It's 2018 and people are still using the word "retarded" as if it's not just as derogatory to people with intellectual/mental disabilities as the n-word is to black people.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If it's not direct _at someone or some group_ and is not intended to belittle them for e.g. actually being mentally retarded, then it's harmless.
We put too much emphasis on words and too little on intent.
Maybe we should just be less awful about the words we use instead of trying to litigate that they're really okay, no, really, I said so.
Definitely NOT the same as the N word (weird that you even compare it)! However, to be on the safe side I generally agree with you.
But then, we need to find an equivalent that would fit in cases like this. This isn't stupid, it's not inconvenient, it's just _retarded_.
What else would you call this?
I actually think you could argue the opposite. Maybe it's forgivable to not keep up with the euphemism treadmill when talking about cognitively disadvantaged _people_, but referring negatively to _something_ by comparing it to cognitively disadvantaged people clearly contains a negative message about cognitively disadvantaged people.
When you say "fat check" you're comparing to fat people, it's just the same adjective.
To dive more down this rabbit hole, the distinction is that we associate something like "idiot" with an incompetent person who has arrived at their incompetence through their own actions. "Retarded" refers to someone who is developmentally disabled, usually through no fault of their own. So using "retarded" in a derogatory sense -- even when not talking about a person -- is viewed as effectively pushing the idea that developmentally disabled people are to be looked down on. But we, as a culture, are fine with looking down on "idiots", at least for now, so there's no problem using "idiot" in that way.
I'm not looking for an argument here about the merits of all of this. I don't particularly care about the merits or your (or my!) opinion of them. That's just how these words are viewed today by enough people to influence social norms. If you don't care about offending people, that's your prerogative, but for the sake of community discussion here on HN, it's better if we try to avoid these sorts of things. Let's try to keep the SN ratio high.
"Idiotic" works.
The noun is recorded from 1788 in the sense "retardation, delay;" from 1970 in offensive meaning "retarded person," originally American English, with accent on first syllable.
It is completely fair to interpret this ID law as retarded in the first sense.
Which is in effectively zero cases the phrase being used here. The vernacular usage of the word is shitty and offensive. Instead of well-actuallying about maybe he meant it in the sense of the mechanical device or or or, maybe just be a person about it and recognize that the decent thing to do is to just not get your cape on for it?
This isn't code. People know what you mean when you say something nasty and being cute about it just does not change anything.