skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a parent I have found myself lying to my kids exactly as layed out in this essay. Mostly along the lines of protections. I just have a couple of specific dissagreements.

Sex,

Having a soon to be 14 year old daughter this section hit close to home. My wife and I haven't told her lies about sex but we have certainly held back some things. Pregnancy and STD are important topics to understand but even more so are the emotional aspects. Sex can be a powerful binding and richly rewarding part of a relationship but only so far as each partner treats it with the appropriate respect. You may have casual sex but it comes at the cost of less meaning for sex in a committed relationship. I don't want her having sex now not because it may cloud her judgement but because I want her to be able to have something much better in the future.

Swearing,

Minor point. I tell my kids not to swear (and don't hardly swear myself) for the same reason I don't let them track mud in the house. I just think it's ugly. I hope that doesn't set me off as less educated.

Death,

There is too much to talk about in this kind of forum. I just wanted to note that talking about religion is far less controversial than talking about parenting.
Precisely the point of the story. :)
I meant to link this on my photography blog when I saw it a while back. Did it now instead: http://www.photub.com/2008/May/13/photo-stream/
I am not sure if letting the parents of children explain sex to there children instead of myself (say these were your kids) would be a lie.

If your kids came up to me on the street and were to ask me questions about sex and I tell them anal sex is 'the best'... is that what you want me to tell your kids? Or maybe I should not discuss sex with your kids at all and let you, the parent do so.

While I respect the author, you just can't write something like this and pass it by parents of children. When you have a child and say you are in favor of Gay Sex & Marriage and are an Athiest you want to be able to help your child reason through these things and whatever answer they decide to pick is fine, but if you don't have a chance to at least have a real discussion about it before they make a decision is disappointing.
In a freemium model there don't have to be any ads at all!

Your basic service can be totally free, provided you can justify it as marketing expenditure with the conversion rate to paid services.

The biggest problem I can see with running ads on the free tier of on a two tier service is that the people most interested in buying advertising will be your direct competitors. It might not be too smart to give them easy access to your user base.
Thanks for the clarification.

It seems to me then, that some of the situations that you describe are more often not lies but situations where parent actually believes it himself.
Swear words seem to be such a necessary part of language that I'm pretty sure new ones would arise if we ever completely legitimised the old ones. When you wake up at 2 am and discover that your balcony is on fire(^), it's nice to know that your language has a word set aside specifically for situations like that.

In the last few decades, it seems that the C-word has become more taboo even as the F-word has become less so, thanks to the efforts of feminists who like to bitch about it. (Come to think of it, "bitch" seems to have got slightly more taboo during my lifetime as well, for similar reasons.) And then there's a whole new class of newly-taboo words like the N-word -- admittedly nobody shouts that word when they hit their finger with a hammer just yet, but perhaps they will in the future.

(^) That happened to me the other week. I can't remember exactly what I said, but it was neither intelligent nor graceful.
Quintura Next Generation Web Search | Tech Jaws
According to Andrei Zmievski, greatly improved unicode support is a big priority too, which of course will be nice for i18n stuff.
It's not just that they're "hard"...it's that things are usually downright unfair. We never really teach children the essential role of luck in success, and how you can be the best by every objective metric, yet still fail because of phenomena that are outside of your control.
It was exciting when Facebook first released their developer platform.

They do like to play the big brother role and limit some of the functionality.

Also, if you have a large amount of traffic hitting their API, they will throttle you.

The Query Language and FBML are pretty cool concepts too.
99% Genetic?  Individual Differences in Executive Function Are Almost Perfectly Heritable
Just because something is bigger than Windows doesn't mean MS should compete. The automotive industry is probably bigger than Windows. Maybe they should start making cars?
Binge drinking rarely helps anyone's case, even when picking up women. However, the rest of this describes the traits necessary to solve the Poincare conjecture, not be an entrepreneur. If you're choosing to stay at home working on a product that you know will never bring you any money, you're not going to be very successful from an entrepreneurial standpoint.

Also, the article is not talking about a side effect. It is doubtful the successes of Google and Yahoo and Amazon were ever in danger of being derailed by parties with "hot willing chicks."
You can't have an idea of progress without some way of distinguising better from worse, forward from back, more progressed from less progressed. it's been part of the word all along (latin 'progredi', to step forward) - not that etymology always matters, but in this case the metaphor is essential to the concept.

If we have a clear idea of what "pushing the human race forward" is (more knowledge? less famine? better morals?), then somebody can be the 'best' at it - even if they are the best by being somehow innovative.

I'm not sure that this is a fruitful discussion to be having, though - except that people often seem to talk about progress without reflecting on what they mean. Besides, you started it with "push the human race forward" ;)
Andriod Scan is pretty amazing.

Take a picture of a bar code, it scans it and finds you the best prices online instantly. I could go to a mall with my phone, scan the crap I like...then just buy it all online and potentially save lots of money. Sounds like a game changer to me.
Debian (and derivatives) Bug Leaves Private SSL/SSH Keys Guessable
Rensselaer student invents alternative to silicon chip
Ross Perot is a rich man!
I think it is possible to have interesting and useful discussions about the nature of who and what we are that includes viewpoints that are religious, non-religious and 'other'. Message boards seem to be very bad places for them.

These are the sorts of things that people have put a lot of time and effort into thinking about and wrestling with - and there are very often emotional personal experiences tied up in those beliefs. On message boards, however, you usually just want to spend a short amount of time making relatively concise statements. Not the best format for getting across a complex worldview. This creates the "Amazon rating effect" where in order to influence the "overall results" you feel compelled to rate things either 5-stars or 1-star even though almost everyone holds 2-4 star beliefs.
Progress must have direction (at least implicitly, relative to that which is not progress), or we wouldn't be able to define it; it would just be "change".

Moreover, to say that freakish geniuses "change" the world would be a truism, except for the fact that "the world" doesn't actually change unless everyone else follows the freak. So the parent comment has merit -- you need the people who do weird things, and you need the people who do the hard work of filling in the gaps. Progress is defined by the movement of the whole, and not the movement of an individual.
After the first 2 items of the list I realized it was indeed a list until the end: from that point, knowing the structure of the article made the reading even easier.
Hacker Intelligence: What is Art? Sayings from a Heretical Perspective!
The difference is that the automative industry won't undermine Microsofts businessmodel , but Google might.

If they look a few years down the line they should definitely compete against Google.
Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage
Funny, my Bible doesn't have that one--just something called "Revelation".
An excellent personalized internet radio community
Pixarra Community - Gallery - Viewing image - Born To Be President ?
I think you may be overestimating the importance of geographic locale. Are suburban teenagers really less bored than urban teenagers? Or, for that matter, more engaged than rural teenagers? It's possible that some teenagers are just naturally bored, and that even in environment with plenty of activities, familiarity will eliminate enough that there is effectively nothing to do.
equivocation
Wow! This is so cool. Good job. Great format.
Bjorn Tipling's comment (6th one down) is spot on. You can't assume that someone who doesn't pay to remove ads is too poor to afford anything advertised. They may simply not care enough to pay the asking price to remove them.

It's called a demand curve. Did this person who dares to give business advice even bother to take Intro to Economics?
It would be nice to have an interactive demo, because I think it would take a lot of getting used to. I guess on a phone you don't have to compete quite as much against touch-typing for the advertised "efficiency."
This is basically right. The words are taboo because it's useful to have taboo words, so the culture deliberately makes them so.

Taboo words are useful because they transcend politeness. If a normally civil person comes into your dinner party and tells you that the fucking ceiling is about to fall down, you get moving. You don't waste time looking around for the ironic smile. You don't reproach the person for speaking out of turn.

But it goes beyond simple cultural coding. The neurologists say that there's a physiological basis for swearing: the brain is wired to do so under certain conditions. Under extreme or sudden distress, swearing helps us cope, and the reverse is probably also true: swearing helps to work you into a rage or a panic. That's one very good reason why we tell kids not to swear and correct them when they do: It's a way of calming them down, and of teaching them to be calm, and of encouraging them to reserve their moments of adrenaline-surging fury for appropriate times.
Everytime I look something up on Yelp, if it has more than, say, 5 reviews, the rating always seems to be between 3.5 and 4.5.

That's not useful, other than to find the address of a place that I already know about. A vote of 4 seems to be the safe vote on Yelp.
I think it is a sort of lie to tell someone the truth in a context they can't handle appropriately. So, I don't see anything wrong with what you are doing. It'd be wrong if you never stopped telling her such things.
It wouldn't. But it would make good coding easier for a good developer though. Don't get me wrong - I'm writing a PHP webapp _right now_ on the other monitor... The only reason it's in PHP is because it's a for-redistribution script and everyone knows PHP is easy to deploy and popular.

It has its strengths. They've obviously done something right to garner that huge userbase and support. But for a developer looking to write an internal webapp where only a couple of people get to look at the sort; I maintain that a good developer will be better off coding in one of the other languages that are, shall we just say, more "built" for the hard-core coding sort of thing.
" But why do we conceal death from kids? Probably because small children are particularly horrified by it."

One of the hardest things for me answer was the question "Dad, am I going to die?". Even though it is incredibly hard to tell them the truth, I do. The aftermath of saying "yes" to that one really, really sucks no matter how you try to handle it.
I grew up in Chicago and raise 2 kids in Oak Park, which is to Chicago what Brooklyn is to Manhattan. Speaking of Brooklyn, one of my two business partners is going to be raising a kid there as well.

The problem with big cities and children is school systems; you can get around that by paying for explicit private schools, or the de facto private school systems you get in the near suburbs.
How subjective is gynecology? How much room is there for 'perspective'?

I think the metaphor has been taken too far to be useful here.
Didn't he sell EDS to GM in the 90s?
It's very interesting to me, given how advanced the HN community is in terms of programming and business strategy, how inefficient most of the marketing strategies suggested here are.

(with the notable exception of: "make an incredibly useful product")

Indeed, the notion of "make something awesome and it will market itself" is a useful heuristic for guiding a deeper, sustainable marketing strategy. It's a meritocracy out there, folks, especially in terms of media.

("Media" meaning the layer of communication that connects services and users)

That media you create also needs to stand alone as useful information. Traditional PR is based on leveraging connections ("beating the meritocracy") on behalf of clients to expose a product to an audience. One business strategy equivalent of this might be Facebook forcing users to return to Facebook.com to reply to an inter-profile message; it's unnecessary coercion that ultimately degrades the quality of the product.

I advise businesses to begin creating an unfair advantage that is based on the preexisting expertise of the management team. Toyota's marketing channel within Twitter Japan and Miller Brewing's BrewBlog.com are stellar examples of how you can begin to create a marketing channel that attracts attention on its own merit (and has great SEO effects...and scales like a mother).

There's a number of other issues to grok here, including viral mechanisms and transparent outreach tactics, that I unfortunately don't have time to get into at the moment.

I did get into some of this a little bit on my blog here:

http://www.ethanbauley.com/post/34550190

Great question!
Video claims to demo breathtaking Windows 7 features
Microsoft doesn't want to make the same mistake IBM did.

IBM enjoyed 70% market share in the enterprise for 30 years. They thought it would last forever. Until the PC came along. But they didn't take it seriously and look what happened.

Microsoft knows as well as anyone that the days of thick clients and proprietary software are numbered. So they'll milk that cow as long as they can.

No one knows for sure what's going to happen, but with thick pipes, thin clients, open source software, and the upheaval of the "enterprise", I'd be planting new seeds, too.
I've read about similar services here in Europe before. But how they intend to implement it is interesting.
At first, I also misread this sentence in the way that you have. :)

What the sentence means to say is "It is also almost certainly true that students were taught about Curie because she was female."
NEC rugged laptop takes a lickin'
Spray them with water, subject them to extreme temperatures or drop them on the ground, NEC's rugged ShieldPro laptops are made to survive rough treatment. The biggest challenge, however, is about to come: battling more established competitors in the harsh international market.
to preempt common criticisms:

1) 99% is not unbelievably high, given that they used factor analysis to improve the reliability of the measurements
2) this doesn't preclude a) environmental influences that interact with genetic profiles nor b) environmental influences which act on the mean value of a twin-pair's score (the study's concerned with deviations from means within twin pairs).

thanks for the interest guys.
pg quotes Peter Mayle, writing about divorce: "You shouldn't put the blame on one parent, because divorce is never only one person's fault."

to that pg replies: "Really? When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault?"

my answer to that would be: yes, even in that case, the guy's wife has to take part of the blame. she married him in the first place. if she was observant, she would have seen the signs. and she could probably tell he was restless or unfulfilled somehow, but chose to ignore it.
Aside from good analysis, the beginning is full of humorous gems. I'm not sure if the humor is accidental, or if the author picked humorous examples deliberately.
To a person unfamiliar with economics, accounting, math, etc. the financial markets seem magical, or at least mysterious. Prophets emerge to explain the markets, and often do so in vague and opinionated ways, that to the uninformed seem brilliant and enlightened.

Regarding this article, there are sociologists, psychologists, etc. that make a scientific/formal practice of answering questions like, 'Why do we lie to kids? What are the ramifications.'.

Where the majority of people reading pg's articles are technically proficient, our realm of knowledge generally doesn't extend into the pursuits of a sociologist/psychologist. And so those realms seem magical or mysterious to us.

Does it occur to anyone that the issues brought up in this article have probably been thoroughly studied, and well-reasoned, possibly even evidence based conclusions have been drawn, and in fact are publicly available.

In this age of information, perhaps the lie of the 'original thinking prophet' will go out of fashion.
You're wrong. The people who are successful are those who focus on solving the problem. If you are a marketer and you stay at home, you will fail because the problem the marketer faces is outside. If you are a business guy and you spend all day at the computer, you will fail too, because business is about networking and contacts. Each of those people, were they focused, would be doing the activities that are most beneficial for their line of business, and those activities are outside.

If however, you are a software developer, and you are outside trying to act like a businessman, then you will fail because you are not focusing on solving the core problem you set out to solve.

It's NOT possible to play all the roles. There is no super hacker who is also a super business man. There is no basketball star who is also an extremely successful musician. Those things require focus and dedication, and you cannot do both and be equally successful at both.

If you stay at home working on a "PROBLEM", not "PRODUCT" and the solution you come up with is better than every solution out there, and people want to use it, you will be successful because the guys focused on business will search you out.

If the problem you are solving involves search, you need to focus on that. Studying algorithms, AI, all that stuff. If you are spending half your time doing that and the other half looking for venture capital, you are setting yourself up for failure.

If however, you are creating a website for musicians and you are not going to music venues and taking notes, you are also losing.

Understand where your focus should be for the line of business you are in, and ... focus! If you find it hard or boring to spend so much time focusing on it, then that business was never meant for you.

Thinking about your product should be like playing a video game - challenging and fun. If it's not and you prefer to think about money or funding, then you have picked the wrong product.
Einstein Letter (1954): Belief in God childish, Jews not chosen people
Doh! That he sure did! Then GM spun off EDS again!
I think the key is that it's the parents who are uncomfortable with death, since they don't have to deal with it on a daily basis, either.
How It Does It: The RIAA Explains How It Catches Alleged Music Pirates
Another issue is that religion is better understood when someone has grown up within one. It's alot easier to understand the lack of religion. The same things with a number of affections that the educated consider false, such as patriotism, true love, etc.

So, really, if a person keeps their child away from things like this so they can make an informed decision when they are older actually can limit their ability to make an informed decision.
We specialize in everything
Great quote from the CEO:

> The limiting reagent in the startup equation is not ideas, but amazing founding teams.

Sounds rather PGish, eh?
HN Feature Request: Include link domain name in RSS feed
I read primarily by RSS and sometimes skip over an item because the title isn't always descriptive enough. For instance, I didn't immediately realize that "Lies we tell kids" was a pg essay. I like to scan RSS items quickly and don't have time to "scrub" all the links to see where they go.
Breathtaking?

Having wasted time watching the video.. it's a tabbed file browser, ftp functionality and shows a WYSIWYG webpage editor.

Either Vista's seriously lowered expectations or the author's got bad Asthma.
Social Networks Could Still Change The World
If I were having a conversation with a friend I would prefer Prrometheus' comments to yours. If I were told in response to something I said: "Belief qua belief does not deserve respect", first of all I would think "Alright! Half-baked Latin! That justifies the price we paid for these coffees!" but also I would be happy to be given the chance to advance the conversation. I would have been given a choice either to explain to my friend that I had not got my point across and to try again, or I could discuss why "belief qua belief" does deserve respect.

However, if the conversation began with my friend telling me "you will probably just dismiss this" and especially "many others believe this" I would feel insulted/dismissed.
John Stuart Mill is forgotten? From the headline, I thought they were going to pull up one of the more obscure German Idealists (along the lines of Gellner's joke: "There are three great German philosophers: Hegel, Schlegel, and Bagel. No one understands Hegel. No one has
read Schlegel. And Bagel doesn't exist. Or as the Bagelians like to put it: Non-existence is the essence
of his Being.")
Yes, I remember that. It was innovative and very useful actually. The new twitter-summize seems not that impressive, not ground breaking at all, and far less useful. Plus we already have tweetscan.com.

Is twitter search that important? I think the value of twitter is in the instant, not in the history.
Some more information at Ben Laurie's blog: http://www.links.org/?p=327
It's possible, as I'm merely talking from my own experience. But I clearly remember thinking that living in walking distance of commerce as any kind was exciting. There was a clear split in my mind between "places people lived" and "places people shopped." In the suburbs, there's not much for kids to do other than hang out at each other's houses.

Once we could drive, we spent a lot of time hanging out at Denny's and IHOP. I think, but obviously can not prove, that if we lived in walking distance of a downtown area, we would have been less bored.
not any school I went to did we spend BHM learning about black scientists.

That's a very broad brush your painting, and I wonder if you have some actual data to back that statement up, other than you personal experiences learning about Native Americans.
Investing in UX
We should start a movement for watrcooler. Love the design, especially the keyboard nav
Times Reader Beta for Mac Coming This Month
Is that not implied? We can assume an author is writing about the present and recent past unless told otherwise told.
Those who choose not to pay away ads might not be cheap; they might be too busy to deal with paying. If you're advertising a time-saving product or service you'll score.

I recently got rid of google ads on OurDoings:

http://ourdoings.com/2008-04-24
Wetpaint Emerging As A Leading Social Publishing Platform