Like the WSJ and the NYT, just open an incognito window and do a google search for the title. In order to have their content indexed by Google they have to allow that to work. With the NYT you don't even have to Google, just right click the link to open an incognito window.
Nice, that's cool, too bad I don't trust browser extensions to not steal my personal banking information or whatever else I go to online and I can't be bothered to audit every single extension I use. Third party audits are pointless in a world where these things autoupdate.
You think that may be paranoid, but I visit seriously important sites in my browser and I'm not going to always do that in an incognito window.
Pretty sure Sun was doing Ask Toolbars with Java installs [1]. And Ask Toolbars are not malware, they're not even adware. They don't compromise your computer. The shady thing it does is change your default search engine to an Ask.com search result that has more, and less noticeable ads. That's a pretty shitty thing, not user friendly, but it's not "malware" and it's not "adware." I worked on the Ask Toolbar and there was no tracking information other than your general non-personally identifiable stats gathering like one would use on a website with Google Analytics.
Changing the default search engine in a user's browser when they did not consciously ask for it counts as malicious data corruption in my book. Can you even begin to imagine how much damage and confusion that causes for "old people"?
You're getting downvoted, but I agree that we shouldn't be praising this kind of behavior out of context. The guy was unquestionably brave, had good intentions, but probably terrible judgement.
I have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things."
Using "bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender. It's an awful exclusionary term and you shouldn't think it funny or ironic. You're not taking this serious. I'm guessing because you haven't any idea of how soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace when you're at the other end. It fucking sucks.
Now, we're just being pedantic. I guess this is what we do on a lazy Saturday morning when we all just have to be offended and aghast at something.
I don't even know what you're talking about with "soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace". What behavior? naming a tool "bro"? Are you serious?
I work with grown ups. Men and women of every age, background, and geography. They would take issue with cat-calls, gross innuendo, propositioning, and many other things. Not a single one of them would lose their shit over "bropages". You know, because we're all adults and have developed this sense of "things that matter" and "things that are trivial" and "things that don't even register".
Of course, this seems to be half the current content of HN. Every day, long diatribes about the horrors of sexism that restate the same old bullshit and gets everyone worked up with no further understanding or patience derived from them.
To be fair, some people actually use "bro" as an neutral term. I call my wife "bro" all the time, she called one of her (female) students bro, etc.
And I'm not trying to downplay any bad behavior by people you've had to interact/work with. Pretty much anything can be used in a negative way in a specific context, and people can be huge jerks. I'm merely trying to say that words which you think are offensive to one gender, can be used as a completely neutral term without any subtext other than friendliness. It's really a shame that this word has become so negative to you.
It's really a shame that in the community with which you are currently participating, the word has acquired so many negative associations; I agree.
I also call my (female) SO "bro" – in addition to a broad range of friends and family – in specific contexts. But I would never consider the word neutral or inclusive in the context of the tech community. Too much baggage. If any of the people I call "bro" were programmers plugged into the same world we are currently plugged into, I would not do it, period.
The fact that everyone in this thread came into this with knowledge of the term "brogrammer" suggests to me that there shouldn't be much of an argument, but I guess that's just wishful thinking.
As soon as I saw the title I knew there'd be this brouhaha. For over twenty years my circle of male friends have been calling each other "bro", my female pals call their brothers "bro". All this was way before "bro" was misappropriated as a term of offence just because of one word - "brogrammer". This thread has seriously deviated into the twilight zone of reductio ad absurdum.
Must be an American thing then, I'm European, for me "bro" is just short for brother and it is a term of endearment. It's not hard for english speaking humans all around the world to arrive at a natural abbreviation such as "Bro" without being exposed to isolated pockets of misuse. We certainly did.
I'll continue to use the word "bro" because in my timezone (and on a few on either side) it's not a term of offence.
I appreciate your intent, but this line of reasoning about the implications of the term "bro" seems like a huge stretch to me. Being a male, should I likewise feel personally offended by the Emacs woman command, which is a similar and equally "exclusive" pun on man pages?
You're shitting us right? Manpages referred to manuals, not men.
But given that I'm obviously swimming against the tide here at HN I'll just cave .....
Word, brah! Like, totally right on! We should be making like 'sispages' next with like only explanations and shit. Get it? For like the sissy-grammers! Awesome dude. You da bomb!
I can't tell if people here are being intentionally thick or not.
"Is bro supposed to be sexist or is it meant to be ironic?"
"Man referred to manual, not men!"
I can't even imagine many of you people watching a stand-up comic. Your heads must verge on exploding. The diagram for the pun/humor here would be about as simple as a diagram could be.
Well, bad comedy is still bad. Much like the naming of this idea.
The term is already reserved for a subgroup that celebrates itself for being exclusionary, crass and insistently unreflective about its privilege in society.
It has been a casual term of friendship and acknowledgement between guys for even longer than it has been a douche-bag-frat-boy-sleazy-programmer reference, however. There's not really any need to associate every occurrence of the word "bro" with that, unless it is clearly intended to do so (which, maybe this is, I wouldn't know).
I just know that getting irate over this, at the moment, is like losing your crap over someone including a "manifest" file with their software.
People gotta calm down and not be so jumpy. There's enough intentionally offensive and exclusionary stuff going on in our world without assuming everything else is, too.
Not to say I disagree with you about the way it is often used, though. Nothing more grating than playing a game and hearing a bunch of teenagers say "bro" and "brah" thirty-seven times per minute.
> It has been a casual term of friendship and acknowledgement between guys for even longer than it has been a douche-bag-frat-boy-sleazy-programmer reference, however.
In my entire life, I have only heard "bro" come from the mouths of bullying douche-bag frat-boy sleazes, usually while telling me the assault they just committed against me was "just a joke". It has never come from anyone I would willingly subject myself to.
And in my _entire life_ (including a lot of time spent with friends in fraternities and at frat parties in colleges), I've never heard "bro" used as anything but a shorter form of the term of endearment "brother", or at worst an ironic reference to the stereotype of the super-fratty popped-collar bro. Obviously both usages are prevalent, but your contention is that the term can't POSSIBLY be referring to anything but your usage. Why exactly is that?
Ha oh I see, you're one of those simpletons who thinks that all people who meet a certain arbitrary criterion must be exactly the same. I've never even been close to the jock/douchebag-frat stereotype (I actually can't think of a single trait that I have that fits: short, unfashionable, hell I didn't even party that much in college). But hey, whatever helps you get over the trauma of getting constantly stuffed in lockers in high school.
I've never been near a frat or anything related to an American college and I lots of my female and male friends use the word 'bro' to greet/reference each other.
It's terrible that you've had such a shitty life, but it'd be great if you didn't push your stupid 'I'm offended by everything' agenda down everyones throat.
It'd be great if you could demonstrate actual compassion and understanding of other human beings instead of pushing your stupid "I should be able to say whatever I want without social consequences" agenda down everyone's throat.
I've got plenty of compassion and understanding, thanks.
Using your logic, why don't we just get rid of the word 'frat' while we're at it, since you've had such a bad experience with people associated with them. Do you see the slippery slope you're on here?
I'm glad we live in a society where everything isn't geared to appease people like you. Those that I do have compassion for are people with real issues, not feigned concern over the name of an application you had nothing to do with being a word that might trigger a panic attack because you got your ass beat in college.
> I've got plenty of compassion and understanding, thanks.
Only for yourself.
> Maybe you should try therapy for that.
Maybe you should try not being an asshole.
By the way, your comments have numerous factual errors. You've assumed a great deal about my life rather than seeking actual understanding of it. Amusingly, even if your assumptions were correct, it would just make you an even bigger asshole.
> In my entire life, I have only heard "bro" come from the mouths of bullying douche-bag frat-boy sleazes, usually while telling me the assault they just committed against me was "just a joke".
My bad. I shouldn't have assumed to know the type of assault you experienced. I apologise for that.
Unfortunately though, your life isn't the topic of conversation here, and frankly it's none of my business.
Like overgard said in a comment replying to your original post, you appear to be offended because someone used the word bro.
If that is the case, my belief is that ethically, your personal experience in this matter does not invalidate the use of a word across an entire culture. Like I implied in my previous comment, where does the buck stop with this type of censorship?
If you care to respond to that, I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
One of the top headlining comedians in the US talks about this. Some people will be having a great time at his show and laughing at everything. But, then when it comes around to something about them, all of the sudden it's not so funny anymore. If you don't understand how absurd that is, you don't understand comedy.
Hopefully you realize that your personal experience and everything you load into the word "bro" is not universal.
>>I can't even imagine many of you people watching a stand-up comic.
For the record, I think comedians like Louis CK & Dave Chappelle do society a disservice by making serious issues into trivial jokes but that's just me. So yeah, there are some people out there who can't watch those types of stand-up comics. I also believe the term "brogrammer" and the issues of sexism in tech has pretty much taken over the term "bro" whether you like it or not. The word "gay" originally means "happy", but it would be absurd to use it today and expect people to interpret it with that definition now.
In the world of sports, "bro" probably still just means "Come on, bro!"... but in tech, the term has taken a new definition. To officially use that term in the tech-sphere and pretend you don't know the negative ideas it brings to mind is ignorant/insensitive at best, or just plain terrible & purposely malicious at worse.
____
Disclaimer: I'm not going to debate this so don't bother replying me asking pedantic questions or setting up hypothetical situations. Everyone has a bar for sensitivity & respect. I think yours is too low, you probably think mine is way too high. I'm sure you have a bunch of friends/coworkers that agree with you and I have a bunch that agree with me. Don't know where that leaves us... but there you go. Just adding a data point. Off I go...
Why should anyone's head explode? A stand-up comic who isn't funny pisses off the audience, it's incredibly painful to watch, and the comic doesn't get invited back.
Seems to work for Dane Cook pretty well doesn't it?
Ba Dum Chhhh!
In all seriousness though "funny" is in the eye of the beholder. Jon Benjamin and Mitch Hedberg both tell what amount to non-jokes and have intentionally unfunny standup on occasion and that's actually their whole gig.
Yes, I was kidding about 'man', but my point is that 'bro' isn't that exclusionary.
In fact, I think the problem here is that a lot of geeks don't like 'bros' and I am doubting that they're hated by women as much. Personal opinion here, but: a lot of women have friends that are bros; a lot fewer geeks have friends that are bros.
No I didn't say that. I think that is completely false.
>> A lot of geeks don't like 'bros' and I am doubting that they're hated by women as much. Personal opinion here, but: a lot of women have friends that are bros; a lot fewer geeks have friends that are bros.
I think women that are geeks also have fewer 'bro' friends.
Geek is a property of men and women, it is not a mutually-exclusive group.
Nice try, trying to implicate me in sexism but I do not like it when people try to read things into what I say that I've never implied. I intended one thing, stop trying to use it against me...
What I am saying is that I think a group of non-genderised geeks define the label 'bro' by its negative connotations more so than the greater super set of non-geeks (even those which are of the female gender.) It's a case of a new set of people 'bros' joining another set of people 'geeks'; it's exactly the same group behaviour as you see when people from different cultures immigrate into a country; same us-vs-them group behaviour; same magnification and amplification of negative connotations.
A bro is just a stereotype. People are people and you should get to know them first before rejecting them (and especially if there are negative behaviours that you want to treat.)
If people are often reading sexist intent into your words maybe you ought to consider the possibility that the things you are writing are, in fact, sexist. Or be more careful.
Yes. Geek culture isn't about being a bro. When I think about "bros" I think about guys who party, and then let someone else do the work. It's about power disguised as being carefree. Geek culture is about a kind of unification of mind and action. It's also about creativity within traditions.
Brochure. Which, despite the tounge-in-cheek joke I was trying to make, actually tends to be a shorter and more example driven document about a product.
Just imagine how upset people would get if you referred to a mixed gender crowd as "ladies"
"come on now ladies lets move the tour along"
"Who you calling 'lady'!?"
Guys really is just a historically ingrained shorthand. I don't think I've ever heard it used in this sort of context to cause harm. Using "Ladies" in this way, on the other hand, could cause yourself harm.
Back in school, my sports coaches would sometimes refer to all male groups as "ladies". However, I suspect this is not what you're talking about ;)
As much as anything, I've heard many women refer to mixed gender groups as "guys" or "dudes". A lot of this "definition creep" is actually due to women themselves. Probably this is because the male identity is viewed as a source of power, and women seek this out and aim to identify with it.
In other words, I don't think the use of "guys" generically is being driven by sexist men. I think it's being driven by blurring of gender roles and definitions, and adoption of these generic terms by women.
>"bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender. It's an awful exclusionary term and you shouldn't think it funny or ironic.
>You're not taking this serious.
> I have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things."
And there's nothing contradictory about that. Just because 'bro' is a man who might be all of that, doesn't mean that a woman can't be the same thing. Maybe she will not get the same nickname or term of endearment, but neither does that imply that she is qualitatively different from a 'bro'.
Indeed, man is short for manual. It has nothing to do with men, or beards or bros crushing code. The term "bro" when it comes to programming really needs to go away.
a) How about "brochure"? b) Someone that runs for the hills when seeing a command called "bro", will also run from "man" even before they now about eithers meaning. Of course, these poeple don't exist, because anyone using this is a grown up man or woman.
This is actually a very, very good idea. Everybody knows it, it means one thing and one thing only, and that thing also describes what it does, it probably isn't taken, and fits nicely with all other standard descriptive commands like ls/man/... Nice one.
DI isn't scary sounding, it's just unnecessary most of the time I've seen it, especially in public facing APIs that third party developers use. Most classes don't have so many varied amounts of diverse dependencies where you have to resort to convoluting the constructors for the sake of testing. You could just use inheritance.
Dependency injection takes a thing that should be one line of code and makes it twenty lines. It requires third party developers to have know all kinds of unnecessary implementation details. DI is a piece of shit that should be a measure of last resort and if you find yourself resorting to it often maybe question your entire architecture.
I have yet to meet one person to convince me that DI is not unnecessary in most cases. It always boils down to making writing tests easier. Well you should not shit all over your public APIs for the sake of testing.
How do you "experiment" with atheism? Just saying to yourself "I'm now an atheist" and seeing how that feels? It doesn't sound like you ever had solid rational and empirical reasons for choosing atheism, and indeed that is the only kind of atheist that I've ever heard of turning to the supernatural.
Atheists like me are atheists not because the quality of life it provides, but because there's no empirical evidence that there's any truth to any of the supernatural claims ever made. We understand that faith is a choice of last resort when no other evidence is available, and that faith is a really bad way to come to conclusions. Atheists like me understand our inherent biases, we seek to ask questions in a way that there can be a negative answer. There is no such negating answer to "what would convince me there is no god" and that alone, in the absence of any kind of empirical evidence for the existence of a supernatural entity, should be enough to not be a believer.
The truth is whatever the truth is, and I want to believe reality no matter how it makes me feel. If it feels good to believe in magical things that care about us but those magical things aren't real then I don't want to believe in them.
The litany of Tarski is useful:
If the box contains a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;
If the box does not contain a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
By "experiment" I mean I started questioning whether or not it was true, debating with my peers about it (either for or against).
I ultimately settled on agnosticism because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If there was a God who chose to never reveal (or even hint at) his existence to humanity, it would be incorrect for a person to be an atheist. Since that's a legitimate possibility, it makes more sense to be agnostic than atheist.
I can't reply to you directly. Why is your faith not blind or unreasoning? Can you give me just one specific example of empirical evidence for God's existence? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm guessing you're going to give me some unverifiable testimony from people who died long ago and expect that to have a person question heaps of contrary empirical evidence. I don't think that works.
And you are resorting to faith because the evidence isn't good enough. The evidence that explain the things that I believe in, like the existence of this computer in front of me, don't require any faith at all.
I've found that you can reply directly by clicking the [link] link, which gives you a reply box.
"The evidence that explain the things that I believe in, like the existence of this computer in front of me, don't require any faith at all."
Not so. You have faith in what your parents told you about the circumstances of your birth. You have no memory of the first year of your life, so it could very well have been made up. But you believe it by faith mixed with reason.
In this case that's not me using faith, that's using a heuristic. A heuristic is a decent substitute for empirical research, but it is not foolproof. We use heuristics to save time. If we had to do empirical research for everything in our lives we would never have time to do anything.
A heuristic is a way to ascertain information quickly. In the case of my birth, there's all kind of evidence to back up my parent's stories including photos, the investment and time spent in raising me. None of this is foolproof evidence, but it's enough to pass my heuristic for this situation. And there are measures I can take to get physical empirical evidence, like a DNA test.
The question of who my parents have can be phrased in this way and have an answer "the people who claim to be my parents are not actually my parents if a DNA test disputes their claims."
Please I encourage you to phrase a question as I have for your belief in God. Something like "I would not believe in God if X were true." Fill in the X.
Try to the phrase the X with very specific verifiable empirical evidence.
It's a bit ridiculous to make a claim of truth for an entire volume of information. Scientists, for example, don't do this. There are always going to be errors that creep into work. Einstein's has a paper called "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory." Scientists don't say "I would not believe in relativity if Einstein's paper were not true." They give specific evidence. For example, they would say they don't believe in relativity if light from stars didn't bend around the sun. Try something like that.
> I'm guessing you're going to give me some unverifiable testimony from people who died long ago and expect that to have a person question heaps of contrary empirical evidence.
Read the related chapter in The Handbook of Christian Apologetics[1] for reasons why the Gospel stories are reliable eyewitness accounts.
When it comes to claims that attempt to discount an insurmountable mountain of physical evidence you yourself can verify, there is no such thing as reliable eyewitness accounts, especially not from people who died eons ago. It's obvious you are not applying sound reasoning. Would you say it's sound reasoning to convict a man cleared by DNA tests for murder when there are witness accounts from living people? Think about this maybe. You're applying a wholly uneven standard of importance to one kind of evidence because of faith. And you resort to faith because the evidence is not good enough. You resort to faith because you want to. Given all that we know about the universe, you are clearly making the wrong choice.
I may not convince you, but again, you are exactly what I thought you were, a person who relies on faith to believe in God. Faith is a bad way to come to believe in things. For example Muslims believe Muhammad was the last prophet, Mormons believe Joseph Smith was a prophet. Both rely on faith, but clearly both can not be right. You would not use faith to answer questions in everyday life, because you would not do well.
Why don't you provide a short summary. My opinion right now is that if the book claims that things we can physically verify ourselves about the world are wrong because of a handful of dead people it doesn't sound like a very good book.
I can only think of three reasons you're asking me why I believe in Christianity (or Catholicism).
1. You want to learn more about Christianity for yourself to see if its worth believing in.
2. You just want to have a conversation with me.
3. You want to find my reasoning so you can tear it down and show me how I'm wrong.
I don't believe #3 is true, as I believe you're a better person than that. And I don't see why you'd be particularly interested in doing #2. In which case, you probably just want to learn more about it.
Since you probably just want to learn more about it, I think you'll find that those books contain all the same answers I could give, and they do a much better job of it than I could.
But I just don't have the time to devote to rewriting them in the form of HN comments. I'd rather spend my Saturday reading the Julia documentation (so awesome) and playing with my kids and teaching my son programming.
I'm not trying to do anything malicious but intentions are irrelevant when it comes to truth. It's either right or wrong. If someone really had a good reason for believing in God I'd like to know about it. I am also interested in atheists who later turn to God because I don't comprehend how such a thing is possible unless they were never rigorous in their scepticism or had some kind of terrible psychological trauma. The latter is known to ruin minds. For example starvation makes people irrational about eating, war, giving birth, etc all have psychological effects that can't be reasoned away.
Anyway thanks for answering my questions. Enjoy your weekend.
wrong questions you two banging heads for. Before you go for the ultimate, first, pin down a thing (anything) thats not changing (what, why, how, ...until all questions satisfy you/logically-subside). Atleast you will have a REAL thing to anchor/pivot from. As they say, reality(atheist's synonym for god) is real. God is reality. Real reality is not changing; get your mind established on it, the wisdom unfolds.
These are all witness accounts from superstitious people who died long ago. Nothing listed is verifiable. This is not good evidence. Witness accounts from dead people should not be enough to discount the mountains of empirical evidence that imply that resurrection after having been dead for three days is not possible.
The explanation given there is sound when it is applied the veracity of historical written records that don't attempt to support the supernatural. It's just about measuring what the more reliable evidence is. Did so and so say such and such to this person and so 500 years ago? Best written records say so, and there are different pieces of records from different people who say so and so we deem it good enough to say it's accurate. That's a totally different ball game than trying to discredit contemporary physical evidence.
If it could be explained in a HN comment, I think there would be many more Christians in the world. That's why there are whole books written on the subject. The only one I still own is The Handbook of Christian Apologetics[1][2] so that's the only one I can recommend.
But it does require some faith, just not blind or unreasoning faith, as most people seem to think.
I don't want to debate with you; I've done more than my share of religious debates in my life and no longer find any joy in them. I also completely agree that debating definitions is rarely useful. I will point out, though, that nobody claims to have faith that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or that the sky is blue. "Faith" connotes a leap; I understand that as a leap from the evidence to the conclusion, covering a gap that cannot be covered by logical reasoning. It's that leap that I take issue with, regardless of which word you choose to label it with.
You've repeatedly recommended a book of apologetics throughout the thread. If I could make a recommendation in turn: Critique of Religion and Philosophy, by Walter Kaufmann. I think it can give you much to think about, and from a reasonably friendly perspective.
I should also point out that, after my initial conversion to Christianity, "how I feel about it" is basically not a factor in what I believe.
There are many times when I felt miserable and strongly wished I wasn't a Christian anymore. But I couldn't just choose to disbelieve in something that my research had convinced me was objectively true.
All the cnet author needed was to add a gif or a super short video showing the effect. They did not need to have some long video with voice over with stock footage of people typing for half the video.
It's a content site, so probably from pageviews with ads. I doubt Quora is going to stick around, and if it does it will be in there with about.com, ehow and the like. A scummy low quality crowd sourced content farm.
Like the WSJ and the NYT, just open an incognito window and do a google search for the title. In order to have their content indexed by Google they have to allow that to work. With the NYT you don't even have to Google, just right click the link to open an incognito window.