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novaon Why we need to abolish software patents

Maybe a non-broken implementation is not possible.

> This is a subject of irrationality I have trouble understanding

That's because you are utterly, terribly wrong, and like you millions of people, including doctors. And that's why so many people have trouble losing weight. You think you have THE TRUTH, your truth is not working, then blame the world.

Just two things:

1) The actual first law of thermodynamics is:

(Calories In) - (Calories Out) - (Calories Stored) = 0

Note in particular this is a constraint, i.e., the absence of causality assumptions.

2) You don't eat pure energy. After the first law there is the second: http://www.nutritionj.com/content/3/1/9

3) Please read Taubes.

novaon Three Worlds Collide (Eliezer Yudkowsky)

That's actually a not so bad failure mode, I think.

novaon The Ultimate Guide To Getting Nowhere In Life

Also called marginal utility.

novaon Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer

Or you could say the China Study is vegetarian FUD backed by other lobbies (soy, grains, corn, etc).

By the way, nothing wrong with fat in our diets, unless is tran-fats or excess omega 6 PUFAs (typically seed oils). Please read Gary Taubes also.

novaon Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer

Oh yes, the China Study.

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

novaon Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer

> However, eating fruits and vegetables is still necessary for proper bodily function and general health.

Tell that to (ancient) Inuit.

novaon Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release

KB does exist, it's a Kelvin-byte.

novaon Genocide and Jedi: Why the Sith may be Right

So, Shadows and Vorlons?

novaon Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken (2006)

regardless of how they are represented, are not things that should be added together.

Maybe something about torsors?

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/torsors.html

novaon America's Jobless Future?

free to own much of the resources/land/factories/IP

One of these things doesn't belong.

novaon Is math a socialist plot?

Read Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" for more atrocities of the XXth century.

novaon Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought

I think we have to question the science when he states that exercise is an inefficient tool for weight loss.

The science of the book is sound. And he is right about exercise: it's good for fitness (as in muscle) and other health reasons, but for weight loss is almost useless by itself. The reason is insulin, which signal the body to store, not use, energy.

Of course you could calorie-count people on a high carb diet and whip them to exercise and they will probably lose weight. But you will also destroy their health and they will regain all of its former weight (and then some) later. This is documented and is all in the book too.

novaon Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought

Yes you can decompose it further but it doesn't matter. Just consider that "energy intake" is the energy actually absorbed by your body, not what you put in your mouth. (Try eating grass. It has energy, but we can't use it)

My point is that a lot of people misinterpret conservation of energy assigning it a direction of causality it doesn't have. It's a constraint between variables (not an assignation as in programming languages) which are under complex feedback control systems in the body, and that's why the kind of calories you eat (fats vs carbohydrates) DOES matter, you don't eat abstract pure energy but as you say mass with chemical energy that has to be metabolized.

That's why starvation diets (just counting theoretical calories, which are numbers obtained in laboratories, dismissing the type of macronutrient) often fails in the long term and leave serious damage. The book talks long about this.

novaon Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought

After (a very brief) look this seems to me like another Atkins-style diet

Taubes' book is not a diet book, it's a thick book on all the things that are wrong on modern research on nutrition. It explains why the problem is not fats (nor greens), but refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour.

Very worth your time, really.

novaon Complete Notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes | Higher Thought

Just write the equation like this:

Energy intake - Energy expenditure - Change in energy stores = 0

There. Just f(x,y,z)=0. That's what the first law really says. There is no causality implied, it just a first integral of the "motion" of metabolism that the body, naturally, has to follow.

It does NOT say what variables are free to independently modify. It's just a relation the three of them have to obey.

novaon Intake of saturated fat not associated with an increased risk of heart disease

Taubes deserves a Nobel-level award just for that book.

novaon The New Cavemen Lifestyle

The topic is very important but the article was really bad. A few no-nonsense links for the interested:

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/

http://www.paleonu.com/

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/

http://nephropal.blogspot.com/

I very much like Dr Harris (PaNu blog) position: is not about blindly replicating cavemen lifestile, but studing their metabolism (which is ours) in the light of modern science.

novaon A review of probability theory

I understand that E.T. Jaynes' book on probability theory, which I have not yet read, does not go the route of random variables.

Jaynes' book is excellent but is more about the philosophy of the Bayesian interpretation of probability than mathematics.

His problem with "random variables" is not so much the concept (although he wasn't a fan of measure theory), but the "random" in the name.

novaon A review of probability theory

Yes. I think this exceeds the capacity of the blog medium.

novaon Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth mastering ?

don't know if they are as unusable though

Pretty much.

novaon The Lost Decade:What the World Can Learn from 10 Years of Excesses

in practice, "hookup culture" is founded on the humiliation of the woman

uh?

novaon Gnome to Split Off from GNU Project?

We sure need more "crazies" like him.

novaon Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective

> it's obvious that we need some convergence.

Why? This isn't politics. Maybe one approach IS better than the other. Or maybe there are better methods we don't know.

In fact I think most Bayesians would consider Frequentist methods either plain "wrong" (like, at best works in special cases) or as approximations to the full Bayesian way.

And that doesn't mean they are useless, because going fully Bayesian normaly requires "a lot" of computation, or maybe we have issues with elicitation (I suspect this is the biggest hurdle for frequentists). But Bayes is still the gold standard.

novaon Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective

> or using some of your data to model your prior

I think that kinda missing the point.

novaon A climate scientist who engages skeptics

> What is the best way to deal with skeptics of generally accepted ideas?

You know, this could be read very, very wrongly.

novaon How to lose weight. No, really.

> As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.

This is very wrong. Obesity is not a shortage of discipline, is a hormonal disruption. We play havoc with insulin eating too much of things we didn't evolved to eat.

novaon How to lose weight. No, really.

This is obviously true, but it's not as simple as it may seem.

The body has a complex energy regulation system and hunger, energy consumption via metabolism and energy storage are interlaced. It's not as simple as "energy in" = independent variable.

It has a preference to store (instead of immediately use) calories from carbohydrates (due to insulin). So a diet low in total calories but still high in carbs is going to be painful, and very frequently fails.

Read Gary Taubes' book, people.

novaon How to lose weight. No, really.

His advice is not bad, but it can be simplified: low carb diet. Avoid specially excess fructose, so yes, lose the sodas, and sweets and sugar. And cereals derivatives (like bread). Also starchy vegetables (like potatoes).

Exercise if you want muscle, but it's not necessary or sufficient.

novaon A minimal C unit testing framework (only 3 LOC)

You could also concatenate the strings, as they are know at compile time, and use puts or something simpler than printf.

puts("FAILED: " #expr )

(Or you could keep the printf, as it looks like GCC optimizes it to puts when just used to print a string, without variable interpolation)