean that's how things work, you don't have to invent anything, just make up some new expressions.

Let's be somewhat more charitable, and say "you don't have to invent anything, just provide an insight". Which is pretty reasonably, I think.

The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has one of these set up if you want to play some of the old classics.

http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/

Please answer these two questions:

1. What is wrong with revising a patent based on Patent Office feedback? "P.O.:This is objectionable for reasons x, y, z" , "Applicant: Ok, thanks, I'll change x, y, z so as not to be objectionable". This seems like a reasonable exchange on the face of it.

2. How will you distinguish 'revisions' from 'new' patents that are substantially similar to previous patent applications?

Remember that some companies (MSFT/Google/IBM) file for many, many patents every year.

How would a rejection differ from sending it back for revisions? Are you imagining a blackout period for that submitter?

> Languages were invented as means of communication, so if all languages disappear except one it'll be tremendous boost to humanity.

It isn't at all obvious that it would be a straight-up boon. It would help some things, hurt others. And in a few generations, we would have dialects and languages again. It's just how brains and (by extension) communities work.

If you leave it full of grounds for any length of time, it starts to corrode the interior of the tube (it starts to look 'scratched'). This can lead to seepage.

Sort of. The finer grind, increased pressure, and shortness of steep time make it different. It's more like a cross between an espresso machine and a french press.

I bought it thinking it would be a novelty item. I was mistaken.

I never notice when my comments are replied to! Sorry for the delay:

The biggest change is that I used to get migraines from lack of sleep (even while sleeping 8-10 hours plus occasional naps). Now I can get 6 a night continuously and be more alert. But most importantly my quality of life improved drammatically on account of having probably 30 hours a week of migraine-hours removed.

I still occasionally get lack-of-sleep-migraines, but they are rare, and are usually well deserved (I have three children, a puppy, and an unwillingness to give up 'alone time' in order to sleep enough. It's a bad combination).

Do it. Seriously. I can't believe the change in my life since discovering (in my 40s!) that I've suffered from sleep apnea my entire teen/adult life.

That's because you find them obscure. If your community used them more frequently you would just read them in place, like people do with IANAL, LGTM, AFAIK, etc.

Incidentally, I didn't understand this one, but I don't blame OP (oops, I mean 'original poster') for misunderstanding the linguistic norms of HN (hacker news).