Recent Comments

I can't speak for science, but one certainly doesn't need an advanced university degree, or even an undergraduate degree (Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, etc), to do fantastic work in software. People with a masters or Ph.D in CS from a well-regarded university tend to have a certain polish, though, with a practical understanding of the peer-reviewed research and fewer gaping holes in their base of fundamental knowledge. That would be important for professors, as even Dyson grudgingly acknowledges in the interview, I think.

It's almost a truism that many or most of the best teachers on a given college campus are those who don't have tenure. Youthful energy, ambition, receptiveness to new ideas, lack of complacency and habits of political infighting, rapport with students, are some of the reasons commonly given.

Looks like I don't need to use OKCupid or Firefox. Spend more time worrying about yourself and less about others. You'll be a lot happier.

So on the okcupid page telling you not to use FF because the new CEO and inventor of Javascript is a bad man, the links are in Javascript. I can't tell if they are serious, trolling, or just using this poutrage for media attention.

Seriously, WTF? I come in here with my morning cup of joe and see this pink slime all over the place and a poll asking my opinions on craptastic website design where it seems that the full suckfest has already been implemented. Look, change it back, or I'm leaving. We are not your "customers" or your "audience." We submit stories, we edit them, we moderate them and we discuss them. The community IS Pipedot. We are not here for you to monetize us.

I move that we start a new site, AllPipedot, and prove that the community can take back what's ours. In the mean time, I urge everyone to stop submitting new stories, and all mod points should only be spent on Fuck Pipedot Beta posts. We need to send a strong message to our evil, if benevolent, overlord, Bryan.

When I wrote the original article, I was using Costco as an example of a corporation whose CEO's political/personal/religious/other views affect the way they manage the entity, not an example of a corporation which has undergone backlash for said views. The link I connected it to reflects that original example. If you want a good example of Costco backlash, though, try this one. ;)

And in other news: the editors here actually EDIT! Holy crap! I think it looks better than what I originally submitted, too. Thanks!

Now just kill the magenta and comic sans and it'll be perfect. Damn April 1st.

The gun icon has a couple of problems. It has a single action trigger but has no hammer, and the ejection port is on the wrong (left) side.

I like your point, we should expect more from each other, male or female. However, here are two concrete examples from my life which feel more nuanced.

My very young son loves to dance, ideally I would like to put him in dance classes, maybe even ballet to learn the excellent technique. I quite likely won't though because I fear the stigma for a boy in dance classes more.

A husband of a friend is currently under-enemployed. She brings home the money and does most of the domestic stuff. He is deeply embarrassed to not be providing money for his family but is quite hostile to asking for help, especially from his wife, even if it could result in employment. Helping with the domestic stuff may not heal his sense of worth to his family either

There may be more to being a man than current conventions allow. It's not just about allowing weakness in some frail sort of way, I suspect. What do you think?

I see today that everything I checked has been used against me. Oh, that I had stayed my hand!

If they make a good trilogy from the spinoff, more power to them. Hollywood seems to lack original story plots and material, so it is healthy when a new author's work breaks through to the mainstream.

I am still waiting for this generations Star Wars universe, though. I definitely think there is an opportunity for someone's grand vision with just enough depth to really capture the imagination.

Posting to add another article which chronicles the whole thing pretty effectively and readably. (What? Read the article? That's unpossible!) A choice quote:

"I worry that Mozilla is in a tough spot right now," (Mark Surman, XO of Mozilla) confided. "I worry that we do a bad job of explaining ourselves, that people are angry and don't know who we are or where we stand. And, I worry that in the time it takes to work this through and explain ourselves the things I love about Mozilla will be deeply damaged."

Clearly they are trying to address this. My question still stands, however: at what point do the CEO's views become representative of the company's? In any normal company, the answer would be either "often" or "always" - see Hobby Lobby , Chick-Fil-A , and Costco for examples of CEOs whose political, religious, and personal views affect their employees (and, arguably, their customers). Mr. Eich has stated, however, that his personal views do not apply to how he will captain Mozilla.

In the interest of disclosure: I'm torn because I'm a Firefox user - I consider it the best, most customizable browser ever - but I am also adamantly pro-gay-rights. I very much hope they fix this.

You guys are really mature, making fun of my handle.

Sent from my Netscape Communicator

I lurk on slashdot unintentionally. After so many years of reading the comments, the same arguments would pop up all the time and I could pretty much predict the circle jerk. It's at the point where I don't feel it's worth the effort to contribute.

Is it too late to recheck the box 'garish colors?'

You can recast your vote as many times as you like. Simply click the vote link. Your old votes, obviously, get replaced by the new ones.

Blinking Text? What about Marquee. I read faster if the words move too!

I know what the perfect browser is. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist.
Join the Campaign for a Nonexistent Browser!
http://theanna.org/Voo/
(And she's serious, even though that page is mostly a joke.)

I found it depressing. The green site doesn't have April fools anymore :-(
Long live the ponies!

Not enough blinking text. Can you put that back please?

From the developer side of things, can we just say Internet Explorer X, where 4 ≤ X ≤ 11? I've never used anything below IE4. Metro and lack of standards compliance get double votes.

But seriously, that site is awful. Given the size of that project, I expect better from them.

I CAN NEVER UNSEE THAT SH!T, THANKS! ;)

I have to admit I got a real LOL when I refreshed my Pipedot page today.. Talk about a great colorscheme! (and the "Beta" joke... hahaha)

Can we keep it past April Fool's??? :)

Holy crap, some of those proposed logos are damned good looking! I didn't take the time to try to figure out if some guidelines were proposed, but they seem to all fall into a certain color scheme, and they are mostly variations of a certain play on the shape of the letters P and D. I thought there would be some entries using the pipe and dot characters; maybe before the end there will be.

Meanwhile, I'm impressed!

I doubt these are created by |. lurkers though. There's probably a community of hungry graphic designers hanging around that site waiting for contests. They don't have a connection to the site, they just know how to do art and when somebody needs something, they jump in to compete.

This is all brute supposition, of course.

I should add: had you used Comic Sans in the body text I'd probably have had to dig out my own eyeballs with a spoon. Catastrophe averted!

Glad to have a laugh. My favorite part was squeezing in the word "Suckage." Not sure it's in the dictionary.

Hey, Happy April 1st. The site looks great! But knowing what I know now I think I'd like to back and vote again. Is it too late to recheck the box 'garish colors?'

This is the only site carrying on the noble tradition of trashing itself visually on the 1st of the month. Probably because it's the only site with a decent CSS scheme that permits doing so with little effort! MUST HAVE MORE PONIES ...

Actually an overly feminist friend of mine posted a story on my facebook page about how we need to stop telling our boys to "man up". Reading the article was like driving screwdrivers into my eye sockets. The whole premise was we use things like "your such a girl" as an insult thus we're implying that women are weak and a suitable insult, but instead of saying we should expect our girls to be more emotionally stable, intelligent, hard working and strong we should expect our boys to be more like our girls. That's to say we should let our boys to be emotionally vulnerable, tell them it's ok to fail and *require* someone else to help them.

Why The Men's Rights Movement Is Garbage

I'm really not ok with that. I don't understand why instead of expecting *more* from our girls we should be expecting *less* from our boys.

Hindi: " "

Very High. Here's the most recent stats I could find from soylentnews.

It looks like the raw daily page views are in the 6-figure range, while daily comments are in the 3-figure range. That's (very) roughly around 10000 page views per comment.

I'd love to compare between sites. My guess is pipedot would be about the same or slightly higher, while slashdot would be orders of magnitude worse.

#1 should be able to answer that.

As the rights of women to be strong or masculine rises, at least in some parts of the world, it is interesting to ponder that the rights of men to be weak or feminine has not risen equally. It would seem that changing stereotypes and assumptions is not a zero sum game that is always in some sort of balance.

I wonder what the member to lurker ratio is on sites like slashdot, soylent and now pipedot?

Oh, or the abuse of scrolling to animate the page. I'm not really sure what you call it, but here is an example: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/

I'm always tempted to put best viewed in Netscape Navigator 3 on my pages, just for the "get off my lawn" power it has.

¡Qui© grande!

Show more idiocy on results pages. Because there is no pagination, there is no easy way to quickly move forward among the results, so you have to repeatedly scroll down and click Show more . If you leave the page you often lose your position and have to start all over again. Stupid UI trend which has no place in anything other than simple interfaces. There should at least be a simple way of setting the offset.

Same here. I wish there was a +1 Flamebait moderation, as this deserves it!

This place must have a lot of lurkers

A picture of the /. Logo having the stuffing beaten out of it with phb money and users flying out. The fwd slash flops over, picks itself upright and fades to |. blue. The |. description "without the corporate slant" ffades in under.

Αυτά μου φαίνονται αλαμπουρνέζικα.

こにちわ
Привет
γειά σου
¿alo?
Fancy quotes: "hello world"
Em dashes: foo - bar
Math: sin²(θ) + cos²(θ) = 1

ROFL. At first I was wondering if you where speaking in haiku, or maybe you where still lost in Usenet with the manual line breaks, but then I read the Capitalized vertical letters.

Nice.

I was most of the way down the list before I realized I was essentially ticking all of the boxes.

Thanks, that's now no my long list of things to check out.

It seems that the Apache folks are trying to corner the market on open source Big Data projects...

For me it's clear.
Unless devs want user backlash, they need to listen.
Commonly they choose business motivation over engagement of their core users. It
Kills the site, every time.

Sloppy coding habits, excess reliance on javascript and other
Lame technologies like Flash, not to mention ugly banner
Advertisements can lead to total
Suckage if they're abused. LinuxToday was another great site before some
Ham-fisted attempts to bring in more revenue led to more ads than articles and the
Death of the community that so
Often had interesting conversations on
That site.

Before you start making a site flashy you've got to get the basics right.
Even relatively complex things can be done simply, and if you choose flash over substance
The readers that have an
Alternative will flee your sucky site like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

Whatever could you be referring to?

Been there. The only thing you can do is block and hope they don't get a lucky hit in or escalate. In my case one of the girl's brother came over and tried to kick the crap out of my because his sister and her friend attack me. Right. Attacked me. In front of everyone. Unfortunately for him I put him down hard and fast. Still copped a lot of flack for 'fighting girls'.

I don't know what the last option is referring to. Can anyone help me?

Ah, I didn't realize the video was available in the article (or at least parts of it). From what I can tell the boy did as I wrote, and he didn't really get beat up as such. Sure he got hurt, but he was clearly able to walk away with no trouble at all (note: I did not watch the entire video).

I'd never thought of using it at a day spa! Though given the danger of not waking up and legal waivers involved, I can't see anyone short of Elon Musk at this moment attempting such a venture. On the other had, there are companies out there that make money by offering people the chance to jump off of tall structures or out of planes with various safety devices. I guess it just depends on the individual being willing to take the risk and what kind of experience they are going for.

That's pretty much the same thing. If he touches them, even if it was just to block or restrain them, he's fighting a girl. If he runs away he's a wimp for not standing his ground. I don't know with all the gender equality if it's more acceptable in the younger generation for a boy to fight a girl than it was for my generation, but I remember a fight in junior high where I ran from a girl and was deemed a coward. It would have been an easy win for me, but I was *always* taught not to fight people smaller than me or girls. Personally I think what this boy did was right, he stood his ground and took the beating, which after seeing the video wasn't that bad. Just not fighting back was the best thing he could have done. Had they pulled a weapon on him, which I've seen happen, he'd be well within his rights to beat them to a pulp.

I live on a street behind a high school and see this exact same thing, and much worse, happen at least once a year. I have a security camera pointing to the end of my driveway because my trash had been vandalized so many times. The camera usually shows it being vandalized because someone's being pushed into it and the bags are used as projectiles.

I've seen fights between individual boys, groups of boys on one boy, individual girls, groups of girls on one other girl and, more rarely, groups of girls on one boy. When that happens it's usually a guy hanging around with his friends, smoking, playing hacky-sack, etc... and group of girls surround him, while the other guys just look on. Most of the time the guy does fights back and the fight takes less than a minute. It's almost like young girls have forgotten that boys have a physical advantage, by high school age. Maybe they're counting on that as some kind of a devious plot to get a couple bruise and have him suspended/expelled/arrested.

In some respects it funny to watch a bunch of thug girls think they can take on a boy and act tough until he starts swinging back, then they drop like flies and bawl their heads off. Unfortunately it's never funny to see the results of a serious fight. I have see a girl really badly beaten after pulled a knife on a boy. He spent a good ten minutes just kicking her in the head after she was knocked to the ground. I have a pretty good working relationship with the school administration because of the garbage issue and frequently hand over videos to them when a fight's gone too far.

Good point about how the Target article fails to describe how many misses there are. I always get a good laugh out of the ads Google's fancy algorithms think I should see. I am regularly bombarded with ads for things I've already bought, for example.

There's an old quote by Pico Ayer (I can't find it at the moment but probably discovered it through that old website from the late 90s, the Utne Cafe), in which he worries that people are confusing information for knowledge, and knowledge for wisdom, and that although the modern technologies provide us tons of information they don't provide much knowledge, and far less wisdom. I'd kick that one level further to say that before even information, they drown us in data, which is totally worthless unless you know what you're looking for, or are trained in noticing things you were not suspecting.