skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.

This probably sounds eerily familiar to any developer who works in a mid-sized company or larger.

And I thought getting UI designs as PPT slides was bad...
I don't think that's quite fair. The parent simply offered up a possible explanation for what is by all accounts an irrational fear.
great idea! Storing which task were completed on which days, etc. Maybe an option to display a month's summary of completed tasks, etc.
One explanation of homophobia that has some support behind it is that the most homophobic men are fearful of their own homoerotic impulses and are lashing out as 'proof' that they are anything but.

See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=single-angr...
10% above the 90th percentile, who are sufficiently different from the average as to make relating to normal people difficult.

[citation needed]

There is no confusion at all on my part. I knew what subset of the population I was writing about (perhaps an even narrower subset than the original Paul Graham article, the first of his I ever read, was about) when I started typing. I specifically disagree with "as to make relating to normal people difficult." If high-IQ people have a social problem, as perhaps they especially do in certain parts of American culture, I invite them to use their high IQ to engage in problem-solving.
This is one of the rarest merit badges:

http://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Merit_Badges_Earned
A thought: Alan Turing died when he was 41. Anything Turing would have invented between 41 and his natural death are things lost to society because of the persecution of homosexuals. What an incredible cost.
The sarcastic tone of articles like this seems entirely unnecessary and detracts from their effectiveness to me. It should have been simply something like "Management mistakes that drive away good programmers".
It doesn't excuse it of course, but I think it does explain it a bit. Imagine somebody kills one of your children, then comes back and insults your wife. It's adding insult to injury.

It's kind of like kicking someone when they're down. People in the Islamic world are sensitive as of late, and considering what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan lately, I think it's pretty understandable. The prudent, friendly thing is show a little respect.
What integer value in a game gets so big that it can potentially overflow a 64 bit integer?

2^64 meters is only around 1900 lightyears, which is woefully insufficient for a galaxy-scale RTS.
Steve Souders is at Google now: http://stevesouders.com/bio.php
Get a free beats and instrumental music online
Exclusive beats are sent as a high-quality .WAV or .MP3 file, along with the individual instrumental music tracks, used to put the beat together, in .WAV or .MP3 format.
Thanks for the links. While I was part of an "out" group growing up, I managed not to get bullied much (it usually stopped quickly after a round of fisticuffs and my father being a boxing coach in his youth). But a great many of my friends were bullied, some horribly. I've never been able to understand the mechanics of it very well even after having seen it so many times.
www.rubyinside.com tends to be pretty good, also trending repos on github and following hackernews are usually good indicators of what's up and up in Ruby.
I don't have any evidence one way or the other. I did not accuse anyone of anything. At this point everything is hearsay.

The fact is that the finder of the iPhone Prototype "sold" the property that never belonged to him to Gizmodo.
It is an arrangement that is extremely uncommon through most of human history/evolution so it seems reasonable to believe that humans may not be well adapted to brought up by gay couples. You could argue that the lack of genetic relationship to the parents overwhelms any difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples. But on balance it is not difficult to see why being reared be both a male and female parent could have advantages.

Additionally to this you could imagine a scenario where the genes that tended to increase heterosexuality also played a part in being a naturally 'good parent'.

Of course all these 'first assumptions' could and should be replaced by actual evidence and I know there is some of that. However I'd argue that studies and statistics to date are likely to be biased by the additional hurdles placed in front of gay couples. Only the very best and most dedicated gay couples are likely to allowed to adopt.

I'm not arguing that this justifies a blanket ban, but a degree of caution seems to make sense.
You'd be surprised at the number of straight-acting gay men that you interact with everyday.

You're basing your judgments on the flamboyant feminine gay men, the ones who you know are definitely gay. That's a very biased sampling to base your judgments on.
I'd like to agree with this study, but its from the Cato Institute...
How strongly is pay linked to productivity? Nice gals finish last?
Success of the offspring, perhaps? Professionally, emotionally, etc.
That Dell would make a sweet Hackintosh too. Looks like it can run Snow Leopard just fine.
And the alternative is? I don't know of anyplace worth living in that doesn't have laws and a means of enforcing them. Do you?
latex beamer
There are lots of ways some kid's straight parents could be stigmatized too. Your argument doesn't really hold any water.
Good question. I just want to point out that yes, node.js through CGI is a massive bastardisation.

The main reason for it was that I (and possibly some other people) want to make websites using JavaScript and then just chuck it on some cheap shared server. The reason specifically for node.js is because it's arguably the most popular form of server-side JavaScript.

Yes, CGI spawns a new process for each request but V8 (the node.js VM) is crazy-insane fast. I haven't done any tests but my intuition (which is quite probably wrong) tells me that the cost of forking V8 (lightweight) is probably not as bad having a Python process ready and serving from it.

By the time my blog receives enough requests that having a persistant process is necessary, I would have moved on to caching. Caching is the answer for blogs.

Running node.js via CGI for a complex web application is definitely not the final answer. I've made the libary very similar to the built-in event based HTTP server so the cost of switching when the application gets too big is very insignificant. Find, replace 'cgi' -> 'http', chuck on a virtual machine and go!
It may not be about completely different alternatives but instead the degree to which government power should be limited.
How is Yahoo the C-list? They may not be as good at making money as Google is, but they have a lot of good engineers and over the past few years they've done a lot more than Google. They have YUI, BOSS, and I've had much better luck with Yahoo's search results than with Google's. Google has all the hype, but they keep releasing things like Wave and Buzz that aren't very useful to most people.

It seems to me that he really made the choice between working on a spam engine and working with a lot of talented people on interesting products that are used by hundreds of millions of people. Calcanis not having anything good to say about Yahoo is expected, but there's a lot more to Yahoo than the Google fanboys would have you believe.
Disallowing anyone an adoption for any reason is discrimination, if you understand the term literally.
5 comments over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072843
> I have never encountered a rational argument for homophobia.

From parents and close relatives it is easy to see a evolutionary reason. However from unrelated males (more common) it would seem that they would have every reason to encourage homosexuality in other males. Maybe it comes from when most people who lived together were related.
The problem isn't PPT, but the way it is used. If you do a bad job with powerpoint, you'll do just as bad with Beamer or Keynote.
I've never seen someone straightforward enough to say that they'd rather be polite than logical.

I think that sufficiently sharpens the contradictions.
Paying was a very poor move. Often times companies will sell their debt very cheaply to these agencies. The burden of proof is on them, not him. In my experience, these small agencies don't report to the big three (Experian, Equifax, Transunion). Check http://annualcreditreport.com to get your free report. I'm not saying that they won't report, but he could have resolved this in a different manner. He has just validated their business model and have encouraged this type of thuggish behavior in the future.
Although I agree with you that Turing's death was an incredible loss, I wouldn't be so sure he would have died a natural death.

Turing had considered suicide before, during his failed work on the Riemann hypothesis. At that time, he schemed up a suicide mechanism involving an apple and electrical wiring which he described in a letter to an old boyfriend.

Turing was pretty eccentric, romanticized suicide (and was a little obsessed with this apple idea), and was in and out of depression.

Mind you, I agree. I'm just not so sure Turing ever would have died naturally.
What? I think you meant to reply to someone else. Re-read my posts and find any statement where I suggested any behavioral differences and backed it up by anecdotal evidence.
This is something I have an interest in, but from a different perspective. I wasn't bullied. I was smart, fat, unapologetically nerdy, and never paid a social price (I had friends, girlfriends in high school, and was not socially maladjusted other than a stubborn anti-authority streak that remains with me). Seemingly I also had higher confidence and was more physically oriented than many geeks I have met later in life.

I'm wondering what the differences were. I know one is that I went to high school in a highly educated town where geeks and jocks were nearly equally respected. That can't be the whole story, however, because I also had some friends who happened to be the less socially able geeks, and I experienced a similar degree of friendship and acceptance in junior high, which was in a decidedly less intellectual-friendly city.

I'm sorry if I seem to be going on, but I want to provide a counterpoint to the picked-on geek, and I'm curious why the bullied geek is such a common stereotype (seems to be a true stereotype; I don't argue otherwise).
You can listen for the window blurring
I'd actually like to see the statistics on acceptance rates of ugly couple vs good looking one. I'll bet they're pretty damning.
Did Microsoft ever sink so low as to legally attack a publication out of petty vindictiveness?
Murderers and pedophiles are okay then?
No?
So all doesn't mean all, but some subset of all.
I am in that 10% of 10% above the 90th percentile of the population. I have zero problems getting people to like me, however I find little of interest in "average" people.

But, being smart only get's you so far. There are plenty of ways people can diverge from the norms of society and intelligence is just one of them. Develop some hobby's more interesting than television and suddenly we have something to talk about.
Unfortunately, a job is still a job. Wake up early or don't pay your bills? Not a hard choice to make, even though you're not happy with it.

Luckily my friend is a good dev, so he didn't have a problem finding more work.
Web Laureate Insight, "WISIA: Not What I Asked"
There was a bit of a huff over it today, one of the main pieces of art they are using is heavily based on a piece from Magic the Gathering. http://www.mananation.com/art-plagiarism-healing-blade-game/
It's not surprising that PowerPoint endangers soldiers, when it is well known to kill astronauts.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08...

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

After edit: Somehow, I think the most effective international terrorists manage to do without PowerPoint entirely, but have interactive CONVERSATIONS on a need-to-know basis about important operational details. Maybe the United States armed forces should look into doing the same.
I'm thinking mostly from the POV of if we had more adopting families than orphans, which I know isn't actually the case.
Alt-F4?
If I recall correctly, there was some anecdotal evidence that time committed to video game actually improves a surgeon's capabilities during an operation. If a card game can do the same for pharmacology, cheers to Nerdcore!
It is simple. People who have used Linux are not impressed as much by shinny things. I love my Mac becuase it is simple, clean and easy to use.

I have used Linux and it is more powerful and agile. Though Gnome is not as pretty and finished as OSX.

It is like Photoshop vs GIMP, InkScape vs Illustrator etc. The opensource software will get quite good, and in some ways better. Though it is not as polished.

It really comes down to what you can live without.

Dale
I couldn't point you to a citation but you can google around, courts have compelled lockers to be opened, safes to be opened, and they've compelled people to decrypt things.

The fifth amendment applies to words you say, not evidence. The "pass phrase" is access to the evidence, not testimony against yourself. It's a losing battle anyways, a judge demands you turn over the passphrase or unlock the data and throws you in jail until you do. You could attempt to take it to the supreme court or something, but you're in jail during that process. Likewise, you could try to give them the wrong key with truecrypt or something but that assumes that they are idiots. If you find yourself in court in this situation, you've already lost, you're almost certainly going to spend time in jail.
Unfortunate for PowerPoint that it's become synonymous with idioms like "mindmapping" and the bullet point, which seem to be the devices this piece is really raging against. I see PowerPoint as a quite unconstrained way to present an series of arbitrary images, paired with an image editor that's evidently more usable than anything else business- and military-types can get their hand on. Perhaps it's the tradition surrounding slide presentations, and not the software used, that permits speakers to be inarticulate and longwinded.
Kudos to this guy. It's sad that many people in society are myopic and think that this guy was gay. As stated, I think it's simply a case of one geek that was persecuted standing up for a fellow geek. The world needs more people like this guy.
The unencrypted contents of your hard drive constitute evidence, not testimony.
Saying that all people are created equally does not mean that all people are free from error or consequence.
Off topic, but it always surprises me how someone with all this knowledge can ..well, use Comic Sans for the presentation. While I understand that it's about games and that Comic Sans is supposed to be perceived as a "fun" font, this is really an odd choice.
Device aims to perfect diagnoses of ADHD
Jason, you need to understand the difference between your persona and your reputation. What you write on your blog, your email newsletters, your facebook and your tweets is your persona. What people think of you behind your back when you thought they were not watching is your reputation. It takes a lifetime to build a reputation. It only takes one tiny miscalculation to throw it all away. And you have been throwing it all away, first with stealing contributors from Digg, then with hijacking Leo Laporte's brand, and now beating up on some young kid who just wanted to better his life ... Horribly disappointed in you.
Powerpoint is not the disease, it's the symptom.
Powerpoint isn't the problem. It's a symptom. The real problem is communicating effectively with ideas/pictures.

There are two books which have made me better at this:

1. The back of the napkin [http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/]

2. Slide:ology [http://blog.duarte.com/book/]

These books kick-started my journey to understanding (and appreciating) the use of diagrams, colors, fonts, and imagery for the purpose of conveying an idea.

Update: Added links.
LTE gaining momentum, Bad news for WiMAX
As an example, "Likes and Interests," "Education and Work," and parts of "Basic Information" used to be text in your profile with a search link. That search would only show people who had chosen (via privacy settings) to display the relevant part of their profile to you. They are now group-like "Connections" to community pages, whose membership is not secret.
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
Just as an aside, "straight-acting" isn't an appropriate term to use. It perpetuates false stereotypes of both gay and straight men.
"... I was smart, fat, unapologetically nerdy, and never paid a social price (I had friends, girlfriends in high school, and was not socially maladjusted other than a stubborn anti-authority streak that remains with me). Seemingly I also had higher confidence and was more physically oriented than many geeks I have met later in life. ..."

Extrovert? This matters because if you are introverted people see less information. Being in social situations might also give off a "discomfort" signal in body language. It's easy to see someone is uncomfortable. Harder to understand why? Reading body language is one way Bullies select targets.

Simple experiment. Next time someone is in an argument with you change your stance by placing your hands on your hips, "arms akimbo". The stand of defiance. It's no coincidence US Marine Corp instructors use this stand. It means don't mess with me, I'm standing my ground. Extroverts won't have a clue about these subtle body language because they have more interesting things to think about. Hence they can become TARGETS.

"... I know one is that I went to high school in a highly educated town where geeks and jocks were nearly equally respected. ..."

Now that's a good place to be. I'm not sure it's Geeks v's Jocks as much as Geeks being the bottom of the short lived social graph. PG refers to this phenomena in "Why Nerds are unpopular" ~ http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

"... I want to provide a counterpoint to the picked-on geek, and I'm curious why the bullied geek is such a common stereotype (seems to be a true stereotype; I don't argue otherwise). ..."

Because they show weakness. Because they could be introverted and therefore appear weak. Because not enough people stand by them when it counts. These reasons alone make them a TARGET for bullies.
When I was in the military, I experienced this. I have a dagger on my bookshelf engraved with "Powerpoint Ranger" precisely because my colleagues knew my disdain for Powerpoint. I felt like technical accuracy was sacrificed for the sake of fitting a situational description in a table or a bullet point. Keep in mind, this kind of reporting wasn't for a live presentation or to summarize some other more thorough communicate. It was our communication medium. Take each event, update the slides, mail them out in the morning. Ugh. God help you if your font or colors deviate from the expected standard. Also, the General does not like orphan bullets. Watch out for those too.

I keep a copy of Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" on my bookshelf now. If you ever want some arguments against PowerPoint, I recommend reading it.
Grabbing data from an o-scope was the last time I used one.
I wonder what the pay gap would be like if you added in zeroes for all the unemployed men in this recession: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/arch...

Returning to the piece at hand, this quote really bugs me:

"But one could also argue that pay differences among all individuals — as well as gaps between men and women — reflect differences in personality, preferences and principles as much as productivity.

If this true, then policies like executive pay restrictions and higher marginal tax rates would not necessarily lower productive contributions."

How did she go from "maybe those factors are as big as productivity" to "therefore there won't be any effect on productivity" in consecutive sentences?

There are some interesting links in the article, but a ton of shoddy thinking in and around them.
If the Gawker reporters write for editors (I don't know whether or not that is how Gawker is organized), then they are journalists by the definition I have read. I like your list of questions about other activities that might distinguish a journalistic organization from other organizations.
Best. Loading screen. Evar.
In princle perhaps, but in practice what happens is that particular groups of people are specifically excluded in all sorts of insidious ways. Usually they're excluded by a "homogenous" majority (homogenous relative to the aspect that defines the minority) and so there is no incentive for members of the majority to stand up for those in the minority.

Examples include gays' right to marry, women's right to vote, slaves' right to freedom, etc.
The page back then feels like a small village community. There aren't a crazy number of comments, just a few tacit ones. Today, HN feels like as if the small village had a gold rush of visitors and "tourists."
Ah, too bad---I was hoping for an article on why to stay the hell out of insert mode, not how to. I know how to; I sometimes have a hard time convincing my students that it's good for them to become power users of their editor, and thought this might be a link I could pass along.
How is barring individuals from adoption on the basis of their sexual identity not identity politics?

For that matter, why do you think scientists or armed service members are better candidates than baristi or garbage men? Late nights in the lab, relationship failure, and heavy drinking are a part of the science life. For that matter, lawyers have some of the highest alcoholism rates of any profession. Shall we conclude that they are unfit, as a class, to raise children?

(Disclaimer: I'm a gay physics major with a boyfriend in law school. I'd like kids some day.)

I... reluctantly conclude you are trolling. Strange, you don't see that often here.
And what may that innate quality be? And what about gay children? Aren't straight parents the wrong setup for them?
Luckily, plenty of gay couples have tried raising kids, and they do just fine, thank you very much. :)

http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.aspx

"Beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents likewise have no empirical foundation."
This article isn't based on any grounded research or survey. It is basically a collection of what the author feels is happening in the current day with random selective citations from other articles written by other authors touting their own opinions.

If you're going to write about your personal opinions, don't pretend you are knowledgeable and speak as if you are talking about facts.

We have enough articles in the every day media that pretty much have "citation needed" written all over them. We don't need them on hacker news.
I'd have guessed this was "common sense", but here you are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana#Long-term_effects

Anyway, my point is that the argument that "marijuana isn't toxic so it should be legal" isn't valid. First, because it is toxic. Also, because it isn't that relevant: there is similarly toxic stuff that is legal.

> I guess everything is toxic to a certain degree, even water is toxic if you swallow enough of it.

Well, I'm talking about normal effects of normal doses.