To Lose Weight, Eating Less Is Far More Important Than Exercising More - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/upshot/to-lose-weight-eating-less-is-far-more-important-than-exercising-more.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1 <comment><USER3> The problem here seems that discussions about this are sooo littered with personal biases. "Bro science" is just one aspect of this, far more common is expecting that one's personal achievement is universally reproducible. Yes, person A may eat all the burgers and twinkies, because he's going to the gym all the time and swimming laps like there's no tomorrow. But as a general rule to combat obesity, that's probably not the way to go (we often get the same personal non-exceptionalism in economic debates).

So I hope we'll have less "But it worked for me!" in this thread and more thought about something a bit more universal and averaged out.

<comment><USER4> > Yes, person A may eat all the burgers and twinkies, because he's going to > the gym all the time

One major problem with the standard BMI definitions is that any athlete in a sport that vaguely requires muscles will be classed as 'overweight' or 'obese'.

Although there may be some justification for this categorisation, these are people we normally consider at the peak of fitness.

One of the best things you can do for long-term health outcomes is to follow a strength training programme. For an average person, that may result in weight gain via muscle. This is not a bad thing.

<comment><USER5> > > > Yes, person A may eat all the burgers and twinkies, because he's going > to the gym all the time

> One major problem with the standard BMI definitions is that any athlete in a > sport that vaguely requires muscles will be classed as 'overweight' or > 'obese'.

Oh, what a major problem it is for the vast majority of overweight people changing their diet and lifestyle. This really is the most important point they have to keep in mind: BMI don't apply to athletes who regularly train and practice. What a bummer.

/s

<comment><USER6> My BMI is 30.1, which is obese. With a 36' waist, and usually fitting pretty comfortably in to an American size M t-shirt, I am a little overweight, but BMI is not a helpful measurement for any kind of diagnostic for me. I lift the occasional heavy thing, but an athlete I am not.

<comment><USER5> So you are overweight and your BMI correlates (and a single data point).

For what it's worth I used to wear EU M t-shirts a decade ago and I haven't put on weight. But the same M t-shirt sold these days is way slimmer than my old t-shirts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is one of the main themes of the documentary Fed Up - the food & beverage industry have sold us a lie about the US obesity crisis (people are obese because they don't exercise enough) - while downplaying their involvement (hiding\obfuscating sugar in the nutrition information of "healthy" options, lobbying to have Pizza classified as a "vegetable" portion in school meals, etc). It's worth checking out: [http://fedupmovie.com/](http://fedupmovie.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> There really isn't that much science to it. On paper its really really simple.

To loose weight, you must expend more energy than you absorb.

However, conversely to get fit, you will need to eat a balanced diet, with enough calories to replace damaged muscles.

However on the weight loss front here are the golden rules:

Some people exercise (exercise expends energy)

Some people reduce energy consumption (eat less, or eat less calorific food)

Some people combine both.

There are no other options.

Seriously, if you are on a diet and you are not loosing weight, its not because you are unlucky, its because you are still absorbing more energy than you are expending. Exercise more, or eat less.

There is _some_ evidence that efficiency can be altered by eating patterns, however that's not enough to over come eating an extra 300calories a day.

Everything else, is literally junk science. The 4:2 only works if on arrogate you consume less calories. Atkins only works if you can't absorb the extra energy you have in fat and protein. Etc, etc, etc.

This part is the easy part. Weight in 90% of cases is a symptom of one's environment. Changing environment is devilishly difficult.

<comment><USER9> Assuming that by "4:2" you are talking about intermittent fasting, does anyone believe otherwise? Alternate-day fasting can help people lose weight not because there's any magical effect, but because a faster is unlikely to double their calorie intake the day after fasting - having fast days is just a simple/easy way to reduce overall calorie intake.

Besides, the main benefits of alternate-day fasting are meant to be health related, not explicitly weight-loss. Is it a main-stream weight-loss method?

<comment><USER10> Intermittent fasting combined with weightlifting means you are more likely to loose fat and not muscles while fasting. The weightlifting will tell the body that the muscles are needed and it will then have less of a tendency to metabolize them for energy.

Also muscles burn energy while you are sitting on your sofa. Increasing your muscles mass by weightlifting means you will burn more energy all the time. I think weightlifting is strongly overlooked for weight loss and especially for loosing fat when combined with intermittent fasting.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a source for that?

First, I'm talking about actual weight loss, not fat loss. They are two different goals.

Weightlifting causes muscle damage that needs repairing. This requires energy.

Intermittent fasting will cause longer repair times and if done incorrectly will cause muscle loss. (muscle bulk I assume is your end goal, as opposed to a specific need for a sport)

However the common way to gain muscles is to take protein powder laced with hormones, natural or otherwise. As a strategy for weight loss it is useless unless you exercise enough to burn off the extra calories consumed. This requires time and effort, both of which are difficult.

Loosing fat is not in its self weight loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who recently lost 40 lbs, I should say that it is generally true. A hard ergometer exercise can have a net effect of 240 kcal for one hour and gross effect of 320 assuming 80 kcal per hour body burn. 240 kcal is not much at all, provided that my body generally burns 2800 kcal a day. Not even 10%

However limiting food intake reduces not only the calories, but vitamins and micronutrients plus minerals. Also not exercising at all means muscle loss and not so much fat loss, which can have severe effects in 3-6 months. So regular exercises are must, swimming for example 3 times a week plus some brisk walk in the park twice a week will do miracles. Not to forget proper feeding is it is as much important as reducing calories intake and creating calories deficiency. If one can't balance his food to have proper vitamins and minerals, one should resort to food supplements at least for calcium, potassium, magnesium, vitamins C, B6, B12 and E if you want to keep you heart and liver healthy during the process. Know what you eat and do the numbers. I started with 39% body fat and 33% muscle.. Now I am 30% body fat and 35% muscle with a lot of cardio. A close friend of mine reduced his food intake and albeit he achieved serious weigh loss, that was on the expense of muscle and tissue, rather then fat loss..

Personally I achieved my loss with the help of numbers and constant measures - get a proper scale that can report body fat/muscle/tissue, cross check with calipers, get a fitness tracker to track daily steps and calories, track you food, exercise, calories and progress.. There are so many sites and applications to do so.. And really important - do a blood work each 3 months for you heart and liver. A few drops of blood can give you so much intel

Hope that helps

</comment><comment><USER12> Still amazed that people are still considering this a pure caloric issue and not a food quality issue.

When you look at how various hormones (namely insulin) are affected by blood sugar & affect body composition, it seems you'd want to promote a method that bears that in mind.

That said, I think the focus should be on "eating better" not just "eating less."

<comment><USER13> Eating 3000kcal of "quality food" every day will still make you gross fat and give you heart problems. And did you know that protein also affects insulin? Insulin is essential for muscle building.

Still find it hilarious how so many people still don't understand that a caloric deficit or surplus is the #1 thing to do when trying to cut or bulk.

<comment><USER14> "Eating 3000kcal of 'quality food' every day will still make you gross fat and give you heart problems"

Eating 3000 kcal every day would make me shrivel away to skin and bones.

"thing to do when trying to cut or bulk"

Most adult males who lift enough weights to care about cutting and bulking are burning 3000+ kcals daily.

<comment><USER15> > Most adult males who lift enough weights to care about cutting and bulking > are burning 3000+ kcals daily.

I very much doubt that. Most adult males that combine lifting 1 hour+ a day with a physically demanding job and who is otherwise highly active, maybe. That includes a very small proportion of people who "lift enough weights to care about cutting and bulking".

I've done power lifting for ten years. I'm 108kg, carry around far more muscle than the average man. I exercise hard 3+ times a week. That's enough that my lifts according to strstd.com are all in the "advanced" range - much more than that is a waste when doing power lifting unless you're aiming to compete internationally. Yet my daily calorie need is on average ~2300kcal because I have a sedentary office job.

Most guys I see that worry about cutting and bulking have no clue what they're doing, and end up getting fat and bloated when bulking, so I tend to discount what people think they need quite heavily. I gained most of my muscle early on with a diet that saw me on 1600kcal-1800kcal. It's just the last few years I've been able to increase my intake above that without adding too much fat (and if you think I'm super defined and low body fat, think again)

<comment><USER16> This is why the human body is so fascinating. If my conversions are correct I weigh 88kg, perform about an hour of exercise a day and by limiting my calories to 2500/day I'm losing ~.8kg/week. I'm weighing all my food at home and at work so I doubt I'm out by more than maybe 100 calories.

Yet you are much larger, and fitter, but only need 2300 to maintain. I used to have more than 25% of your total daily intake in my coffees! And I've never been fat fat.

<comment><USER17> In livestock, they selectively breed for animals with good feed conversion ratios. i.e. for two pigs of the same breed given the same food, one will put on 1kg of mass and one will put on 1.5kg.

It would be daft to assume the same thing couldn't happen with people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everybody in the fitness circles (see Reddit Fitness) knows this. It's just that normally doctors, TV & company misadvice you, telling something like "walk more, be more active" when the task at hand is to lose weight. Actually the exercise suggestion should be: do some strength training _while seriously dieting_ in order to retain muscles. A 30 minutes run will burn ~400 calories. The same amount of calories can be eaten in 10 seconds. Do your math.

<comment><USER19> You do your math. Exercise isn't just about how many calories you burn _during_ it. Add a kilo of muscle and it will be burning energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

<comment><USER20> You urged to do your math, but didn't present any of yours.

Muscle burns an inconsequential amount of energy -- 6-10 per pound depending on sources. So if you were somehow to gain 10 pounds of pure muscle, you'd have enough calories for a small apple per day (60 cal).

How fast can you gain 10 pounds of muscle? In an 18-week weight training programme, a group of men gained 4.6 pounds of muscle: [http://jap.physiology.org/content/82/1/298](http://jap.physiology.org/content/82/1/298) \-- most of the gain in 8 weeks. So I would imagine increasing your lean mass by 10 pounds (just to be able to eat an extra apple a day) would be quite an effort.

One study: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139779/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139779/)

So considering SOLELY weight loss, ignoring calory deficits from diet changes and focusing on building up muscle mass does not seem effective. Instead of building up muscle mass for a 60Cal deficit via BMR increase, take a 600 Cal deficit via diet and lose the weight in 1/10th the time.

<comment><USER19> The point is though that you have shifted your daily equilibrium, and it takes zero thought to maintain that. Choosing to eat 60 calories less a day is a _choice_ , which takes mental effort. In contrast, once you have that 10 pounds of muscle, it is burning away regardless. 60 calories * 365 days = 21900 calories a year. Fat has 9 calories per gram, so if you maintain your eating at the same level, that's ~2.4 kilograms (~5 pounds) a year you are losing without even trying. Obviously in reality, your appetite goes up as well, but the point is that once you are muscular enough you have to actively try to eat more just to maintain your weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _" Far too many people, though, can manage to find an hour or more in their day to drive to the gym, exercise and then clean up afterward — but complain that there's just no time to cook or prepare a healthful, home-cooked meal. If they would spend just half the time they do exercising trying to make a difference in the kitchen, they'd most likely see much better results."_

This. From my anecdotal evidence, weight loss is largely a commitment issue. So when you spend as much time going to the gym and back as you spend exercising there, motivation to continue the effort can disappear despite the reward. So it's just best to find your own right balance between (what kind of/how much) effort and reward.

<comment><USER6>
        > weight loss is largely a commitment issue

Yes, but it's a "commitment issue" in the same class as "stopping drinking", "stopping smoking", and "getting out of debt" for a lot of people; there's a very large mental/compulsive/dependency component.

<comment><USER22> To the extent that scientists who've studied it reckon that only 5% of the population are _capable_ of keeping weight down long term through diet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's tough to lose weight. I've had success lowering my calorie intake.

I find that only implementing one change at a time conserves my willpower so that I'm more likely to succeed. I'll either up my exercise a couple weeks before I start cutting the calories or cut calories then wait a few weeks before introducing exercise.

Controlling what I eat, for me at least, is easier than upping my exercise levels.

</comment><comment><USER24> After years in the practice of obesity medicine, helping people lose excess weight, I'd say the thrust of the article is correct. The main key to successful (that is, sustained) weight loss is modifying food intake. Not for nothing do we call this "lifestyle modification", we should never underestimate the effort and courage it takes to adhere to the better plan.

Thing is one can never exercise enough to "burn off" the tremendous calorie intake most people are subject to. After all around 75-80% of energy expenditure occurs in the resting state, only 20-25% is ordinarily attributable to physical activity.

However I fully agree with the article that exercise is far from useless, certainly can contribute to well-being and has many indirect benefits that assist in long-term maintenance of decreased body fat content.

Of course none of this is really new, it's been established wisdom in obesity treatment circles for a long time. "Getting in shape" is hardly a trivial project as it requires commitment, determination, knowledge and support. Maintaining the benefit of hard won weight loss is not free, the price is eternal vigilance.

<comment><USER25> >the practice of obesity medicine

Curious, what does that entail?

<comment><USER24> Among other terms for it are "medical weight management" and "bariatric medicine". The idea is prescribing appropriate nutritional programs, behavioral approaches, and yes, exercise to assist people to reduce excess body fat content.

Where indicated, medications can be prescribed to reduce appetite and satiety, perhaps increase metabolism in some instances. Probably obvious, but there are many other aspects to treatment of obesity, not the least of which is addressing other health conditions that contribute to excess adiposity.

There is substantial medical/science literature on all these topics, really not too hard to find using search engines of choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The phrase I always hear is that "abs are made in the kitchen."

Edit: Or the variation: "Abs are made in the gym, revealed in the kitchen," which I always thought sounded kind of gruesome if you take it literally.

<comment><USER15> Abs particularly because abs don't get very big no matter what you do, and so for most people abs won't really be very visible unless you dip below 10% body fat. No amount of crunches etc. will work around that.

For larger muscle groups the body fat percentage matters much less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I found it ridiculously easy to lose weight by eliminating refined sugar and alcohol from my diet. 'Don't drink calories' is a great rule of thumb, sugared beverages are a plague on society. Keep your sweet tooth happy by eating fresh fruit--I don't think it's even possible to get or stay fat if your main sugar source is fruit.

<comment><USER28> _especially_ alcohol -- there's huge calories in booze. It also promotes being sedentary, and also over-eating if you drink with dinner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think focussing on "weight loss" is the incorrect metric. They would be better off using "body fat %".

It is possible to gain weight, and yet become more healthy. In addition, the metric most often used to work out whether are people are overweight, the BMI, is hopelessly inaccurate.

</comment><comment><USER29> For myself at least its always been quite simple...

If you want to lose weight and be healthy - eat little and eat healthy.

If you want to lose weight and don't care too much for your health - <USER2> little.

If you want to be healthy - eat healthy.

If you just don't care - eat whatever you like.

<comment><USER30> I was simplifying of it as:

Calories --> Weight

Food quality & exercise --> health

<comment><USER31> That works in my head too, though I'd always add the caveat that you need both and should endeavour not to sacrifice one (even temporarily) in order to improve the other. Along that path (particularly compromising the health side in a pursuit of dramatic weight loss) fad diets and the like lie, and those things rarely work long term.

<comment><USER31> That works in my head too, though I'd always add the caveat that you need both and should endeavour not to sacrifice one (even temporarily) in order to improve the other. Along that path (particularly compromising the health side in a pursuit of dramatic weight loss) fad diets and the like lie, and those things rarely work long term.

One important factor that I've noticed ( _warning: anecdotal evidence approaching, be prepared to engage critical thinking_ ) is that while exercise increases my appetite it doesn't seem to increase it as much as the extra I'm burning off. The difference isn't large but it is noticeable when watching closely and it seems to be relatively consistent: yes my body wants me to eat more when I exercise more, but it seems content with getting less extra in than the extra it has put out so if I just listened to my hunger I'd still slowly lose weight. This doesn't seem to be the case in periods when I do little or no exercise beyond my daily routine (walking to/from work and such) - I don't stop feeling hungry before I've eaten the right amount to stay at a stable weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm absolutely floored to see comments here still nit-picking at FOOD QUALITY vs FOOD QUANTITY vs WHAT DEFINES EXERCISE vs ETC.

Whilst I fully enjoy reading some of the opinions on SOD, the myriad of needless front-end frameworks, etc. - this really is not subjective at all. Calories in, calories out. You eat 5000cal of the most nutritious, well balanced meal & run 10km - you will still put on weight (given you're not a giant).

I'm not sure how this is so open to interpretation, it's rudimentary science at best.

<comment><USER33> Percent body fat is a better metric to reduce than weight alone. Most men would even want to gain weight if it is muscle mass. If you want lean bodymass it's best to control your blood sugar (low glycemic diet) and exercise.

Calories in/out does control weight but there more to it if you don't want to end up skinnyfat. If you think calories is all that matters, try a diet solely of dextrose (glucose) and see how you end up.

<comment><USER32> I also should say, that I do agree with you. If it is more that losing weight you want, then the caloric deficiency is not the best way go - like if you're doing resistance training. But somebody who is obese? Eat cleanly yes ... but most certainly eat less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Losing weight is easy. Most people can do it by eating less without exercise.

The biggest problem in weight loss (beside the fact that you shouldn't do any dieting as this should be a lifestyle change), is how to maintain the weight once you reach the healthy goal.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to keep the healthy weight and the best way for me is to exercise in addition to a strict cal limit. Exercise will increase your burning rate, and you have to figure how to balance it with your eating habits because you won't know how your body is burning while at rest for a while. This is the main issue, it is harder to maintain this fight than to lose weight on a simple low-cal limit.

I met a lot of folks who successfully lost weight but gained it back and lost it again, it took them 3-4 times in a row to figure out how to maintain their healthy weight. I'm already in my second battle against this. I found the best method is 16/8 fasting method, eat 8 hours and 16 hours fasting and I already am losing far more weight than anything else. This is so much easy to maintain even when I'm reaching my goal.

It's kind of like people winning the lottery and most of them just bankrupt themselves in a year. There's no real good educational program in US that teaches both kids and adult how to focus on what you eat and how to maintain the weight.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is obvious for anyone who tried both approaches and compared efforts/results ratio.

<comment><USER36> Or just counted calories...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> So true. I've found that Intermittent fasting + a 500cal deficit (below TDEE) is the easiest/most-effective way because it fits into my life-style as a programmer. I eat my last meal at 8PM and go to bed at 1-2AM. So not eating anything until 1PM the next day is a breeze (with a couple of cups of coffee in the morning). I've lost 20 pounds over the last 3 months with zero exercise.

<comment><USER38> I like intermittent fasting, but I am already skinny, and I struggle to keep my weight up, despite having chocolate and crap beside me at work on my non fast days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Isn't it obvious - you BMR is 2-3 times higher than your all other energy expenditures for the day. If you overeat nothing can save you ...

<comment><USER40> It's not obvious, actually; exercise also affects the BMR, as a matter of fact, according to some theories, certain types of exercise increase the BMR more than certain others (I don't express any support for this, just pointing out).

Although we're not talking about huge amounts, when having a precise dieting regime, even a few hundred calories of "good weight loss" matter.

Definitely nothing can save one from overeating, but that's why overeating itself it's a completely different matter.

To wrap up, while of course in this field little or nothing is definitely proven, definitely no, this is not obvious :-)

<comment><USER41> "It's not obvious, actually"

Yes it _is_. Changes in metabolism are a second-order effect, at most. There is only one first-order effect: fat = calories in - calories out. Once that equation is OK, one can go look at all the other factors - BMR, how macros are split, genetics, ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just watching documentation on people in none-1st-world-countries or even on wildlife animals clearly shows that we are eating wayyyyyyyyyyyy to much for the energy we are losing - that's one reason why I got into intermittent fasting (8/16). This hunger feeling we sense at times has nothing to do what so ever with actual hunger or nutrional depletion.

</comment><comment><USER43> I lost 40lb, and the only exercise I do is walking / running occasionally around my apartment complex.

My trick? I slowly reduced the size of my portions and I limited myself to eating only when I felt hungry.

I didn't do any sort of strict calorie counting, I just tried to have a rough idea of how much food I was eating. Seriously. That's it. If you eat fewer calories, you will lose weight. It's that simple.

At no point did I starve myself or force myself to undergo harsh dietary conditions.

Here's the thing, I think a lot of people fail to lose weight because they try doing too many drastic changes all at once. This is REALLY difficult! But if you just do it really slowly... You don't even notice the change. Sure, the downside is that you won't see super fast changes, it'll take longer to manifest itself. On the other hand, this is probably the easiest possible way to lose weight, because it requires very little effort on your part (you just have to have enough self control to not stuff your face every day).

Just serve yourself a smaller portions than you'd normally consume, eat it, and wait a few minutes. Then if you still felt hungry, go get some more. Otherwise, you've had enough and you're satisfied.

At the beginning of this year I read an article that made me realize something. The article basically said "If you're fat, it means that you're eating like a fat person. You are a fat person." Maybe it seem stupid... But it's correct. If you're fat, it means that you have the eating habits and lifestyle of a fat person. Ask yourself, is that who you really want to be? For me the answer was "no".

You can even cheat with your portions! Every time I go to a ramen shop I disregard all limits and just eat to my heart's content. Although doubtless it won't work very well if you do that every day.

<comment><USER21> Something related is that a lot of people are eating too quickly. I am guilty of this. And that doesn't leave time to the brain to get the satiety signals, leading to eat more than necessary. Eating more slowly can end up helping reduce portions. It's a difficult habit to overcome, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is true, but: when I exercise regularly, I find that I am less hungry and eat less. Anyone here made the same experience?

<comment><USER45> If I know I'll go for a run I am very hesistant to eat heavily, as I know I'll regret it.

The more you exercise the more you push back heavy/unproductive meals in your schedule. You just know if you eat wrongly you won't be able to keep up with your own pace of execise.

Eating and execise seem deeply connected to me. Certainly it is hard to put this kind of thinking into a controlled randomized trial.

<comment><USER46> So much this. If you include regular exercise you're way more motivated not to over-eat, you simply don't want to spoil the hard work you did since it's so easy to consume 500 cal but so much harder (relatively) to burn 500 cal. Combining both has certainly been effective for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> What a load of rubbish. First of all, losing weight is not the goal itself, it's one of the means to the real goal, which is to be healthy. It's not about eating less, it's about eating healthy. Exercise is absolutely essential to be healthy, regardless of weight.

Exercise is more important that eating less. What a dumb suggestion.

<comment><USER48> Being overweight is unhealthy, it can't be done in a healthy way; not in the long term.

While it is possible for an overweight person to not have any of the common health problems associated with being overweight, that is temporary. If you are overweight, you will develop those health problems, it's just a matter of time.

It's basically like smoking and cancer; not all smokers have cancer or get cancer, but there is no such thing as smoking in a healthy way, and if you do it, then the best way to get healthier and to prevent developing health problems in the future is to stop doing it.

Some people can be overweight without developing health problems for a long time, even for a decade or two, but it's just a matter of time. Reducing your bodyweight is easily the best way to improve your health, and to make sure you don't develop health problems in the future.

And, vice versa, many of the things we associate with bad health don't become health problems at all for people who stay lean. Food that we know to have strong correlations with bad health, like eating red meat, sodium, cholesterol, etc, are only really problematic if you also over eat.

Exercise is great, it's terrific, but not over eating is much more important. The saying is true, "you can't outrun a bad diet".

<comment><USER47> >>> but there is no such thing as smoking in a healthy way

But there is a way to be overweight in a healthy. Basically everyone at the gym is overweight (officially anyway) because of their muscle mass.

>>> Exercise is great, it's terrific, but not over eating is much more important.

True. But there is a difference between over eating and under eating. I never said we should over eat, I just don't agree with under eating.

<comment><USER48> No, having muscle doesn't make you overweight, no matter how much of it you have. The word overweight means to have excess fat, specifically.

Im not sure what you mean by under eating, but eating fewer calories than you spend is the only way to lose fat, other than surgery.

<comment><USER47> >>> The word overweight means to have excess fat, specifically.

Dictionary definition "above a weight considered normal or desirable."

The WHO definition "a BMI greater than or equal to 25 is overweight"

Not sure what definition you use, most gym-heads are technically overweight.

But discussing semantics is not the topic here.

<comment><USER48> Not being able to understand the difference between excess muscle and fat is not semantics.

BMI is a tool applied to populations, used on individuals it can be very inaccurate, which is why nobody does it outside of blogs and magazines.

<comment><USER47> The term "overweight" does not differentiate between muscle and fat, plain and simple. You're wrong.

<comment><USER49> > The term "overweight" does not differentiate between muscle and fat, plain > and simple. You're wrong.

 _You 're_ wrong. The typical _diagnostic method_ for overweight and obesity (BMI) does not differentiate between muscle and fat, because mechanisms that do are too expensive/complex for the use, but the _term_ , in fact, does.

 _At their most basic, the words "overweight" and "obesity" are ways to describe having too much body fat._ [0]

 _Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health._ [1]

[0] [http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention- source/obesit...](http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention- source/obesity-definition/)

[1] [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/)

<comment><USER47> Both your quotes are followed by BMI index, which technically doesn't take into account fat/muscle ration by definition.

But I do concede, overweight in that context does refer to excess fat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It seems like the article downplays the role of exercise - maybe I'm nitpicking, but how is this a valid argument: "Over a six-month period, though, adding exercise made no difference."

I mean who wants to lose weight over six months only to be more likely for them to gain it back?

Also, looking at weight alone is misleading. All other factors being equal, a person burning 2500 kcal per day and consuming 2000 would be worse off than if they burn 3000 kcal and consume 2500. The latter case leads to better body composition (as in the ratio of body weight to fat) and better athletic qualities like strength and endurance.

People doing regular exercise also report being more energetic than their sluggish 0-cals-per-day counterparts. On top of that, prolonged dieting regardless of exercise may lead to depression and moving around tends to alleviate that.

Source: My Ph.D. in Broscience and Anecdotal Evidence :P

<comment><USER41> "All other factors being equal, a person burning 2500 kcal per day and consuming 2000 would be worse off than if they burn 3000 kcal and consume 2500."

I have tried every possible generous interpretation of this that I can think of, but I just have to ask I guess: what's the idea behind this?

<comment><USER50> Regarding the 2500 vs 3000 kcal thing: move around, lift weights, knock uglies with your partner multiple times per day, do whatever floats your boat in order to increase your BMR by 500 kcal per day. Regarding the "worse off" part: I assume having less strength and endurance is worse for the average Joe compared to having more strength and endurance. Sorry that it wasn't clear in my post, I guess I assumed it was self-explanatory.

<comment><USER41> But then all other factors _aren 't_ equal. I.e., person P with x% muscle and y% fat; eats 2500 and burns 2000; or that same person eating 3000 and burning 2500.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Just eat less. It is just that simple.

<SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION>

My Weight Loss Story 40kg in 40 Weeks Without Exercise where I went from 120kg to 80kg (79.6kg) / 265lb to 175lb.

[http://40in40book.com/](http://40in40book.com/)

This book was born out of the constant positive feedback and requests I received that my story needed to be shared with a wider audience.

</SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION>

EDIT 1: I wanted to do this as a Show HN when I published, but I've been a longtime lurker without commenting and without an account with my real name.

EDIT 2: I've read the article and the points raised are the same as what I noted when I lost my weight. Exercise can help, but you can lose the weight with diet alone.

</comment><comment><USER52> Yeah, that is true, but I hold that being overweight and exercising (real exercise, not the fake gym training programs) is far better for your health and your well being overall. At least you keep a functional body - you can do long walks, runs, climbing, etc. - which is a much better life if you ask me, but that's only my opinion, I repeat, only an opinion.

Edit. Just to be clear, of course being slim and exercising is a better option. I am just saying that for health I would prioritize exercise over weight.

<comment><USER25> >but I hold that being overweight and exercising

How is being overweight 'far better' for health or well being? (assuming you're talking about excess adipose tissue).

Please define 'function' and how excess adipose increases ones ability to walk, run and climb.

<comment><USER52> I have seen plenty of overweight people back in Italy that were able to do tough 10 hrs hikes or caving explorations with heavy loads or else. They looked far more healthy to me than slim people that do no exercise. I am just very skeptic of using weight as a measure of health or even as a universal goal. That said, being very overweight is a problem and being slim _and_ doing exercise is a better option.

<comment><USER25> >I have seen plenty of overweight people back in Italy that were able to do tough 10 hrs hikes or caving explorations with heavy loads or else. They looked far more healthy to me than slim people that do no exercise.

What do you define as 'overweight'? How did they 'look far more healthy' than slim people?

>I am just very skeptic of using weight as a measure of health or even as a universal goal. That said, being very overweight is a problem and being slim and doing exercise is a better option.

It's not weight per se it's excess adipose tissue. Any where past 20% for males and 30% BF for females will generally decrease performance to a significant extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It's a bit oversimplified, because exercising increase your burn rate (your basal metabolic rate), even when you don't exercice.

But anyway: eat food, not too much, mostly plants ;)

<comment><USER13> Did you not know that you can't outrun your mouth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm currently reading an interesting book - Food and Western Disease by Staffan Lindeberg. Among other things, it talks about how gluten might interfere with leptin (the hormone that makes us feel full). I don't think this has been proven 100% yet, but I've noticed that there seems to be far more fat people in the countries that eat lots of wheat, than in the countries that rely on rice.

</comment><comment><USER55> To lose weight EATING WELL is the most important thing.

For me it is shocking to watch the calories argument, and almost saying that you have to starve in order to lose weight.

40 years ago Americans, or most Europeans did not starve, and being overweight was rare. They ate lots of fat, for example with consumption of butter(calories) three times what it is today.

Traveling around the world I see people that eat well(I have eaten their food) and nobody is fat there. They cook their food though.

People in the Western world eat very badly. Most of their food is precooked, frozen and stored in plastic. That alone removes lots of necessary components of food, like vitamins or fiber, or degrade it making them not usable by the body.

So when the body needs essential components, and could not get it the normal way, it enters panic mode and craves for more food.

One of the most overweight people I have seen in my life were native Americans Indians in reserves and in Alaska or native people from Hawaii. They are so poor and eat so badly no matter how much they eat their body never says enough. People in Hawaii were known for being slender before colonization.

There are natural limitations on industrial food, and we are paying for it.

Industry instead of solving he problems(which is hard) has tricked be body into believing the food is totally ok, with things like artificial flavoring.

<comment><USER56> Nobody says you need to be hungry to keep a healthy weight, but if you are overweight, and you want to lose that weight, there's no way around being hungry sometimes.

You know why? Your fat cells only start giving off their fat to the blood when your blood sugar level is too low, and when that happens, your brain gets a signal you should eat, thus you're hungry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Exercise and the lowered depression levels may be a good trigger for lowering the amount of confort food eaten and increasing diet discipline. The lower calorie intake still gets the credit, but many people may never get there without the exercise first.

</comment><comment><USER58> "statistically significant". I ak spoiled for life since reading [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714985)

</comment><comment><USER22> The fundamental problem with the research he's quoting is that "long-term" means a year to him. Actual long-term, diets never ever ever work.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/04/w...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/04/why- diets-dont-actually-work-according-to-a-researcher-who-has-studied-them-for- decades/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Articles like this are far too common, generic and pretty useless. X may be better than Y! Here's a study that proves it. Oh wait no, Y is better than X because this study proves it. Eat well and exercise. That's it.

<comment><USER48> I understand that from the zoomed out perspective, when you learn about advancements in the field from newspapers, magazines or blogs, it looks that way. But this is mostly the fault of various media sensationalizing findings, drawing their own conclusions and prioritizing shocking headlines over levelheaded critique of scientific study results as well as framing it in the proper context.

The total body of scientific evidence is not really in such disarray as the reporting would have you believe.

However, your conclusion still hits the mark; eat well and exercise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Thermodynamics saves the day...

</comment><comment><USER61> And eating better is far more important than eating less.

</comment><comment><USER62> As always, balance is the key!

</comment><comment><USER63> Metabolism gets used to aerobic exercise quickly so it is not good for loosing fat. High intensity training (HIT) burns more fat overall.

Timing on carbohydrates is important also. Eat them when you need them like around exercise, before work or in the morning. After your glucose storage is full extra energy will be stored as fat.

How well fat will burn depends mostly how good shape your metabolism is. If your metabolism is slow when you start dieting it will only get slower and you really have to starve yourself to lose weight.

Slowly increasing carbohydrates when not loosing weight and exercise is good way to speed up your metabolism so you are able to loose that fat after you gain some.

Cardio exercises are last resort at the end of the diet when your metabolism is really slow and you want to eat something.

So while eat less than you use is good starting point to loose weight. You can make it so much easier to your self with exercise and proper food.</comment>


University of Tokyo pair invent loop-based quantum computing technique - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/24/national/science-health/university-tokyo-pair-invent-loop-based-quantum-computing-technique/#.WckRKhNSxFR <comment><USER2> "resolved all problems except how to make a scheme that automatically corrects a calculation error"

I'm sure I've read suggestions that quantum error correction might be the limiting factor in quantum computation. That is, without error correction you don't have a working quantum computer at all, and quantum error correction is in some ways the hard part (other than all the other hard parts).

<comment><USER3> I admit fully that I might simply not understand what work the researchers have done. But, that being said, that quote you gave made me laugh out loud and say 'oh, is that all?' There are many barriers here though, language barriers and the inevitable press release 'dumb it down' barrier. Hopefully that was just an accident of phrase.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of a comparison someone made last week: "that's like saying 'we made a spaceship that can fly at warp speed. All we need to do now is build the warp drive'".

<comment><USER5> More like all we need to do is have it go where we want it to go

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reddit discussion: [https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/72bnel/japanese_sc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/72bnel/japanese_scientists_have_invented_a_new_loopbased/)

Full Text: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06312](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06312)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.120504)</comment>


Yelp Increasing Transparency and Eliminating 'Favorite Review' - <AUTHOR> http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/04/announcing-steps-to-avoid-confusion-increase-transparency.html

<comment><USER2> This actually doesn't seem to address the rumors floating around about Yelp, which were that they would use (misleading) negative reviews as part of high- pressure sales tactics for small businesses. The "favorite review" feature is what Yelp themselves said they were selling. It wasn't the nexus of the accusations against them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would love to know how they intend on filtering reviews successfully while exposing the process behind the filter. It would seem any transparent filter system would invite people to find reliable ways of bypassing and subverting the things that get you flagged.

There's a reason Google won't give you a full look at a page's spamminess rating, and a reason reddit is open source _except_ for the spam filtering bits. With any blacklist filtering routine, transparency puts you at an inherent disadvantage. Instead of a million trials to see what passes and what doesn't, the answers are already there.

...or they aren't really, and this is just a PR scheme by Yelp to claim more transparency with the illusion of fairness for review visibility. To me this is the only real possibility here.

<comment><USER4> If a spammer wanted to see what a site took down, all they'd have to do would be to keep track of all the comments (including ones not by their accounts). Then they'd have some idea how the filter worked.

If you make the list open then honest people can see too.

The only reason you'd keep the list of what's spam private would be to maintain (perceived) infallibility. Every filter makes mistakes, only some filters let you see them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still no way to request a manual review though. I already see several good detailed reviews by people that I know personally that have been flagged. As well as reviews filtered for businesses that I know personally and know for a fact that they don't pay anyone for reviews. From initial appearance, looks like a lot of innocent reviews get caught in the filter.

<comment><USER6> I looked around at some of the filtered reviews for restaurants I frequent. For the vast majority I couldn't find anything wrong with them other than that they were penned by users with less than 5-10 reviews.

I can understand why they don't offer any sort of manual review -- how is a staffer who has never patronized that business capable of determining if a review is spam or legit? I wonder if it would be any better if questionable reviews for a given business would be put up to a vote by "more established" users (by whatever metric they use to determine that) who have also reviewed the same business. Let people who have actually been there determine whether it's spam from someone who never walked in the door.

<comment><USER5> Well, the other weird thing that I see is that the reviews that have been filtered, are overwhelmingly highly positive. Which leads me to think that while their spam filter is agressive in filtering positive reviews, it is still vulnerable to businesses posting negative reviews about each other. Maybe that's just my limited sample size though.

<comment><USER6> I did come across a number of negative reviews by users who had limited activity on the site. I guess this is an effort to block "hit-and-run" negative reviews.

The downside to filtering out reviews by "less-established" users is that you run a risk of angering new users who take the time to contribute a review to the site only to find it doesn't appear. Are they really going to bother posting a second, third, or fourth review that will also get filtered out, or will they just walk away?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This might be a pretty good PR move..

Most of the filtered reviews I have seen so far are, in fact, pretty spammy or blatant advertising..

This will definitely make people appreciate the filter more

OTOH people, not machines (thanks to the captcha), could read tons of filtered reviews and come up with cleverer ways to beat it

</comment><comment><USER8> I hate to be cynical right out of the gate, but we'll see how it goes down. Admittedly, its a better move than doing nothing.

Could be interesting to see what kind of reviews are being flagged anyways. I've always thought that review stuffing is way more common than people would think...</comment>


Show HN: My girlfriend's startup - <AUTHOR> http://jellifi.com

<comment><USER2> That MTV video... I'm choosing my words very carefully here. That video says something about the company. That's the point, right?

I imagine the notion of having a) a launch party, b) a launch party with burlesque dancers, c) a launch party with burlesque dancers filmed by MTV was not an accidental choice by the company. Perhaps jellifi is aimed at a particular submarket in the event planning space which is very interested in the glitzerati world of fashion models and reality TV celebrities. If so, that video isn't completely insane. If you're not aiming to cement your reputation as that sort of business, I would strongly reconsider having that video on your home page.

In particular, in picking who to show that video to, I would note that it is going to be _positively radioactive_ to multiple, independent, broad swathes of people in the tech community.

</comment><comment><USER3> What the heck is it supposed to do?

That's a serious question. I scrolled all the way to the bottom, clicked on About Jellfi, read a bit about the founders, and then finally noticed that:

"Jellifi matches both professional and casual event planners to the best and most unique local talent for flawless and fun events without the stress."

That (preferably with fewer adjectives) needs to be the first thing I (and anyone else) see, IMO. Without it the service seems all style no substance.

(Granted this may not be as much of a problem with promoters and artists than it is with a 38 year old programmer that lives in insurance.)

<comment><USER4> To me, part of the issue is that there are two audiences (event planners/event related services vs. someone who needs help planning an event) and the homepage attempts to market to both at the same time. The subheading and the call to action seem to contradict each other. "Jellifi is looking for event planners" vs. "Plan Event Free"...huh?

That said, I do think it's an interesting concept and suggested it to a friend who does event photo booths and he seemed very interested in signing up.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes, a 25 year old female founder. 3 engineers, 1 ex-radio industry veteran, and ~5 other team players.

She got started last year, went through a rough patch with a different designer+developer team, had to rethink everything, and then in Jan of 2013 -- landed an amazing marketing opportunity for the site which will air later this year. Very proud of their accomplishments, especially in a city like Austin where consumer startups are much more difficult.

Please show her and her team some HN love, feedback, etc. I've been a member at HN for a long time so I'll be here to answer any questions.

<comment><USER5> One of the landing page screenshots says "Jellifi Can Help You Throw A Better Weddings Event!" Is that a typo? Is "a weddings event" a thing?

<comment><USER6> I guess it can help you plan an event consisting of multiple weddings. I've never been to such an event, but I imagine it would be quite a challenge given that planning a single wedding event can sometimes lead to massive personal meltdowns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a terrible title. It tells me nothing about the product. I expect a title like this in /r/pics but not in HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. I should have known better... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks good. Out of curiosity, why didn't she submit this herself? To me, this is as odd as a woman submitting "Show HN: My boyfriend's startup".

</comment><comment><USER9> It looks great to me. My main problem is that she asked me to give over my personal information before I can really do anything. I chose "Birthday" (my birthday is coming up) and I wanted to see what kind of suggestions would come up, but the first thing I see is "Give us all your information and create an account", but I don't particularly want to do that just yet. Can't she wait and ask for that at the end, when I presumably do something like hit a "Create This Event" button?

</comment><comment><USER10> The app seems to have pretty large customer base already. And I thought Show HN was for people to show-off their new products/features/hacks. Anyway, I still don't understand what it does that is unique compared to competition. From its description all I see is all kinds of adjectives thrown around without concise use-case. Is it like a market place for planners and service providers?

</comment><comment><USER11> Her social media feeds are really trying too hard. Does spamming people with unrelated memes and asking for likes really onboard users vs alienate those she already has? And I'm with patio11 on the video, I had to stop it. Show me the prep and the setup, give me testimonials and shots of various types of events she's done. Not close-ups of women taking their clothes off.

</comment><comment><USER12> Main call to action seems confused -- text suggests that you're looking for suppliers, button underneath suggests you're looking for buyers. The "event planners" you're looking to supply are probably not enticed by the "Plan Event Free" button. Maybe split it in half to appeal to each?

</comment><comment><USER13> How do you pronounce "jellifi"? Jellify? Jellifee? Jellifih?

Was the original idea for it to be <http://jellifi.sh>, but they changed their minds and went with jellifi.com?

This is something they should figure out - if I tell someone "just go to jellifi.com" there's a decent chance they won't know how to spell it. So perhaps look into making the name more obviously spellable (jellify.com), extend to jellyfish.com, grab all the alternate domains, or work hard on your SEO so even misspelling it still nets you the right site. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> jell-eh-phi :)

</comment></comment><comment> why-el Good idea, but hard to figure out when I first landed on the page.

Also, that speed register thing that's supposed to work with Facebook, I cant figure out how to do it. It is not implemented yet?

Otherwise great work. Tell your girlfriend congrats.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting idea! Thanks for sharing.

Just a quick note, the pricing page (<http://jellifi.com/Pricing>) needs to be fixed, it still has the standard 'Lorem ipsum...' filler text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch, almost silly it went missed. Reported! Thanks.

<comment><USER15> 2 hours later, still Lorem Ipsum. Hmm. I hope this doesn't reflect turnaround times if I were ever a client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool idea. What sort of things is she doing to get it out there and try to start getting people using it, get it known and stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of local-level marketing in Austin and parts of Texas. They just started to expand into other cities and part of that is due to the pending national/international exposure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Banner image doesn't stretch on Chrome + retina display. <http://puu.sh/2upQE>

</comment><comment><USER18> auto-complete search bar for location is a little too small, using chrome

</comment><comment><USER19> bubble, what bubble...

<comment><USER20> This and Summly do indeed give the feeling of a bubble, don't they.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good layout...I like the big call to action with the rest of the page being devoted to a semi-walkthrough of what you'll find.

However, the "call to action" button text should be fixed. Currently, it reads: " _Plan Event Free_ ". It looks like a typo was made, though I understand you wanted to keep the text short...but right now, it looks like an amateurish grammar mistake. Perhaps, these might work:

"Free: Plan an Event" "Plan an Event for Free"

Or separate the text into a button label and header:

       Try it for free:
       Plan an Event

edit: Another suggestion: Use geolocation to narrow, by default, the services listed here: <https://jellifi.com/service>

Right now, it simply shows everything that's on the site, which immediately, in my mind, triggers a "there's a bunch of unfiltered spam listings here that I won't be interested in"...even though it looks very nice. But a little personalization will help a long ways.

And if the listings are too sparse to personalize it for most users, then limit the selection to just the cities you've focused on. No shame in saying "We've just launched in Austin, TX and San Francisco, SF. Follow us on Twitter to see updates when we open in other cities!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, great feedback so far.</comment></comment>


Comparing (R) dplyr vs. (Julia) DataFrames.jl - <AUTHOR> https://bkamins.github.io/julialang/2020/07/03/dplyr-vs-df.html <comment><USER2> The R code looks so much cleaner and readable! Is that just me being a bit more familiar with R/dplyr than julia? Or could the julia code be written more elegantly than that? I mean all those .@(_, => :) constructs make julia look rather opaque in comparison ...

<comment><USER3> > The R code looks so much cleaner and readable!

Absolutely not. "%>%", "ifelse" as a function, etc. are just horrible...</comment></comment>


Carl Hewitt, Creator of the Actor Model on Concurrency Past, Present and Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-with-carl-hewitt.html <comment><USER2> Professor Hewitt has a blog with more info here:

       https://professorhewitt.blogspot.com/

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the third introduction, previous ones being Joe Armstrong and Tony Hoare, ahead of the panel discussion where the three discuss their approaches to concurrency. The Panel discussion will be released next week.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post</comment>


DeepSound: Steganography tool to hide secret data into audio files - <AUTHOR> http://jpinsoft.net/DeepSound/

<comment><USER2> If I didn't miss something this just replaces - depending on the quality setting - the least significant 2, 4 or 8 bits of every 16 bit sample with the data to be hidden. This is trivial to detect and will not survive any lossy compression.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember using something slightly similar (Though more rudimentary) in my final year Computer Forensics degree. The task was to leave a 'breadcrumb trail' of evidence for another group leading to files that would condemn us as child sex traffickers. Our group hid the password to a certain archive file in a single track of a Cannibal Corpse album. I think the track was 'Festering in the Crypt'. When the track was viewed as a wave graph, the password was clearly visible. Much fun was had leaving subtle hints to our counter group that they had to listen to the whole album backwards to glean the password. I don't think they ever solved it. Cannibal Corpse was selected because any distortion from changing the wavelengths to hide the password would be very hard to pick up.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the tool that Elliot uses in the last episode of Mr. Robot, right?

<comment><USER5> As soon as I saw the caption, I rushed to the comments to type just this. Thunder stolen. :D

<comment><USER4> hahaha It actually took me a while to realise :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure if it's effective steganography. It says that you can encrypt hidden files. If I use this on a file which contains an encrypted hidden file, will it detect that there is a file without giving a key? If it does it's not proper steganography.

I used steghide once or twice, it claims that the existence of the datafile cannot be proven, can hide in image and audio files. It doesn't survive basic lossy compression cycles, but can hide in jpeg files.

</comment><comment><USER7> The burning questions is, can audiophiles tell the difference?

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice tool .. not able to run it though. (No Windows here.)

In the meantime, found this interesting related article, which inspires a bit of hacking as its a tad more technical and a little less .EXE'ish:

[http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/6960/Steganography- VIII-...](http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/6960/Steganography-VIII-Hiding- Data-in-Wave-Audio-Files)</comment>


A Reputation-Laundering Firm That Ruined Its Own Reputation - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/25/the-reputation-laundering-firm-that-ruined-its-own-reputation <comment><USER2> This part of the article stuck out:

> "As we have known from the start, we are in the middle of a civil war with > the Guptas and allies on one side, and Johann Rupert and others on the other > side. More mud will inevitably be thrown. However, it is difficult to turn > down such a large retainer."

I feel like the blowback the Guptas and their PR flunkies got was more because of the fact that this was a power struggle between different obligarch factions than because of wrongdoing (although obviously they are guilty of that as well).

If the Guptas/Pottinger had targeted people without massive wealth and clout among global and European elite circles we might not be getting behind the scenes exposures like these.

I think we live in era where ordinary people and interests that don't represent the wealthy have no ability to hit back against character assasination and PR campaigns, and with no one left to go after the future is going to be obligarchs targetting each other, a bit like the late stage Roman republic.

</comment><comment><USER3> PR firms/people don't die. They just reincarnate.

<comment><USER4> Kind of reminds me of trolls in NetHack, especially since trolling is their business.

<comment><USER5> I believe that predates the modern usage of "troll." Trolls regenerating is an old fantasy trope.

[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/103146/where- did-t...](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/103146/where-did-the-idea- that-trolls-can-regenerate-come-from)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A bit like a virus that is so lethal to it's host that it extinguishes itself.

</comment><comment><USER7> PR is just another word for Propaganda, isn'it ?

<comment><USER8> In one very vague sense, marketing, communication, pr and propaganda are all cousins.

But in a more serious sense, if you just out and out lie, and repeat the falsehood, I would count that as propaganda. If you simply put a spin on it but don't disavow actual facts, I would put that down in PR.

In Handmaid's Tale, when Fred goes to Canada he engages in a lot of PR. But when he disavows actual practices, he slides into propaganda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And nothing of value was lost.</comment>


Are You Rich? Where Does Your Net Worth Rank in America? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/12/upshot/are-you-rich-where-does-your-net-worth-rank-wealth.html <comment><USER2> "Why are the wealthy so much wealthier than everyone else?

One reason is that the rich tend to store their wealth in businesses and stocks, and those in the middle class store theirs in housing."

The rich can also afford better consulting and wealth management, which further reinforces their established prosperity.</comment>


I wish people would stop using economy as just a smart-sounding metaphor - <AUTHOR> http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/08/i-wish-people-w.html <comment><USER2> He tries to debunk the economy metaphor by pointing out that:

        1) Lots of people use the metaphor poorly
        2) If you take it literally, it doesn't work

Neither of those are particularly good. Maybe becoming hackneyed reduces the value of a metaphor in terms of communications, but really says nothing about it as an idea. And lots of metaphors don't work if you take them literally because, you know, they're _metaphors_!

I dislike how this happened to the word "paradigm." Awareness of one's mental models is quite valuable. And there are likely emergent effects akin to markets in web communities, despite the difficulty in quantifying them.</comment>


ZOZO Has Stopped Selling in the Americas, Asia Pacific and Middle East - <AUTHOR> https://zozo.com/us/en <comment><AUTHOR> > We are sorry to inform you that ZOZO has closed its US shop and is > discontinuing its service in the Americas, Asia Pacific and Middle East. We > are extremely grateful for your support and interest in ZOZO.

This was a really cool service, sad to see it go. It took 7 days to receive the fitting suit. We ordered 1 jeans, 1 t-shirt, 1 long-sleeve shirt and it took about 40 days to be shipped from ZOZO then about another week to arrive. They don't charge your credit card until the clothes are made and shipped.

Overall I was really happy with the service and the novelty of it made it a great gift.</comment>


Money Is Pouring into Tech Like It's 1999, and That's Not Good - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/money-pouring-tech-like-1999and-thats-good/ <comment><USER2> An interesting twist in the current incarnation is this story is how big "private" money is taking risks on the tech sector.

Overall, I don't really find this story convincing for a few of reasons, though I suppose there is plenty of room for disagreement. (1)T he first boom actually _did_ get a lot right. The PC-internet revolutions was intense and did create a lot of new value. The mistake was treating it like a land grab where all major players would be established by the year 2000. (2) Scale _does_ matter when we are talking about bubbles.Smaller means safer. (3) There is real revenue being generated by Google, Facebook and every reason to think it will be generated by Uber too. (4) Private money doesn't (I hope) break the economy in the same way that public money can. If VCs go bust there are ramifications, but these markets are not that liquid. There aren't margin calls going off and forcing fire sales. (5) War chests: The big boys and many of the up-and-comers have nice big war chests. They are obviously concerned about equity, but Facebook would be very hard to kill with a sharp decrease in stock price. Options might need to give way to bonuses, but the Facebook is no longer in the business of selling equity. They have plenty of cash. This goes doubly for Google, MSFT, Apple & a surprising number of no-rush-to-IPO mega startups like Uber , Airbnb, Dropbox Snapchat, etc. Their continued existence is not dependent on the market for tech stock.

Bubbles are some sort of unstable financial complex that can be brought down as soon as the equilibrium is broken. In 99' the money was ultimately coming from IPOs and public markets. When that well dried, everything went bottom up.

The recent financial crash was bullet on financial instrument tautologies, a system that created correlated risk. It could only continue to exist so long as everyone could maintain that the risk was much smaller than it was.

Think of the companies in question. Most could continue to survive if investors hid in a hole for two years, that's robust. Smaller, younger startups would be in for hard times if investment stopped coming in, but 1,000 $10m (on paper) startups going under is a just 1,000 individual failures. This is correlated in the sense that a shortage of cash would effect them all, but it's not systemic in that their failure would extend far beyond the investors, founders & employees that understand the risk.

<comment><USER3> > Private money doesn't (I hope) break the economy in the same way that public > money can. If VCs go bust there are ramifications, but these markets are not > that liquid. There aren't margin calls going off and forcing fire sales.

Too many people trying to compare today's bubble to the first bubble are making the mistake of assuming that it's being led by tech. It isn't.

The current "tech bubble" is just one of multiple bubbles being driven by an even larger bubble in public equities. When the public equities bubble bursts, Silicon Valley will this time be a victim, not the culprit. And there are going to be lots of other victims as well.

> Smaller, younger startups would be in for hard times if investment stopped > coming in, but 1,000 $10m (on paper) startups going under is a just 1,000 > individual failures. This is correlated in the sense that a shortage of cash > would effect them all, but it's not systemic in that their failure would > extend far beyond the investors, founders & employees that understand the > risk.

How many people are employed by these startups? How would a glut of now- unemployed startup workers affect wage trends? How many non-tech businesses in the Bay Area are thriving on the tech funny money?

Companies like Google and Facebook aren't going anywhere, even if their stock prices become heavily depressed for some time. And despite tech's prominence, the Bay Area economy is still fairly diverse. But it's short-sighted to believe that a significant decline in the number of funded startups would be of minimal impact to anyone but investors, founders and employees.

<comment><USER4> >> "The current "tech bubble" is just one of multiple bubbles being driven by an even larger bubble in public equities..."

This is interesting. Could you elaborate on some of the other sub-bubbles? Not being facetious, am really curious.

<comment><USER5> I know nothing about finance but the Federal Reserve has provided new money at almost no interest to banks for a fairly long period of time from ~2008 onwards (this was called quantitative easing). This essentially forced the EU and countries like Switzerland to do the same, if they did not want their currency to get too strong. It is not a stretch of imagination that this fueled much of the current stock market boom, both Euro and Dollar have lost a lot of value at roughly the same pace.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the fed loans money to banks at, essentially, zero interest, and the banks then use it to invest in the stock market, or some such. They make money, because the market isat all-time highs. They pay back the fed, and keep their profits.

All the major firms do this. It's nuts, but our government literally lends free money to investors on Wall Street so they can make millions of dollars on trades.

Of course, this all comes tumbling down when the markets are in bad shape. And, unlike most people in this thread, I fully expect any and all bubbles to burst due to some outside influence: Ebola, 9/11, war, etc. Something big happens to scare the markets, and the big party here in the Valley is over. Who know when that will happen, but it feels like the next year or so will be the time frame, if my gut is any indication.

Burn that capital while you can, folks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Theory: Wallstreet has limited other domestic outlets for their investment money since the 2008 crash, and is therefore investing heavily in tech. This will continue until either 1) more sectors of the economy recover present new and/or better investment opportunities or 2) a crash occurs. However, in the case of #2, which everyone fears, unless the conditions change and wall street gets a new location to place their money, tech will still be one of the best domestic investment opportunities, and we'll see a new climb in spending after said crash.

That's my 2 cent theory, I'd love to hear some discussion on it.

<comment><USER8> My theory is similar. We are in a "rise-all-boats" bull run thanks to the injection of cash into the economy from the Fed. The few "Buffet-like" value investment managers are saying there isn't much margin-of-safety in valuations any more. Also, other than tech, other sectors of the economy are "easy" to price. We pretty much know the growth of a utility company, real estate company, etc is going to be. They can only grow so fast, and the market guess within certain tolerances what it will be.

On the other hand, tech is one of those fairy land sectors that is not priced on any reasonable metric (profits), but instead on hopes and dreams. Until all tech becomes priced based on profits (like Apple, IBM, Google, etc) it will continue to see large investments seeking outlandish returns. Right now it's an area where getting market share from others can happen quickly.

It's pretty hard to grab market share from a utility (usually regulated monopoly) or a rent seeker (you need to buy the asset to rent it out yourself). Same goes for other sectors, only so many cars can be bought every year for example.

Snagging eyeballs can happen quickly, can be fleeting (myspace) or more long- lasting (facebook). Hence the WhatsApp stuff (OMG, so many eyeballs there, just like facebook!!!).

<comment><USER9> _" or a rent seeker (you need to buy the asset to rent it out yourself)"_

"Rent seeking" is a different thing than "renting out access to an asset".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent- seeking)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On a macro level, a likely hypothesis for this trend is that there is nothing better to invest in than tech. But tech isn't moving fast enough (value is hard to create, not in a gold rush period), so we try to translate money into growth much more. Because otherwise that money's just sitting around!

In an ideal world that money might somehow be invested in long-term societal growth than _can_ yield high tech growth in the future, like education, or maybe investing in individuals for some long-term return on their income. More R&D at all levels. Just random ideas. Point is, it'd be nice to see some creative thinking with investment money rather than see it pumped into companies trying to sabotage each other's ride sharing apps, or out-sell their fundamentally identical crm services, etc.

<comment><USER11> > _On a macro level, a likely hypothesis for this trend is that there is > nothing better to invest in than tech._

I think folks are missing a bigger part of the macro picture: It is not just tech. Low interest rates and easy monetary policy have inflated many types of assets.

By way of example, this is currently headlining on Yahoo Finance: [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/some-powerful-voices-add-to- fe...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/some-powerful-voices-add-to-fears-of-a- stock-market-bubble-153542781.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I actually threw together some very lazy (just trying to do a little something every day) graphs on VC yesterday[1] if you want to see the dot-com bubble in terms of VC disbursements and number of deals. Both the old bubble and the recession are extremely visible. It'll be interesting to see what these graphs look like in a couple years when reporting catches up to 2013-2014.

[1] [http://btus.us/venture-capital-in-the-united- states-1998-201...](http://btus.us/venture-capital-in-the-united- states-1998-2012/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have a hard time even reading any of these pieces where a VC is complaining about high burn rates / valuations all while continuing to invest.

"Because my competition will continue to invest" is not a good reason.

You don't see Warren Buffet investing at valuations he believes are untenable, just because the market happens to be up.

<comment><USER14> Sure it is. VCs aren't the money guys, they just invest the funds of the money guys. Not investing really isn't an option for them.

<comment><USER15> VC's are paid to invest intelligently and get a return.

But they have a conflict of interest because unless they invest, they don't get paid.

<comment><USER16> That's for the carry. If the market crashes and their investments fail, their carry income will be zero anyway.

VC's do get paid even if they don't invest via their management fee. It's certainly enough for them to live comfortably on while investing the fund over a ten year cycle.

But, to your point, there's another dynamic here: if they don't invest (and thus have no carry), they will be less likely to be able to raise future funds.

Just saying that it's not as simple as saying there's a conflict of interest. VC's do have a fiduciary duty to their investors and their income is tied, at least in part, to their ability to make money. Even if they lose all of the money, there is no direct cost except for possibly a quite substantial lost of reputation.

The risk to entrepreneurs is not symmetrical. No guaranteed salary is available to entrepreneurs. Even if a portfolio company fails, VC's still receive a management fee.

This system works surprisingly well, except when VC's are stupid or screw entrepreneurs. It's actually pretty amazing that it works at all, since really the middlemen hold most of the power as the distributors, but not originators, of the capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've discussed this at length with investors, entrepreneurs, and upper level management at large tech service agencies, and I'm not convinced that there is necessarily a bubble this time around. Accounting for the massive increase in bandwidth, CPU, GPU, smartphone ownership, software development practices, AI logic, and reliance on data compared to that of 1999, it's really a flawed model to draw 1:1 parallels in my opinion.

While there will be a shift at some point away from software/web entities and into manufacturing (to catch up meatspace to webspace), it will be these tech entities that will largely lead the charge, to enhance their own offerings. The example put forth in the article is as flawed as the logic it purports to criticize: "SAYING WE'RE NOT IN A BUBBLE BECAUSE IT'S NOT AS HIGH AS 1999 IS LIKE SAYING THAT KIM-JONG-UN IS NOT EVIL BECAUSE HE'S NOT HITLER."

Compared to 1999, the value drawn from these companies inside the "bubble" doesn't even remotely exist within the same qualitative and associative parameters.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you think too much money is bad, wait till you see what not enough money looks like.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looking strictly at numbers in this situation is a bit like forgetting to account the inflation difference between 1800 and 2014. Of course the amount of money being invested in tech has grown enormously; in 1999 everyone didn't walk around with the internet in their pocket.

<comment><USER19> And now everyone is walking around with the internet in their pocket, yet revenue seems elusive to a lot of very highly-valued companies.

Lack of potential users is no longer an excuse, but we're still throwing billions at companies with no revenue model, and billions at companies with a revenue model but unable to get cashflow positive to save their lives.

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands >>>>In the same way, Gurley said, too much cash in the startup economy means weaker companies can survive without having to generate cash for themselves.

Isn't this how business should work? Weaker companies lose and the stronger companies win? Those with good business plans, good marketing strategies and a solid product should be able to weather a crash.

Also, those companies that actively plan for a crash usually do much better. Saving money, having a plan B in place and assuming its going to happen is a lot smarter than simply believing we're not in some kind of bubble and then losing everything when the market eventually corrects itself.

</comment><comment><USER20> In the summary, "At some point you have to build a real business, generate real profits, sustain the company without the largess of investor's capital," Wilson said, "and start producing value the old fashioned way."

I do believe a significantly higher proportion of companies today are doing exactly that, and are quite focused on it, whereas they were not in 1999. That's a general and very un-scientific argument for why this bubble (which it still surely is) is not as bad.

Sure, some companies have shaky monetization strategies; but you just can't say companies like Uber are not producing value (rumors of ~$10 _billion_ gross revenue).

</comment><comment><USER21> People seem to have completely forgotten how completely nonsensical (and often completely clueless about tech, the internet and business) tech start-ups were in 1999 compared to now.

The valuations and burn rate may be too high and up for a big correction, but most of the start-ups these days at least have some logic behind it by which they may be seen as potential hits. 1999 was largely mass hysteria with no foundation in reality whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's not a bubble, but a blister. Lance it and it fills back up again.

</comment><comment><USER23> Although the economy suffered a hit, does anyone remember what the job market was like for programmers after the boom? If this article is right (which I'm not convinced of), even to a smaller extent -- how do you think that will impact the current job market?

</comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone here personally lived, worked, and saw the dot com boom and bust in Silicon Valley? More so, do you happen to currently live and work here still?

I have, and although I don't think the current tech boom is as bubbly as the late 90's, I do see a lot of similarities in the area. Traffic, though, is no where near as bad as it was back then. But, it's getting there. However, construction is at an all time boom. I have never seen more cranes nor construction in SF ever. I think we are back to heady times, and I would be really cautious as an investor in the next 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's easy to chalk this up to herd behavior but what's scarier is the real possibility that solid investment choices don't really exist in America anymore.

</comment><comment><USER26> After trying to figure out if he was actually going to back up his argument anywhere - at some point I realized he was essentially saying that Uber is not different than Pets.com and stopped caring about the article.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's at least the third article that spun off from the WSJ article (if not even an older article/interview).

<comment><USER7> was there a HN submission of that article?</comment></comment>


How to Virtualise Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/features/how-to-virtualise-linux-part-1 <comment><USER2> I use virt-manager as UI.

[https://virt-manager.org/](https://virt-manager.org/)

And libguestfs/guestfish to manipulate VMs:

[http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html](http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html)

I did a small toolchain with bash files to cross-compile for Windows (with mingw32-w64). After the build the Windows binary is injected in a VM and launched with guestfish. It works!

<comment><USER3> It also works nice with GNOME Boxes and containers with systemd machinectl

<comment><USER2> I used a bit Boxes and the UI is quite beautiful.

Thanks for "systemd machinectl".

[https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machinectl....](https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machinectl.html)

The man page suggests it's a superset or replacement of libvirt but according to other pages it's mostly used for containers (as you said).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the article kind of misses a bit about qemu-kvm + libvirt and the tools. You can administer a guest and view it's display output via qemu+ssh protocol and ssh keys for a very easy way to run vms on multiple hosts via an easy graphical interface ( and the command line.

With the graphical tool it is also very easy to setup and run local virtual machines like VirtualBox.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish there was a tutorial like this that included starting an X server in every one of the linux VMs and connecting them some how to your desktop. That way you can open windows in them and segregate different applications to VMs (Web Browsers, Untrusted Applications,etc.. )

<comment><USER6> Not a tutorial but there's a distro which does this.

[https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/architecture/](https://www.qubes- os.org/doc/architecture/)

<comment><USER5> I didn't think qube-os did this since I don't think this would be very secure. There are, from what I understand, many vectors for privilege escalation from the XServer. Didn't think Qube os would use it since it is security concerned.

<comment><USER7> Qube OS is made by quite good security researchers, who where first to break into Intel SMM, as far as I know.

Qube OS separates domain as virtual machines on top of Xen and you need to do privilege escalation in the sandbox first, then to break Xen somehow. Sure, Xen is still a lot of code to attack, but it's much smaller than Linux kernel or XWindow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > You can use these techniques to create a virtual version of an old operating > system so that you can keep using some specific software, or for a more > private online environment.

If kernel version is not in the way...:

For command line software, I find it much easier and faster to do debootstrap and chroot with simple script that can call particular sandboxed command and return resulted output, like for exemple publican for fop based PDF conversion from docbook.

I do the same for wine based games for the kids, like WOT.

It has instant start, then during exit, I clean up and umount all the /proc , /dev /sys...

<comment><USER9> The kernel itself has stayed highly backwards-compatible. You can even load a module that lets you run a.out executables (the executable format Linux was using before ELF), assuming you have the libraries those executables need.</comment></comment>


Microsoft backed AI company is helping Israel surveil Palestinians - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2019/10/31/20937638/israel-surveillance-network-covers-palestinian-territories <comment><USER2> Israeli company bought by Microsoft works for Israel.

<comment><AUTHOR> In my estimation, where the company is incorporated or based does not matter as much as where do the investment funds come from.

<comment><USER2> Microsoft bought an existing company with commitments, staff and operations.

Your estimation matters very little.</comment></comment></comment>