if I may give you a piece of advice, ask yourself whether you can guarantee that your kid will be happy to have been forced to come to life, or if you are selfishly taking a bet at someone else's expense.

If I may ask, would you have preferred to not come to life, if you had the choice?

I would have chosen not to be born.

People here are privileged, live in a better country, good income etc. Because they have better life, they expect others also to say it's great. Many children are born without proper thinking by their parents, for selfish reason and suffer every day.

I know you are not asking me. But, I would've refused to come to life. Given that, when they ask me the question, I have the same knowledge that I have now or a short trailer about what is life (not specifically mine). Ahah.

aka fanatically telling yourself fairy tales until you blind yourself to reality

Have you ever considered why fairy tales have persisted? Why do we see the same stories repeated time and time again? Why are tales retold in Disney and Marvel movies to the tune of billions in profit? It’s because the stories resonate, which is another way of saying they present an essential truth. They teach us something about ourselves that help us make better decisions.

The lessons can be misinterpreted, abused, and used to manipulate others, but there’s a reason why those stories in particular persisted.

This is even more amazing when you consider that these stories had to be passed down every generation for thousands of years through word of mouth. It’s a tenuous process. Only the most truthful stories will last through the ages.

Therefore, there is value in telling yourself fairy tales because you might learn something. Even if you’re not religious, you’ve heard many of the stories already through pop culture. It isn’t clear that blinding yourself from reality necessarily follows from being religious.

> Have you ever considered why fairy tales have persisted? Why do we see the same stories repeated time and time again? Why are tales retold in Disney and Marvel movies to the tune of billions in profit?

Yes. Nostalgia and profit. Pre-copyright works are in the public domain. And people will pay for familiar things, especially those that remind them of their youth.

> ...there’s a reason why those stories in particular persisted.

See above and also survivorship bias

And what's it to you? That you have to make snide commments about other people's belief systems? Why are you so hostile?

Let's not pretend that preaching any religion, much less christianity, is a naive act devoid of any consequences or connotations.

An empathetic or curious perspective would imagine that they had come to hold a negative attitude toward religion as a result of some experience. If you were asking in good faith, it certainly did not appear so.

Whatever. Their "some experience" is not relevant here. His comment is full of implicit aggression that is uncalled for.

As opposed to OP's "Garshin's just sad because he didn't come to Jesus"? This entire subthread was bait, don't act high and mighty when someone bites.

> have let themselves go and have nothing "going for them"

that is, they fell ill with depression because of lack of relationships, entering a loop of ever-furthering isolation and depression, which made them bitter and undesirable.

Some "ugly, socially awkward nerds" somehow find meaningful relationships and get saved. Others don't, and go down the nasty road.

A little bit of empathy wouldn't hurt.

writers not from colonialist regimes don't make it to HN because most of us never heard of them at school, which focuses on western writers. are you aware that most wealthy countries are or have been colonialist regimes? this includes much of Europe, North America, Japan and China.

Exactly.

P.S. Also Russia, which is not really Europe.

Russia is (or at least was, during Grand Duchy of Moscow times) a part of Eastern Europe.

Now, its eastern\southern\northen parts\colonies - are not (except for the north and south -west of course)

except for the date api... it took me a couple days to understand the silly idiosyncratic magic string to format dates.

I wish they'd gone with 2001-02-03T04:05:06 (sub 16 for 24h, obvs) because that at least is in numerical order (and you can use +07 for timezone.) There's surely no date format in existence where month comes first and year comes last -after the time-. Or if they were stuck on 2006, 2006-05-04T03:02:01 but then you get +00 for the timezone which might be weird.

On the contrary, I much prefer the fixed date of "2006-01-02T15:04:05" for formatting time strings. I find it much easier to write "Mon 02, Jan 2006", than what you would usually put for the strftime equivalent, "%a %d, %b %Y" (had to look it up, and at a glance it's not that obvious what it formats to). With Go, all you need to memorise is the date itself. Granted, coming from other languages it can take a bit of getting used to.

This is what the documentation has to say about it:

> These are predefined layouts for use in Time.Format and time.Parse. The reference time used in these layouts is the specific time stamp:

01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700 (January 2, 15:04:05, 2006, in time zone seven hours west of GMT). That value is recorded as the constant named Layout, listed below. As a Unix time, this is 1136239445. Since MST is GMT-0700, the reference would be printed by the Unix date command as:

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006 It is a regrettable historic error that the date uses the American convention of putting the numerical month before the day.

Using the American convention is regrettable, but putting the year after the time is even more regrettable IMHO. Not sure which timestamp format does that? Plan 9?

It’s similar to the default date(1) output, except that puts the year at the very end, after even the timezone.

It's really annoying. Esp. For a person that uses golang occasionally, like me. Thankfully, Goland learned how to autocomplete these inside format strings.

Apparently a blog post by 3 economists and a professor of finance decides.

They probably don't include Pol Pot, who Chomsky defended on the usual anti-imperialist basis that anything American is bad and anything not American is good.

i remember reading something similar, but it was a huge slap rather than water (seems too much to throw people in water back when colds were lethal)

Can being thrown in water cause a cold?

A cold is a virus, so not directly at least.

if it's full winter before heating was highly available, i'd guess so

you seem to assume that we won't go extinct...

Or that was a facetious joke...

i believe that flagging my comment was not an attempt to avoid flamewars, but plain censorship of a honest intellectual question that any society taking a stance, against or in favor of multiculturalism (that is, hosting non-integrated completely different cultures within its borders), must confront sooner of later when things like this lecturer's ordeal start happening.

The article was a concrete instance of the abstract dilemma i posed in my comment, so it was on-topic and necessary imho.

You can call it censorship if you want—people mostly use that word nowadays to express a feeling—but the moderation point is that you plainly broke HN's rules with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34298516, and doing that will get you banned here.

i disagree that it was against the guidelines - after all, it did generate some interesting intellectual comments.

either way, your home your rules, so whatever. (which, ironically, confirms my original point...)

the goal is to end suffering if you believe that suicide won't work because you'll just get reincarnated. their real goal is to end reincarnation. if you don't believe in reincarnation, buddhism is useless.