reflexive

it doesn't hold for a definition of 'satisfied' that aligns with 'I consider it done/enough'.

Which is literally what satisfied means (Latin satis "enough")

I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.

Wrong. I did not assert this. I asserted that resources should be focused on improving the abilities of the group most likely to be in key positions in the future.

I just said that some plants are among the most nutrient dense foods available.

To be honest, that's not what you said. You clearly stated that the most nutrient rich foods are plants, which is false.

"Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.

"Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.

Yet the ones he recommends for us to eat -- grains -- are toxic and not suitable for human digestion.

He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies.

Vegans are precisely the people who ascribe a lofty moral status to their dietary choices, in my observation.

He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group.

I don't share that experience; the discourse of paleo and keto, in my perception, is people seeking personal results in their health. Keto people may "brag" about the results they've gotten, but not their high moral status, like vegans, or how people who disagree with them are to blame for all the world's problems, like vegans.

You're wilfully misrepresenting Pollan's argument.

I'm not. His argument is very simply that we should eat less meat and more grains. From TFA:

it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat.

most of the plants we have come to rely on are grains

Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores

All of this is garbage. Grains (eaten to the scale we do in the industrialized world, which is as the bulk of our calories) are poison. Yes, he does say a few things that are not false, such as "eating leaves is good". However I think you'd get better dietary advice by saying "eat things that begin with letter S".

Pollan's famous "maxim" manages to be condescending, unhelpful and inaccurate - all at the same time.

Eat food: duh

Not too much: again, thanks?

Mostly plants: Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet.

Pollan is the prototypical Bay-Area insufferable foodie. His documentary was a cringe-fest of pseudo-spiritual fawning.

Rene Girard talks about how food has become a new status symbol as people compete for bragging rights about how good they eat; Pollan is their patron saint.

If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society.

It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.

For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention.

You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else.

If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.

Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?

The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.

You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".

It is indeed proprietary because it does indeed have an owner.

You are using the term proprietary incorrectly, probably out of simple ignorance. The software does not have an "owner" who has power of the users; the LGPL means all users have complete control over the software.

Please read this carefully before spreading more misinformation:

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html

Systemd is the opposite. It is inflexible and clunky, monolithic and proprietary

The other points can be debated, but please don't call it proprietary. It is free software as in "freedom" (LGPL).

Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.

Conversely, just because they're out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid.

Anecdotal evidence: Kurt Vonnegut's son Mark wrote a fascinating book ("The Eden Express", 1975) about his experience being schizophrenic and a prolonged psychotic episode triggered by marijuana consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eden_Express

Marijuana consumption forces many to maintain some form of social links

Ironically, that's only true when marijuana is illegal, hence a poor argument for legalization.

Legal substances may be easily purchased with minimal social interaction.

"2D animation software" and "multimedia authoring" are both pretty concrete terms. "Creator" suffers from vagueness more than anything.

The term “creator” as applied to authors implicitly compares them to a deity (“the creator”). The term is used by publishers to elevate authors' moral standing above that of ordinary people in order to justify giving them increased copyright power, which the publishers can then exercise in their name. We recommend saying “author” instead.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Creato...

use-the-most-appropriate-tool-for-the-job-dammit

Wow, and to think some fools think the most inappropriate tool should be used.

mini-project idea: HN discussion generator

+1 - also an HN discussion auto-up/down-voter.

What's useful about that?

Personally, I've been struggling with the question of, are mega-services like Google and Facebook compatible with an open Internet? This helps to clarify my thinking.

Up to now I've been thinking about what evil they might do individually. Now I see the obvious: just like in any other industry, the objective is to reduce the market to a few major players (3-7). Then these become the only companies who can get "copyright clearances" or "non-fake news certification" in exchange for supporting their patrons' programs.

I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand.

To support your point, there's a press release circulating from Google and Facebook right now. They've launched a program to share hashes (fingerprints) through a database identifying offending ("extremist") content so it can be more efficiently removed from the web. Yet, we aren't allowed to comment on this - I just posted it and the story was flagged.

There's a huge difference between saying "No more gratuitous flamebait about the US Election", and "no technical discussion permitted about any topic that could possibly be controversial."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110823

Agree. If topics and comments are going to be hidden because they're "political", there should be a way to view and upvote these if you want to "opt-in".

Maybe we should be addressing just that, the larger issue here, in addition to political comments.

Yep. I feel like my first mistake on this site was to argue with every comment I disagreed with. Unless the comment leads to an instructive discussion, it's OK to just downvote it.

Being downvoted for expressing an unpopular opinion here is the equivalent of being shoved out of a circle of friends.

You should learn to take feedback less personally.

It doesn't feel good and I don't come here to feel like crap.

If someone uses emotionally charged language to denigrate you, then I think you have a valid complaint. But the interpretation you assign to a downvote is just that - your interpretation.

I would suggest, if your critique proposes a particular remedy, you should expect people to question whether your proposed remedy is a good idea. If it does not propose a remedy, you should expect people to question whether your critique is even useful.

A critique of the status quo that doesn't generate controversy is probably irrelevant.

uncontroversial critiques of the status quo

Hmm...

Let me try to understand your reasoning. If everyone agreed with your critique of the "status quo", why would it be the status quo to begin with?

I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others.

This may be partly because so many thoughtless people feel qualified to enter a political discussion (e.g., about basic income, or immigration), whereas they couldn't even pretend to understand real-time operating systems or functional programming enough to have an opinion.

Part of the beauty of HN is getting opinions about things that matter in the real world, from people who really think about things.

I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do.

I'd like to point out that this site is called "Hacker News", not "Technical and Business News". While there is no single "hacker political stance", there are ethical principles embraced by the community that can be applied usefully to policy questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics

As many have pointed out, it's really the subjective content of this site (here in the comments) that has the most value.

Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion.

In fact, what is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion is: emotionally charged, poorly-considered, and dishonest discussion. The topic doesn't matter: health fads, operating systems, or taxes. I agree, many people have terrible style in their approach to political discussion - but see also, e.g. Hobbes and Rousseau for more thoughtful representatives.

Actually, the entire population disagrees with you, about something. The "realization" is that a lot of the things we disagree about, are actually kind of boring.

Based on Agnolia, these are the most popular stories from the past week on HN that might be construed as "political":

#17 Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for a week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404

#23 Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13092330

#29 Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065599

#37 Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103611

#49 War Is a Racket by General Smedley D. Butler (1933) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13068641

#59 FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074285

High confidence of a low correlation suggests other factors at work.. maybe variations in genetics, or in the particular type of processed meat. Not worth giving up bacon and sausage :-D

Subsidizing people who aren't contributing to society seems the only humane option.

I think humane is the key word here. We are human, after all. It's human that you would take someone in to your home and feed and care for them, though they might never repay you.

It's not human that you would take 10 people into your home and support them indefinitely while they contribute nothing, and then support their children, their children's children, etc forever.