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bello

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I agree that poor lifestyle choices should be somehow disincentivized.

Leaving aside the fact that BMI isn't a great metric (as mentioned in another comment); we can probably come up with a better one.

80% of healthcare costs are driven by 15 conditions, which in turn are mostly affected by 8 behaviors [1]. I bet that the bulk of the cost is due to completely changeable lifestyle behaviors (diet, drinking, smoking, physical activity).

Alcohol and tobacco should be more heavily taxed (fast-food is trickier, as we need to make sure that there's healthy, equally-accessible food options out there). Education around healthy lifestyle choices should be more available, as well as gym memberships/fitness equipment/trainers. Sure they do cost money, but we're already paying so much through non-preventive healthcare.

Any other ideas how to disincentivized unhealthy lifestyle choices?

[1] http://www.aon.com/attachments/human-capital-consulting/2012...

To provide a slightly different perspective: I recently came across a great blogpost/newsletter: http://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/how-to-ride-your-brain-bicycle

It argues that the main reason we don't achieve our goals is not external factors, or the lack of an effective productivity system; it's a commitment failure. We have subconscious second thoughts whether our goals are actually important to us, we lack a sense of purpose.

"There is no point being focused, with a finely tuned productivity system, and maniacal discipline against distractions, if you're not sure what you're doing is worth doing"

So sure, our attention span is decreasing and we're becoming more easily distracted, but is that all there is to blame for the alleged productivity loss?

They messed up and overbooked the flight, sure. But why on earth would they forcefully drag people out of the plane, while they could just find volunteers?

They could offer cash/miles to whoever volunteered, increasing the offer until someone accepted. I've seen other airlines do this on several occasions. They couldn't have handled it worse than they did.

Not always. Sometimes renting might be a better deal than buying.

There are several factors which need to be taken into account, such as mortgage interest payments, opportunity cost of downpayment, property tax, tax deductions, property appreciation, etc. Khan Academy has an interesting video on this topic: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

PS: Sure, if your property appreciates by a lot you'll make a large return. But what if it deprecates? People being overly optimistic about property appreciations were part of the reason/most affected by the housing bubble.

It's different because this time it's VC money, not people's savings.

When a company is listed, the stock price better reflect the actual market value of the company (otherwise a dot-com bubble happens). However, if rich VCs like to bet on startups, that's expected to be a high-risk investment.

Could someone explain why array writes are so expensive? I understand that a write would mark a cache line as dirty (significantly increasing eviction time cause you have to write-back) and that it could probably prevent the compiler from enregistering stuff. However, I don't get the aliasing and the "a write is really a read and a write" argument.

Disclaimer: I'm not too familiar with the code.

"This arena is mmap'd, with guard pages before and after so pointer over- and under-runs won't wander into it."

Doesn't that mean that this will only protect against overreads of a certain max length (such that the int16 length in heardbleed)? Seems like that wouldn't help with a length defined as a bigger int. I wonder if there's any better ways of doing this.

While it's true that there is an "infinite supply of these problems", a good CS program it's supposed to teach you how to think, hence teaching you how to learn.

If you have a very solid understanding of the fundamentals, you should be able to go and solve problems you've never seen before. If you don't, you could be stuck using other people's solutions to your problems, hence not being able to solve new ones that you might encounter.

"all the joins are done in client code"

What's the point of joining in the application level? If you're going to join, why not do it in the database? That should be both faster and more convenient (unless your schemas aren't relational at all, in which case I don't see why you'd use a relational database)

What you're suggesting is converting a universal, concise, formal language into the potentially ambiguous and/or redundant "plain English". What's the point of that? One has to learn some math before being able to read math.

Personal analytics is indeed a very interesting topic (cool article from stephen wolfram: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...).

The biggest challenge imo is privacy and security: How do you safely collect and process everything (from emails to texts)? While I could implement something for my personal use, would anyone give access to all their communications to a third-party service? I wouldn't.

Maybe there is some better way to collect this information (just metadata? do some analytics and store results instead of raw messages?).

Writing (0 == a) instead of (a == 0) to check a's equality with 0.

It sacrifices readability. I'm sure there are tools (if not one can easily write one) that warn you for accidental assignment when comparison was meant instead.

Moreover, the (0 == a) trick only works for constants (which you can't assign values to, hence the compiler will complain), but not for variables. I.e. you can still do if (a = b) accidentally, when comparison was intended.