Three tips from a young dad:
1. Take photos and videos - lots. watch your white balance ... Seeing how much our boy has changed in his 8 months is amazing.
2. Work less. This is a hard one, but working a 4 day work week (or 6 ...) and devoting an entire day to just George time is the incredible. My Fridays with my boy are worth more than money / success / code.
3. Help out with those late night feedings - diaper, rocking, etc. It's amazing how good you'll get at changing diapers when totally asleep - oh, and um, yeah, make sure he's aiming down when you diaper him. Trust me on that one.
Well, it's too late now, but if there are any other parents out there, for God's sake give your kid a globally unique name. It's all one big namespace now. There are other Eliezer Yudkowskys out there, the poor bastards, and they'll spend the rest of their lives under my ugly Google shadow.
Yikes, I see this is currently at the top of the page. Please downvote me far enough so that it isn't the first thing Paul and Jessica see when they check in. PS: Congratulations Paul and Jessica.
YC startups can point to whichever website PG + JL register. That kind of google karma will easily put George as the #1 George on any of the search engines.
Now, if the YC companies are really creative, George will be the 1st result returned even if someone types in "Eliezer Yudkowsky" ;-)
Good solution, I suppose. At least the first part.
To be fair, I'll be first in line to congratulate PGJL on having not named their kid Jeeebo Graham just because the domain name was available.
But I do advise prospective parents to think hard about what the child might think of the name when grown up. Sure, in one sense it would have been awesome, but I'm glad my mother didn't let my father actually name me Luke Skywalker Yudkowsky, Hari Seldon Yudkowsky, or Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan Yudkowsky.
Or similarly: I was once at a science fiction convention, and I saw a young kid - maybe 8 or so - wearing a nametag that said "Vanyel". I walked up to him and said, "Excuse me, is Vanyel your real name?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you named after Vanyel Ashkevron?" He said, "Yes." And I said, "Awesome."
Which, in a sense, it was - it definitely had a high coolness factor. But what I wanted to ask was, "Did your parents think at all about what sort of problems they might be volunteering their child for, by naming him after one of the most famous gay characters in all of fantasy fiction?" But I didn't ask, because I didn't know if they had explained that part to him yet.
I know a family that named their kids Luke, Leia, and Jedi. It actually works out fairly well, because Luke and Leia were reasonably common names in my generation (though Leia is usually spelled Leah), and Jedi just goes by Jed.
If you're going to be creative with a kid's name, you should do it with the middle name. Then it can be up to him whether he wants to use it. My parents gave both my sister and I middle names of Fox, and when she started college my sister begin introducing herself by it.
Remember that a child's name should also be intention-revealing. "George" doesn't do much for you there. Consider some examples--
* Pat: one of the least intention-revealing names possible. The name is androgynous; can we assume the child is as well? Should we assume the child does not wish to buck the status quo (wishes to "stand pat")?
* George: doing better. It reveals the sex, at least. There is still the problem that it doesn't say much about what the child does.
* Paul Jr.: This is much clearer. The child's sex is clear, as well as its purpose: a lighter, faster implementation of the original Paul Graham (the original, of course, is kept around for reasons of backwards-compatibility).
To test a baby name:
Imagine a second, very different baby. Will the name work for both babies?
Other examples of good baby names include mCarryOnTheFamilyName, fBiologicalImperativeToReproduce, and Buck.
That's very funny but as someone with an unusual name it's less funny.
More seriously your should use a middle name to provide uniqueness. People are basically unable to recognise words they haven't heard before. Complexity in the part of the name used normally is a hassle.
I could wish my name was easier to pronounce, but I would still want first+last to be unique. The thought of people meeting me, typing my name into Google, and getting back a soccer player, frankly does not fill me with joy. Middle name isn't good enough, most people won't type that.
Oh, well. I'm sure George Graham will want to change his name anyway at age 21 in order to outrun all the hideously embarrassing Internet posts he made at age 12, should the present world last so long.
Maybe you want to give your kid a highly anonymous first+last name, and a unique second+last name, so they can switch to using second+last once they grow up.
PS: I know a poor guy who happens to be named David Duke. (I suggested he go by Dave Duke.)
The answer is obvious. Unique the surname. People are used to tongue-twisting foreign surnames. It becomes a family namespace, and the kids can have short low-viz first names without either falling off Google or drawing fire from first time acquaintances.
Again, think of it as a single global namespace. When this particular fellow was named, the other David Duke hadn't hit the news yet - but when the name "David Duke" did become famous and recognizable, there was a namespace collision. That can happen to anyone, especially if your last name is common.
Google makes names easier to "recognize", and the Internet's vastness increases the total amount of "fame". So in the age of the Internet, you want to pick a name for your child that is likely to be and stay unique.
If you have a common last name, a first name that is very rare but not unique, doesn't look strange, and is easy to spell and pronounce, would be ideal.
My problem with your argument is that words are "easy to spell and pronounce" because they are common and people have experienced them before.
When I said people are unable to recognise names they haven't heard before I mean that literally. They try to coerce it into one they've heard before and either succeed and call you something random or require you to repeat it 3 times before they are convinced they're not just miss-hearing it.
The only way to get something easy to spell and pronounce that is rare would be to compound common forms. Frankly this is exactly what the middle name does.
That said JoHadRon is globally unique (at least according to google) and has useful short forms. I may change my name.
I have a unique name Tarrant, after my ancestors from England. Sure there are times when I get annoyed that people can't say my name. I'm at the point where when asked for my name for an order at a restaurant I'll give something like Dobbs, Bob or Joe to make life slightly easier. I will say that I greatly prefer having a unique name over having a common name. I've always loved my name and wouldn't trade it, even with the hassles it can bring.
I'd say the middle name is the place for common-ness. My first name is unusual (Lon), but my middle name is as common as dirt (David). The first name is a hassle sometimes, but I can always go by my middle name if I want. It also gives me the option to use the elitist "L. David" if I like.
I really like having a unique name, and I don't think I'd be happier being a "John Smith". Ultimately, your name is what you make of it. If you're comfortable with it, then other people will be too. It can even be an advantage for getting remembered by people.
Just look at Barack Hussein Obama, who seems to be getting along just fine with his "funny name".
If you do use a middle name for uniqueness try to make the whole name fairly short. My first and last name are quite common, but my full name would be 22 letters. I settled on tlrobinson (first and middle initial, last name), which is pretty unique but not very pretty.
I kind of like sharing names with other people. Plus, names used to mean something about a person, and we all share some sort of qualities with other people. When everyone's completely unique, no one is.
I'm also a new father - PG (and everyone else) could you share any general parenting advice, or give pointers to sources from which you seek advice on parenting?
One I've found invaluable is Alfie Kohn - his ideas gave me insight into general psychology as well as child raising that I'd feel completely lost without.
There've been a few of articles on here about it so I'm sure you've caught it already, but I'll just say: praise what the child does, not who they are. Praise a child for doing a good job or trying again after failure, not for being smart or gifted.
Read both of these, and soon, since they describe things which become fixed after age three or so:
Meaningful Differences In The Everyday Experiences Of Young American Children
Emotional Intelligence
There are other books you can read once the kid gets to school age, but I think these two are the most important for the cognitive and emotional development of the infant.
edit: Kohn is also one of my all time favorite authors.
Slightly related startup idea - if it were easier for you to embed Amazon affiliate links, you would have gotten ~$10 commission for that recommendation. If YC got a cut of $5, that would add up... The way things work now Google got it (because I copy-pasted your recommendations into my search box).
In general, how easy could one make it for people to recommend products to each other, and split the commission between publisher, recommender, and facilitator?
"In general, how easy could one make it for people to recommend products to each other, and split the commission between publisher, recommender, and facilitator?"
That's exactly what Squidoo is designed for. It's especially designed for short pages that combine advice and information with product recommendations.
If the recommender already has the ability to earn affiliate money without the platform taking a cut, why would the recommender want to give the platform a cut? With Squidoo it makes sense because they get more traffic than they would otherwise, but if I could just set up an Amazon affiliate account and use that to post a link onto news.yc, what do I stand to gain by giving YC a cut?
why would the recommender want to give the platform a cut?
Because setting up affiliate accounts and links is a pain in the ass. You gave Google a cut by not making it a direct link - a 100% cut... if there were an easy way of inserting a link straight to Amazon, you probably would have done it.
Also, platforms would be interested in providing more prominent placement for recommendations than they would other content. In other words, ads configurable by the website's users. Kind of like what Adpinion is doing, but instead of just voting on ads, you actually recommend relevant ads for the content.
I'm usually really cynical about my own ideas, but this one seems pretty solid... am I missing something?
Imagine if YC were to automatically load the links, and re-format them to use the YC referrer, and then add a button in your profile that allows you to request a check for your 1/2.
You don't need affiliate accounts with 15 different companies. The platform takes care of it for you, and cuts you a check. Think of it as a meta-affiliate.
Firstly, congratulations on your children. Secondly, congratulations on caring enough to read about how to parent well. Anything by Faber and Mazlish is well worth reading - and it resonates well with Alfie Kohn. Their work covers eliciting co-operation, alternatives to punishment, encouraging autonomy, dealing with feelings, and much else besides.
He should use a different name until he's old enough to understand what posting on the net means. Besides, gg is taken quickly on practically every site that it's allowed on. It's been that way since around 2000. The most annoying part is they're not all me anymore.
The good news is that he has a whole TLD that's still pretty open http://nic.gg
The bad news is there's a generation of people that often think of G.G. Allin when they hear "GG".
Isn't it a bit gauche to post this kind of personal info to a news aggregator? I mean, I guess there's a YC community, but this site extends far beyond that.
Off topic, but every time I see an ampersand and a semi-colon on the same line, I think mis-escaped HTML entity. Jessica?!?! That's not even close to an entity! Oh.... I see. Anyhow, congrats!
