would anybody like to give a TL;DR synopsis?
> would anybody like to give a TL;DR synopsis?
It says: The TLDR lifestyle kills you.
The island where people forget to die
81–90 of 154 posts
Re: The island where people forget to die
#82I heard tell or a similar tale in he Med. where he natural hot springs were a trace radioactive. It was thus hypothesized that this small, consistent dose was partially responsible for the almost zero rate of cancer on the island.
It might be BS, it might not be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
Re: The island where people forget to die
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Segmented sleep? Melatonin? Maybe it's just my Mediterranean upbringing talking but I think I'll stick with healthy food, good wine, 8 hours sleep, and surrounding myself with people I like.
Nontraditional sleep patterns are a common fad here at HN; though you've been around to probably see one or two of those and are probably trolling to catch people like me, so ... I'll just shut up now.
Eh? That comment looked like a troll?
Re: The island where people forget to die
#84Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…
If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically. Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source…
I'm always conflicted about interesting comments which link to something I read and learn from, but which are needlessly insulting. The grandparent linked to FightingAging.com and I read the article and clicked on some of the links and found it informative, though not convincing. But I cringe when he says, "Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense."
So do I upvote because I learned something from his comment, or downvote because his tone degrades the quality of discourse on Hacker News? Clearly pg says "downvote", and I often do, but I'm always on the fence about it.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#85That the guy survived lung cancer seems more likely a misdiagnosis or rare spontaneous remission than some kind of cause-effect. My vote however does go for: stress level, diet, and enough physical activity. Genetics too but you can't control that.
It's not entirely clear how rare it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_remission#Frequency...
Re: The island where people forget to die
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.
Sounds like a job for Sentiment Analysis [1]. Modern systems are pretty good at discerning negative from positive comments. You could probably find a way to mark negative and positive comments. Whether the resulting algorithm would be fine-grained enough to semi-reliably mark 'middlebrow dismissal,' I really don't know. Actually, as somebody who has worked on that stuff in the past, I don't think it would be very eas…
Bing Liu is one of the researchers working on this. I've discussed Amazon review fraud detection with him. http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/
Re: The island where people forget to die
#87I hate this kind of reporting. I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about -- I'm pretty sure it's not all just for one guy's life story. But by that point I was tired of reading, and quit. Cut it out with the pathos and human interest, and get some of the real point in there quicker.
I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about
The last paragraph on the front page tells you exactly what the article is about. Opening with an human anecdote is a common trope in long-form journalism, because that's what a majority of people want before they will put in the time to read several thousand words about mortality statistics.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#88Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…
"Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome." Not accurate. Smoking takes about 10 years off life expectancy, which is thought to be the reason why hispanics have a longer life expectancy than non-hispanic whites in the US. Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy. Being religious adds a couple years to l…
> Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy
"Mental illness" is a pretty broad category. Can you offer a source for this?
Re: The island where people forget to die
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nontraditional sleep patterns are a common fad here at HN; though you've been around to probably see one or two of those and are probably trolling to catch people like me, so ... I'll just shut up now.
Eh? That comment looked like a troll?
Not entirely. You sounded like someone that is very happy with their current lifestyle, and even proud of it. This is good. However, given how long you've had an account here, I guessed that you had probably seen the "how to live off >4 hours of sleep a day" articles, and were familiar with that perplexing (to me) style of living.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a job for Sentiment Analysis [1]. Modern systems are pretty good at discerning negative from positive comments. You could probably find a way to mark negative and positive comments. Whether the resulting algorithm would be fine-grained enough to semi-reliably mark 'middlebrow dismissal,' I really don't know. Actually, as somebody who has worked on that stuff in the past, I don't think it would be very eas…
Thanks for the link. Agreed I don't think it would be an easy task, but I wonder how would perform a "bag of word" approach. Harder part as I see it would be to categorize the comments on middlebrow dismissal / Not dismissal. It seems like we would be spending more time preparing the data than in the algorithm itself.
Welcome to statistics/data science/machine learning.
The hardest part is always getting the data into usable form. Its not as much fun as fitting models, but its definitely the majority of any role where people pay you to do this kind of stuff.
There's a lot of good research on forums (pm me if you want a bibliography i collected for a previous role), and short texts have become a bigger deal post Twitter. I completely agree with pg on the somewhat annoying nature of comments such as the GP.