711–720 of 1001 posts
The leading cause of death is cardiovascular disease. >90% of these cases can be attributed to an overweight population. It's not an easy problem to solve, but there has to be a way to fix it. Lots of calorie counting apps, activity trackers, motivational reminder apps, etc. Obesity is very complicated, but there are three basic facts: 1. Calories in, calories out is the golden rule. 2. The vast majority of calories…
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>Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. No. If the laws of thermodynamics had been proven false, we would have heard of it.
Thermodynamic laws certainly apply, but you just can't measure all the variables properly. Trying to apply that kind of input/output calculations on such a complicated bio-chemical model like human body is just a naive over-simplification. First you would need to calculate the caloric value of your complete excrements (including sweat), before you even know what the actual energy input is. Than you would need to meas…
Older people. We live in a rapidly ageing society. Retirees are a large and wealthy demographic. Despite that, tech companies are absolutely woeful at designing products for older users. We don't empathise with their needs. We don't understand how poor eyesight, arthritis or cognitive difficulties can affect UX. There's a huge amount of pent-up demand and excellent opportunities for future growth.
I've been thinking a lot about this recently. There are certain near-future technologies like self-driving cars and robotic home care that could revolutionise the lives of the old. I think that's a given, but they have a relatively high barrier to entry. At the other end of the scale there must be pure (or almost pure) software solutions that could help older peoples' lives also. I've been thinking of Alexa-style AIs…
Seniors probably don't think about putting all their content in the cloud, don't think about inheritance of their online account, and don't think about their OS either.
Sounds like an opportunity?
Function as a service (like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions) for Ruby. None of these natively support Ruby ^1 ^2. It's mind boggling that this is the case, especially considering how many Rails/Sinatra apps there are! ^1 Sure there is hacks for getting Ruby running on them, but no native support ^2 Yes I know about Ironworker, from iron.io, but they're going a dockerized and up market and don't…
Ewwwwwwwwwwww.
For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991.
For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe, but VST system is stinky and stuck in times of Windows 95. People are buying hardware synths (which are just computers running software) only because software on these embedded computers runs reliably, but VSTs crash, freeze every time and require hardware license keys plugged into parallel port. Also, everything inside is complete black magic and every supplier of software pretends that there are super secret algorithms everywhere. Every oscillator and filter is super-secret and super-unique and there's no articles in the open how to design "decent" oscillator and filter. Medival times everywhere.
And these tools should be designed for users, not Entertainment Content Production Corporations.
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>Calories in, calories out is not the golden rule, and this has been scientifically proven false. No. If the laws of thermodynamics had been proven false, we would have heard of it.
The issue with the simplifying "calories in == calories out" is that conservation of energy is being applied over the wrong system. Our bodies are not 100% efficient at extracting energy from food, and to GP's point respond differently to different types of foods.
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The issue with the simplifying "calories in == calories out" is that conservation of energy is being applied over the wrong system. Our bodies are not 100% efficient at extracting energy from food, and to GP's point respond differently to different types of foods.
No system is 100% efficient. What's your point?
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Based on all of the responses to this comment I can see how someone would be completely confused on what they need to do to lose weight. While admitting the rest of this thread is bonkers, I'll explicitly list the formula you should follow right now (science is always evolving): Change in Body Stores = (Actual Calories In - Calories Not Absorbed) - (Resting Metabolic Rate + Thermic Effect of Eating + Physical Activit…
"Calories Not Absorbed" really got me thinking. While a food is labeled with their potential calories - the amount actually extracted from the food by your gut will vary significantly based on the composition of the food. The bioavailability of calories for example in a cookie versus some fibrous raw vegetable are going to differ significantly, being absorbed at different rates and to differing degrees of completenes…
So I guess eating processed food vs food that's hard to digest actually matters a decent bit if you're counting calories (10-15% of your calories is not insignificant - that's almost half of what you're trying to cut on a calorie restriction diet)
[1]http://www.peanut-institute.org/images/materials_10_19046826...
Political Science & Democracy Management AFAIK there's little to no innovation in this field aside from the occasional electronic voting machine, whose security may or may not be totally un-hackable. In a day & age where the internet reaches every home, & there's a web browser in nearly everyone's pocket, it shouldn't be that difficult to effectively discern the will of the people. But we're still depending on manual…
Yet, computer security is hard. Like, holy shit, all the problems of physical security combined with all the problems of network security. Decentralized paper balloting limits things to just the relatively-well-understood physical side while limiting the scope for the damage of a breach. It turns out there are distinct advantages to this approach that justify it over something web-based.
Elected officials making empty promises is a social problem. Technology can't help us there.
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Please don't call people Gurus. I've had at least three lousy experiences working with people who referred to themselves as Gurus. Some of them didn't even know the dictionary definition of the word. I feel I have dodged a number of bullets since then, by developing a healthy prejudice against self-titled Gurus.
+1 And "visionaries". May be it's just me, but my defenses go up whenever I read a profile with visionary in it.