WilliamLP

> I'm a frigging EXPERT in dozens of stuff that would make people smile now (those who are old enough ;-))

I'd love to read your list. :)

Can you please stop commenting on whether to use posts as meta-moderation? The community decided the post was worth the number one spot.

> Well, there IS an integer that contains all the digits of Pi

1234567890 does:)

Wow, making selling a game into a game itself. How brilliant!

I wonder if I'm the only one here who is completely font-blind? I never notice what font something is unless someone points it out, let alone being able to pick out 25 specific ones. I guess that makes me a poor candidate for being a designer, doesn't it!

> I think paying for porn is easier than torrenting it if you have any discrimination at all in what you're after.

You sound like someone who has never used BitTorrent effectively!

It is interesting just how much Y-Combinator itself resembles the business model of a university, except that it really can make a deal for a percent of a student's future earnings in a socially palatable way. Like a top university, much of its value seems to come from signaling and the hype generated just from the label of being a Y-Combinator startup.

This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.

There has to be a better way to raise optimism about a release that has been continually delayed, other than to start soliciting public user feedback as to what the medium term plans for the development schedule should be?

I think like many other nascent entertainment technologies, the first really profitable use cases for this could be porn and gaming.

> I don't know exactly how his experiment would turn out.

I'm sure there would be correlation, but I suspect that it would be very far from perfect, possibly because of talent or inadvertently (or deliberately) discovering better and more effective ways to practice.

I'm reminded me of when I was a kid and played chess with a friend a lot. At first I could beat him and we played about the same amount but suddenly he inexplicably got far better than me. It bugged the hell out of me:)

So I think the result of Adams' "lesson" would actually be to teach people that they have strengths and weaknesses, and practice helps a lot, but it will (rather quickly) get swamped by talent in any realistic endeavor. And results might also be strongly affected by effective coaching or acquiring specific knowledge to make those hours of practice dramatically more effective.

> If there was no minimum wage, they could work $2 an hour of value and then gradually work their way up.

Wouldn't panhandling itself be far more lucrative than this? Based on walking by many beggars every day in a downtown area and seeing people giving them money, I'd estimate most of them make more than minimum wage anyway.

For one thing, though scientific, any conclusion is going to be rather soft if it's drawn from one study where human beings self-report calories, and where the difference in weight (2kg) is within the variance of how much our weight can vary within a single day.

You're preaching to the choir here. What you're not going to be able to demonstrate is that, in laboratory controlled conditions where literally every calorie is counted by a scientist, and all variables are taken into account (e.g. hyrdation levels) that one kind of calorie leads to a "metabolic advantage" over another and lead to more or less fat loss or gain given adequate protein. This would be a kind of holy grail discovery.

What is undeniable is that any study where people self-count their caloric intake has a ton of potential problems which have been demonstrated over and over again. People are notoriously terrible at counting calories in what they eat.

It is true that sugars have certain metabolic effects, for example with insulin, that will make you hungrier and crave more. This makes it true that they should be avoided. Basically I think we're on the same page if you're willing to scratch the "obviously".

Another point is that the amount that doing weight training raises your metabolism is extremely overrated. I don't have the hard data in front of me but I think if you look up how many more calories you burn by gaining a pound of muscle, you will be shocked that it isn't that much. This is one of those "everybody knows" facts about fitness that everyone believes but isn't really backed up very well.

> obviously getting your calories from healthy fats such as olive oil and avacados is going to be a lot more beneficial to your weight in the long run than getting your calories from sugary fizzy drinks such as coca-cola.

It may be "obvious", but I'm not sure if that's true!