dejb

>> Dude that is a really ignorant and insulting thing to say.

>Why?

You obviously have absolutely no idea of the range of reasons people have for being vegan do you? Here are a few

- Visceral disgust at the though of consuming animal flesh / produce

- The view that a vegan diet is healthier than a diet with meat. Also a view that meat products are a significant cause of many of our chronic diseases. Both of these views are well backed by a large amount of science for example 'the China Study'.

- The view that plant food is significantly more efficient to produce (5-10 times) and far less harmful for the environment than meat. This is true not just in term of calories but also for protein.

See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_vegetarianism

- Religious beliefs

- The view that human control of animals represents a kind of slavery.

- The view that it is immoral for humans to knowingly and unnecessarily kill and/or cause pain to another being. The fact that humans are intelligent enough to have a choice and understand the consequences of their actions is the important thing. Many vegans feel especially strongly about factory farming which is often cruel in the extreme.

See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_eating_meat

So now do you see how ignorant your point about lions is? Veganism is primarily about humans relationship to animals not about animals relationships with each other.

> I'll bite. How is it a fallacy?

By definition, that's how. Look it up : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

> Citation needed

There are so many but I'll just stick with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Study cause I'm lazy.

> Because the market would provide?

Yes there would be numerous vegan options with the nutrient mix customized to suit vegan diets.

> Either way you still have to work harder and be far more careful with what you eat in order to pull it off so my point still stands.

You have to work pretty hard with a meat based diet to avoid the chronic diseases it can cause.

So the basic conclusion of this study is 'The evidence surrounding veganism appears to be mixed'. And further 'Overall, veganism is healthier than an omnivorous diet with respect to chronic diseases'. Did you manage to read these parts?

With respect to B12 it seems that there is clearly good evidence for vegans to take a supplement.

With regards to pregnant and nursing women the evidence seemed a bit less clear. There doesn't seem to be any mention of actual problems with vegan children, only correlations between them and children that did have problems. Despite the uncertainly It certain seems good enough evidence to take b12 supplement for vegans.

So the takeaway I get from this is that

(Vegan diet + b12/multivitamin) >> Omnivorous diet

Dude you've mostly just stated a bunch of unsubstantiated opinions which I assert are factually in error. You specifically mentioned 'there is no shortage of research that show it can harm the infant'. If there is no shortage of this research then you should easily be able to provide at least one reference.

If one single story like this can challenge someone's confidence on their veganism then obviously they are quite insecure about their position. Similarly if one single story like this is given such a high level of prominence (was top on HN no less) by the majority who have an opposing view then surely this also indicates a certain insecure desire for any scraps of evidence to support ones position. No?

> It's interesting how strong peer pressure is in groups like vegans to continue to press someone in to a lifestyle that clearly is not to their best interest.

Given the levels of obesity in developed nations you could argue that just about everybody is being pressed 'in to a lifestyle that clearly is not to their best interest'.

> It reminds me of religious cults, and other 'us or them' styled groups.

I really don't think it is fair to generalise from a single blog post. It really feels like you are drawing on a collection of stereotypes about what you consider to be 'weird people' for this to have such an impact. Or do you have any other examples you can share with us?

If a link to google search is what you think passes as debate then why not also check out

http://www.google.com/#q=debunking+evolution

The standard of debate is likely to be at a similar level. If you actually have an confidence in any of these 'debunkings' then why not point out one that you think will stand up to scrutiny?

Swapping 'built with adapted' doesn't avoid the naturalistic fallacy. Just because we have adapted to cope with something doesn't imply it is good for our current circumstances. Any source of calories would have desirable for our early ancestors - now we have the opposite problem. Instead gazing backwards to our primitive forbears for advice, we need to use science to guide us as to what the best foods to eat are.

> The point of the story is that not everyone can do a Vegan diet and still be healthy.

When you hear a story about how some substance 'cured cancer' do you instantly conclude that the claims are necessarily correct - even for the cured person in the story? Would you expect the story to become popular on HN? The problem with one-off anecdotes like this is that they don't even conclusively demonstrate anything.

> I sometimes wonder if Vegans worry about Lions on the savannah eating antelope.

Dude that is a really ignorant and insulting thing to say.

> Humans are Omnivores. We are built to get nutrients from both meat and plantlife.

And here you demonstrate your limited grasp of evolution which a resort to a naturalistic fallacy.

> Our metabolisms work best when we eat both in moderation.

Actually the research demonstrates otherwise.

> A Vegan lifestyle makes it harder to eat healthy not easier

That is trivially true in a society where adding animal products to many foods is routine. If even 20% of the population was vegan it would be trivial to follow a vegan diet.

> I never expected this post to get so much attention.

There is nothing more popular than an anecdote that appeals to people's pre-existing biases. Unfortunately there will be many for which this one story will provide the same weight of evidence as the entire China Study.

I don't think a 14 year old web business counts as a startup... but it's paying the bills. I only returned to it 4 years ago after an long um 'sabbatical'.

> You said main environment. I am a developer.

So did you actually think that I was making a point about you specifically? That brings egotism to new levels.

The point I was making was an analogy (hence the use of the word 'like'). It was that just as a console platform is a toy-like version of a desktop one, so is the iOS platform a toy-like version of a proper mobile platform.

You seem to be arguing that mobile computing isn't important enough to warrant the same sort of open ecosystem that exists in the desktop world, that because you can't personally envisage ever developing on any mobile system that a toy like platform is the best way. This strikes me as extremely short sited for 2 reasons. Firstly it shows zero consideration of how others might want to utilise their mobile devices now. And secondly it shows no thought as to how mobile devices may evolve in the future. There are many possible technological breakthroughs that could have you using your mobile device as a primary development environment in the future.

> It's specialized computation

No it's not. The whole purpose of having an app store is to make it more general purpose. Why should anything be 'off limits' just because the device is small? Why is this not obvious to you?

> The iPhone certainly isn't my development environment, either.

.. and it never will be. But you added the word 'development', not me. I prefer to decide how I can use my computation devices and when they do not allow this then they should be regarded as toys.

> there seems to be a legitimate point in here about the difference between consoles and ordinary computers

I still can't for the life of me understand why any self respecting geek would cheer on the 'console' model as the future of mobile computing. Sure, as a developer you have to make practical decisions about which platform to develop for. But as the platform you chose to use yourself? It's like saying that you've decided to use xBox as your main environment instead of Windows/OSX/Linux.

> I see Android and iOS relating very similarly to Windows and OS X.

Actually I think the comparison Gruber makes of 'PC vs Console' is more accurate.

I can't help but notice this tends to paint 'ordinary' people as somewhat sad and deficient. Imagine the story was written in the same manner, but in praise of physical coordination/agility instead, and you can see what I mean. Perhaps it is an understandable reaction to the historical under-appreciation of imagination in society and educational environments. But I'm not sure how much sense it makes for a child that doesn't face this environment or is more practically minded. It does look pretty cool though.

The causation could easily be in the opposite direction. People engaged in boring/unhappy activities are more likely to let their minds wander.

The flip side of this is that a large number of Jewish people in Germany maintained their clear cultural separation for around 500 years even though the 'looking different' aspect seems to have diminished over time. In retrospect you'd have to say that outperforming the locals without becoming one of them isn't appreciated.

> I would have thought it was a great way of letting both parties know they have a similar sense of humour

That's assuming that the authors knows that they both actually do appreciate this type of humour. I'd think that if they had that level of familiarity then it would be expected that any email would get reasonable consideration or a phone call would be another possibility.

that was the case one would assume that the author could also have just called on the phone.

> Once a month is pretty mild.

Yes but I think that drinking 'to blackout' > 'binge'. Intuitively one would think that if you can't remember things that happened the night before, then you could easily be damaging some memory systems in the long term as well.

You are being sarcastic.

> This is additionally confounded by the fact that British people really do mean "sarcasm" when they say "irony."

I've never experienced this in actual conversation with British and/or other non-US English speakers. But the internet definitions I'm finding seem to all include 'sarcastic but somewhat subtle' in the definition of ironic. For me the definitions of sarcasm and irony do not intersect. Sarcasm is intentional whereas irony is at best random or more often a signifier of implied 'fate'.

Actually I think 'Unfortunate' would have been the appropriate word in that song. Most of the situations described don't involve any direct negation of the protagonists intentions. The only possible qualifier is

'Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly

He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye

He waited his whole damn life to take that flight

And as the plane crashed down he thought

"Well isn't this nice..."'

... but the last line is still sarcasm, not irony.

There is an apparently dwindling minority of people who would consider this to be sarcasm and not irony. For these few, irony is never merely logical negation. It necessarily involves unintended and opposite consequences flowing from the protagonist's actions. A short internet search suggests I may be the last of this kind.

> There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet.

Can you provide a reference for this totally unsupported assertion? There is a wealth of evidence that contradicts this statement. Here is a link to one highly respected and large study - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study

> How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.

What? This comment is stupid on so many levels I don't know where to start. Here's a short list

- These animals are 'by definition' different to humans. You can't extend results beyond species.

- The animals are mostly dedicated herbivores. Feeding them meat would make them sick and very unhealthy to consume.

- Meat is a lot more expensive to produce than grain. It takes about 10 calories of plant material to produce 1 calorie of meat. Using meat to produce meat would be uneconomical and ultimately unsustainable.

- I'm not sure about the 'species BMI' they aim for but I would have thought that meat from 'obese' cows wouldn't be all the popular. I thought consumers generally tried to avoid the obvious fat.

Cool. Now in XX years time, after all my expressed opinions are proven to be correct, I can fire up an intelligent program to try to track down everyone who's ever dis-agreed with me and say 'I told you so'.

I would argue that smoke is, by definition, a pollution of the environment, even for smokers. So I should have omitted the 'else' and just left it at 'everyone'. If people knowingly volunteer to expose themselves to it then it should be their right but they do not have the right to impose it on anyone else.

I wonder if they'll enforce the ugly requirement to 'Stop the the beautiful people from wrecking it'. I can just see their next headline about someone being kicked off the site for being too hot.

> I'm sick of this nanny state bullshit.

People have been sick of smoke for years. It was never sustainable that a minority should be allowed pollute the environment of everyone else. Any politician who campaigned to bring back smoking in these places would fail spectacularly. Get used to it.

OK now I see, Thanks. It looks cool. Now we just need somebody to create a Linux that runs in a stomp box.

I play guitar, work on linux servers all day long and have professional knowledge of music software... and I can't understand from your description what this actually does. Is it a plugin, host or controller? Does it require other software to operate? What actual guitar playing related functionality does it have? You might want to add this to the opening sentence or at least the opening paragraph.