skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally know quite a few people who are offended by foul language.

What constitutes foul language may be cultural but that's beside the issue. Imagine, a child from 1950s American suburbs was raised in that belief that certain words were wrong to use. The child was consistently reinforced in this belief throughout his childhood by all adults he met but never had it explained to him. Later, as an adult, he finds many friends who swear freely, and, not knowing the reason it is supposedly wrong, adopts the practice himself. Yet, in the back of his mind he still remembers his entire childhood telling him it was wrong and he know that those people genuinely believed that it was wrong. Clearly there was a reason for this taboo to begin, but without knowledge of the reason, how is he supposed to know whether it is still relevant? It doesn't matter whether there is any intrinsic property of the words that is wrong, what matters is thet there is a taboo and whose to say that the taboo isn't still relevant?

Teaching kids not to swear as a rule is especially important when one remembers that there are still places in society where the taboo holds strong and for the children to succeed in those places, they must not accidentally say anything that will offend someone.
When's the last time you had an honest discussion with anyone about:

a) Sex (e.g., Do you satisfy your partner?)
b) Death (e.g., Was your life meaningful?)
c) Formal Education (e.g., If not, then what?)
d) Identity (e.g., Who are you?)
e) Authority (e.g., Who tells you what to do?)

I don't know, honesty seems much harder than settling on lies to tell ourselves.
May be Wine can run it?
Erm, hardly shocking. It has been established since at least the 80s that vitamin B12 is essential for brain development, and any number of large scale developmental studies have been carried out to that effect.There are no non-animal sources for vitamin B12. If you find any doctor of medicine who will recommend a vegan or vegetarian diet to either a breast feeding mother or to a child, then they ought to be struck off.

Simply Googling for "vitamin B12 brain development" will return you any number of papers on the subject, but most of them are behind their respective journal's paywalls unfortunately. However, the fact their abstracts include works like "cerebral atrophy" might give you some idea of their content.
dfrank seem to be the real professionel! Thanks, is even for me a good chance to learn, even more as a German!
Writing one is not a waste of time, because you learn what's really going on just after POST. But trying to actually use your own and maintain it is pretty much a waste. Write one to learn how it works, then throw it away and use Grub.
Watch and enjoy:

http://www.findinternettv.com/Video,item,1838332278.aspx
"Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't."

This is the most important paragraph of this essay. It's really important for anyone who is curious in general to understand this and I have never heard it expressed before.

"The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the useful half is the payload."

This is actually a very effective marketing trick if you replace "bizarre" with unusual. Look at reddit - the alien makes it sticky, Google - unusual simplicity makes it sticky, Apple - unusually good looking devices.

I do think that with religion as with products, short term stickiness comes from the surface unusualness and long term stickiness comes from the payload - the actual utility (honesty and industriousness for religion, unsually intuitive interfaces for apple products, really good search algorithms for Google, and until recently at least, entertaining stories on reddit)

For people who don't find the long term utility in religion, the stickiness that comes from common unusualness is often not enough to maintain their 'belief'. This is truer for products than for religions though - which I'm sure is an evolutionary effect. It's a much harder decision to quit your group or clan than it is to abandon things. Clearly, Apple has managed to cross this product-religion boundary, making it stickier.
PHP was perl when it started... :)
Real Estate: Why the Market Will Worsen | Newsweek Voices - Daniel McGinn | Newsweek.com
I'm a parent of three children (girl, 6; two boys, 3 yrs and 9 mos), and your essay resonated very strongly with me. Thanks for a great piece of writing.

I've found that I've done a better job as a parent when I consciously thought about these things beforehand, so that I was prepared to discuss them with my kids when they came up (and they always seem to come up much, much earlier than I expect). For example, questions from my daughter about jail led to crime, which led to drug use, which led to recreational drug use. Fortunately I had thought about this one quite a bit, so I was able to give the carefully crafted answer that I had wanted to give. But I haven't always been so lucky, and sometimes the lies come streaming out.

Raising kids - especially more than one - is in some ways like an intense startup experience, where you're constantly trying to extinguish fires, and you're only partially prepared for any one of them. You just do the best you can with the amount of patience, knowledge and raw ability you have at the time, which is never perfect. It's difficult, and transformative, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
Adults may be able to lie to children with their words, but they can rarely pull this off with their actions.

Each of us can remember the many times when, as children, we witnessed the difference between "what I say" and "what I do".

We were told not to swear, drink, smoke, or lie by parents who swore, drank, smoked and lied, not to gossip by adults who gossiped, not to cheat by teachers who cut corners themselves, to do the right thing by leaders who didn't, and to be great by celebrities who weren't so great.

Who knows, if adults actually did what they said, maybe they would have been able to pull it off.

We children may have been a little slow, but we weren't that stupid. After all...

"What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yes, that's the thing. There's literally millions of people in Africa who get little or no animal protein, and they grow up just fine. The point is that study after study shows that with just a tiny portion of animal protein, they end up a whole lot smarter.

I'm not trying to suggest you aren't yourself a smart person, just that simply because you can't see the ill effects your actions cause doesn't mean they don't exist.
I have these kinds of discussion fairly often. In fact, I probably wouldn't consider somebody a friend until we'd had that kind of conversation. I find it hard to judge if that's unusual - maybe it is in other social circles?

I take the point that avoiding self-deception is hard, maybe impossible. But that's no different from talking about science, or history, or just about anything else.
Twist - see Twitter trends in real time
Google hands out $1.25 million to 50 Android app winners
If you are interested in this, you may want to check out our site as well:

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http://twittersearch.flaptor.com for real-time search
As my father once said: “they can make you go to school but they can’t make you do anything there.” Lying to your kids is common but optional. At 28 I can't think of a single time my father ever lied to me and as far as I can tell he never lied to my 10 year younger sister. Granted plenty of other people lied to me, but he had no problem pointing out that religion was silly, drugs where fun and dangerous, and conformity was optional if you accept society’s response etc. Odd as it might seem his accurate responces where frequently less than useful such as trying to describe chemistry at the atomic level to a 3rd grader and recomending the joy of sex (a book) to a teenager but such is life.

PS: One extreme example was he was told to lie so he could get a clearance by the person giving the interview and he refused.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/summize-a-sentiment-eng...

Seems like they just went more real-time with their "review" analysis... still a cool concept. And they're funded by betaworks.

http://betaworks.com/work.html
Why ad-free and Web 2.0 don't mix
Vista is problematic and I have suffered greatly, personally, because of its flaws, so I am certainly a vocal critic of it, but I don't understand the whining about systems requirements. Most machines you can buy these days are Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM or better, and in my obviously limited experience that's sufficient. A $600 laptop from Dell gets you that much.

Yes, you can't run Vista on a really old machine, which lots of people still have. It doesn't strike me as a valid criticism unless Microsoft fails to make clear that a given machine will not have an enjoyable experience due to performance problems.

I still choose to run XP, but then again I run Xubuntu on a quad-core machine just because it appeals to my neuroses.
There is the PHP language, which is getting better over time, and then there is the PHP userbase, that is permanently retarded.
That self-deception is exactly what I was getting at. I have no doubt that many have these discussions but it's so much easier to lie during them. I'd argue it's different in kind from science or history exactly because there's no independent record that can be consulted. Indeed, I can't see many parents lying to their kids about science or history because it would be so straight-forward to identify the lie. No, the lies seem much more personal exactly because we're already telling them to ourselves. Thus the sequel essay.
Summize is excellent. You can set up an RSS feed on your start-up name and then it feeds you Tweets that mention it. It is a great way to connect with early adopters who use your site.
Unless you are a strict vegetarian (vegan), you can obtain B12 from eggs or dairy products. Most vegans are well aware of the danger of B12 deficiency, and either take supplements or eat foods fortified with B12. B12 supplements are inexpensive and widely available. So how exactly is B12 a serious problem for vegetarians?
I still don't understand what made Scoble cry... perhaps just a fanboy thing
Yes - most of the "suburbs" in Boston are smaller towns that have grown and run into each other.
This is the first PG article I've felt a certain way about, which is that its scope exceeded my interest. I may yet read the rest of it soon. But fundamentally, I must point this out:

> By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That's why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. Every kid grows up in a fake world.

Or the classic example, The Catcher in the Rye. Adolescents are caught between a desire for authentic reality and romantic idealism. They profess to want the former but seek the latter.
"A sprinter in a race almost immediately enters a state called 'oxygen debt.' His body switches to an emergency source of energy that's faster than regular aerobic respiration. But this process builds up waste products that ultimately require extra oxygen to break down, so at the end of the race he has to stop and pant for a while to recover."

As a point of information, it's unusual to think of anaerobic respiration as an emergency source of energy; you tend to think of emergency situations as necessarily involving adrenaline, which increases heart rate, dilates blood vessels, etc. The biggest energy source of the 100m and 200m sprints is phosphocreatine, a very useful fuel for anaerobic metabolism; unfortunately for sprinters, it can be depleted in under ten seconds of top physical effort. (Incidentally, A.V. Hill received the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology for figuring out the proportions of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism that contribute to energy production in the various distances of Olympic footraces.)

This, of course, is all to say that sometimes lies aren't really malicious - as he says - but that it's simply easier to say simple things than complex things. Since it was tangential to the discussion anyway, it's no big deal.

And if you disagree (as many experts do, even amongst each other) about the role of phosphocreatine, I'll be perfectly content with you calling me a liar :)
Your use of "vegetarian" and "animal protein" are unconventional. "Vegetarian" generally refers to someone that does not eat meat but does eat eggs and dairy, so when you said "vegetarian kids need animal protein", it implies they need meat. But meat is not essential for development; B12 is, and can be got from milk or eggs.

It's true anyone raising their child vegan ought to be aware of B12 deficiency. Time was when B12 could be got from dirt on vegetables pulled from the ground, but nowadays we're pretty finicky about cleanliness.
Already posted the source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188617
I'm also stoked they're finally removing crap like register_globals and magic_quotes. "Safe mode" caused many headaches as well trying to get software running on all possible configurations, adding lots of little restrictions without much real benefit (patching symptoms vs solving the real problem).

IMO they should have done these in PHP5. They already broke b/c with the object system (passing by reference instead of by copying), which was smart but troublesome for any complex OOP code written in PHP4. If you're already breaking b/c badly enough, just tear the band-aid off all at once I say.
I there are plenty of taboo words, but they have changed over time. 50 years ago people had no problem saying extremely racist or sexist things in the open but now it's a new taboo. IMO taboo words relate to taboo thoughts.

The odd things is the FCC is not what's keeping really taboo words off the air but they still keep the old guard of psudo taboo words off of prime time.
ah, in that case I do agree - and we're talking about something that huge swathes of philosophers, psychologists, social scientists and miscellaneous intellectuals have spent their lives arguing about.

That isn't to deny that a pg contribution could be illuminating!
PHP programmers + Goto statements? Oh dear lord...

Sorry, I know not all PHP programmers are like that, but still...
There's an interesting thing to note about sex amongst youth in rural, suburban, and urban settings. I've been privy to statistics held by birth control manufacturers (although the exact numbers evade my memory, the relations I remember). These show that urban youths begin having sex at an average age of 15. Suburban youths begin having sex at an average age of 14. Rural youths begin having sex at an average age of 13.

So, moving out to the suburbs might seem like protecting your child from having sex at an early age but the statistics would indicate otherwise.
this is really fun if its true.
New Google Reader for iPhone
I just noticed that I was very critical when I was reading the essay. Almost like having a higher standard for Paul's essays. I mostly agree with him, but I was trying to find holes in every sentence. I am not usually that critical.
edit:syntax error
a·naph·o·ra [...]
–noun
1. Also called epanaphora. Rhetoric. repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more successive verses, clauses, or sentences. [...]
2. Grammar. the use of a word as a regular grammatical substitute for a preceding word or group of words [...]
3. (sometimes initial capital letter) Eastern Church. [...]

Aif and awhen use meaning 2, while this essay probably means 1.
"It didn’t try to pay for reviews, as some sites have."

It certainly did, as someone points out in the comments at the Times. Craigslist was littered with ads for Yelp reviewers a few years ago when I was last looking for a job.
> The different (and I'll admit I'm on thin ice here) is that kids have a visceral component that is difficult to ignore.

Exactly - and thus there is value in having a neutral(ish) observer of the parenting process.
OK, now let's have someone make a cool screencast so we can easily skip to the "OMG it's full of stars" awe stuff and not have to waste time futzing with silly Microsoft user interfaces.
You can do that with our search engine as well, plus you can see a trend of the mentions over the past week. For example:

http://twittersearch.flaptor.com/search/search.do?tz=-3&...
I sense that some of the disagreements that I have with Paul Graham are deeply fundamental and have to do with the fabric and meaning of our existence. First of all, I'm a religious person. This I have seen immediately qualifies me for ridicule from some on a forum such as this, as believing in God is seen as the logical equivalent to believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If you think I am totally deluded because of my beliefs, I would ask that you at least show respect for the fact that I am devoted to them and value them sincerely.

I'll pick one thing for now. In the part about sex and drugs, Paul mentions that parents' desires for instilling confidence in their children conflict with their desires to teach children that they shouldn't trust their own judgment.

Teaching a child to avoid doing the wrong or evil thing does not have to be a matter of making the child submit to the parents' will. If a parent teaches a child correct principles (and yes I believe that there are fundamentally correct and incorrect principles), than the child can understand these not only logically, but morally (or spiritually, whatever you prefer). A child can and will be tempted to dabble in things like illicit sex and drugs. However, if that child has been properly taught, then he or she will know that those temptations go against the child's better judgment. There are two forces at work in a child's mind here. One is the natural desire to take the easy way and receive the certain immediate pleasure, the other is the desire to be wiser and live by a higher standard. A parent can instill confidence in a child by showing them that they trust the child to make the right choices. If a child makes a wrong choice, it is not because they used their own judgment instead of their parents', it is because they failed to use their own judgment. They can often feel that they have betrayed the trust that was given them.

Many of you may dismiss this as sentimental hogwash or religious tripe. You may say that this judgment that I describe a child learning from his or her parents comes about through brainwashing and lies. I only ask you to keep an open mind and consider my point of view carefully. Many others share it, though maybe not here.
Swearing would lose its force if we weren't all told it was wrong throughout childhood. Parents who stop their children swearing are doing the hard work to Keep Cursing Special, and should be thanked for their services to the foul-mouthed.
I have.

This essay does not describe my approach to parenting, but I know parents like that.

Made me wonder if PG's SO is expecting.
"Making kids think things are easier than they are"

Probably the most important lie I've unraveled in my mind over the last couple years reading experiences from real people (pg, etc) and things like "Myths of Innovation", etc.

This is ESPECIALLY dangerous if you (or your kids) are smart. If you're fairly smart, then school is easy. It's easy, so you never fail, so you never understand that many things (including most worth doing) are hard.
"It's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. You have to consciously erase it."

I really liked this point, and I feel its a good way to sum up the points Paul made. I think at times we underestimate the impact of socialization (work, school etc.) and we mentally seal off certain doors (opportunities) to mesh with the norms.
With all the noise that we are absorbing, this notion of reconsidering even some of the more 'basic' assumptions becomes all the more important.
It is falsifiable if you can find a single non falsifiable thing that would be useful / treated as true.
"It's obvious now that he was on the list because he was black (and for that matter that Marie Curie was on it because she was a woman), but as a kid I was confused for years about him. I wonder if it wouldn't have been better just to tell us the truth: that there weren't any famous black scientists. Ranking George Washington Carver with Einstein misled us not only about science, but about the obstacles blacks faced in his time."

(I would comment about Curie but someone already did)

Not sure if any school I know of raises GWC on the same pedestal as Einstein. For better or for worse, most people in America regard Einstein as one of the smartest people that ever lived, and the same is definitely not true for Carver.

"
Public school textbooks represent a compromise between what various powerful groups want kids to be told. The lies are rarely overt. Usually they consist either of omissions or of over-emphasizing certain topics at the expense of others."

What powerful groups in America wanted a black scientist to be seen on the same level as Einstein? Carver is usually seen as a very smart black man, which if anything, belittles blacks as if this was the one and only black who could achieve anything in an advanced field.
I visited summize.com before. They used to focus on searching book/movie reviews. Now it is totally different.
A few short follow-up questions:

1) Is any "development" part of suburbia?

2) What if there were multiple developers building the houses?

3) What if it is x miles from a town center?

4) What if the owners built their own houses in the development?

Let's get specific using the Boston area as an example.

5) Do you think any parts of Cambridge count as suburbia?

6) Do you think any of the following areas/towns count as suburbia: Revere, Brookline, Newton, Framingham, Wellsley, Waltham, Lexington?

And finally 7) if an area is just less densely settled does that make it just as unappealing as suburbia in your view?
By that argument, all OBGYNs should be men. Or women who've not been pregnant.
I'd guess most of the top 10 start with "I don't have time for X", for many values of X.

If you don't have time for something, it just means you didn't make time for it. Despite what you think, it's not that valuable to you because you don't choose to do it.

I realized that by not exercising, I was explicitly saying my health or energy level were not important. Since that's just plain dumb, I started going to the gym 3x/week, and I'm going to start biking again soon.
To move forward you have to, by definition, be going in the same direction. The freakish geniuses change the human race, but it's the loyal hard-workers who move it forward.

[sorry to quibble over semantics, but it was too obvious an opportunity to pass p]
Method name renaming was licked in Smalltalk, even in things like specs (which predated XML, but served much the same purpose.) So long as everything's an object in the image, you're fine. (Excepting goofy things like constructing message sends at runtime.)

Things like properties files and pickled objects that left the image -- you aren't covered then. But there's little you need those for that you can't do in-image.
Nice ending! Poetic even :)
check out Steven Pinker's "Why We Curse", http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=246c0071-a9cd-46e2...
Google goes social with friend connect
Now to figure out what the heck all those apps are.
When I was younger my Dad used to tell me roadkill was just sleeping. I remember accepting this for a while. One day, my Mom was driving behind someone who ran over a cat. The cat thrashed around in the road for a long time until it finally laid down, breathing very hard. My Mom told me to stay in the car and told me explicitly "you don't want to see what this cat goes through right now." I sat and contemplated what the cat must be going through and came to a point where I felt I understood it. The next year, when my neighbor killed herself, I was able to accept her passing with much more ease. IMO a gradual path to accepting death worked out well for me.