The Decline of ‘Big Soda’

We do give originals another shot, by rolling the clock back on them internally, if they're up to a few hours old. Beyond that, it feels weird to have a story on the front page with just a few points and a timestamp that says e.g. "23 hours ago", let alone "163 days ago".

We don't change the user-facing timestamp, because that feels like rewriting history, the sort of thing that HN users wouldn't like. It would also make /newest look weird as neighboring posts could then have different ages.

The repost invites don't require users to come up with a different URL. You click on a link and the software fills that in for you.

Probably our next step will be to add a setting to user profiles that people can turn on if they want the software to do such reposts for them automatically. In that case, no need for an email, plus the software could pick a good time to do the repost. On the other hand, it's already clear that many users like getting these emails. The positive feedback has been striking.

An open question is what to do in cases where the submitter has no email address in their profile, or doesn't check their email.

If you or anyone knows of a more elegant solution, please tell us! We would love that.

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...

Also the obesity rate in children is down, which is encouraging: http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2015/15_0185.htm

If a beverage has a certain number of calories from sugar per volume, it doesn't really matter whether it's cola-flavored, orange-flavored, vanilla-flavored, tea-flavored, natural-flavored, artificially-flavored, carbonated, uncarbonated, caffeinated, or uncaffeinated. They're all functionally soft drinks, from a dietary perspective, but the graph that charts the decline in carbonated soda does not show the other members in this group.

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B)

I actually harbor a hypothesis that I have not seen explored which would explain this even if we take it on face value. Contrary to traditional sources of sugar and starch, sweet beverages cause an absorption of sugar unimpeded by the normal vagaries of digestion - there's no chewing, nothing to slow a person down, no cell walls to slowly break down in the stomach, no fiber to absorb and slowly squeeze out the calories.

In the 90's, I used to drink two or three liters of birch beer for something to do while waiting for the pizza. You can keep pouring orange soda into a human body without complaint, long after they would have vomitted up a sugar-equivalent cherry pie. And often our behavior shifts to adopting soda whenever we look for a drink, as the default, several times a day.

We know that blood sugar spikes cause insulin spikes, and we know that ghrelin, insulin, & related hormones act together to modulate the hunger & satiety responses.

My hypothesis is that rapid sugar intake via drinks, when combined with our natural impulse to slake our thirst, acts to dysregulate our hunger and satiety responses in the longer term. Through whatever processes, it detaches hunger from ad libitum consumption levels, sufficient that an extra few hundred calories per day is the 'natural' level that affected people, on average, feel they should be eating. 100 extra calories a day over burn rate is about 10lbs/year of gained weight.

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C) Obesity is a lagging indicator here. People faced with an ad libitum diet find it very, very easy to maintain their weight. There seems to be a nearly universal misconception that baseline gluttony is associated with high weight levels, but that's bullshit. A person weighing 300lbs has roughly the same neurochemical hunger/stress response as a person weighing 150lbs, when you shortchange them each by 500 calories a day relative to their metabolic burn rate: It's just that metabolic burn rate goes way up as one gains weight. Maintaining weight is the default state. The mystery is why people are on average slowly gaining weight, rather than why fat people are not losing weight.