skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I think activation e-mails are dumb. People do way too much user security bullshit. Simple is better in many many cases. (All imho.)
If you "win" an argument (especially in person), are you really winning?
Yeah, I was going to use it for my online gambling (legal) site, and found the dynamic IP problem to be the real decision maker for me. I use smartfox server as a socket server, and renewing a license with a new ip address takes 24 to 48 hours, which means death to an online gaming site using social networking.

The static IPs make it possible to use AWS now. I can finally add voice chat functionality because of the power behind the large and extra large instances.
One of the things I really like about YC news is the fact that it's a great place to disagree. I would even say that it is one of the sites defining characteristics. Whenever I hold an unpopular or controversial view here there will of course be replies - but very rarely do I experience namecalling, trollig or other fluff that doesn't add to the conversation. The replies are always tactful, and often very insightful. Sometimes I even have to take my words back, convinced by another user that I was wrong. And we all learn from it.

You don't see that in many forums.
Yes I do. Absolutely.
What do you gain by talking to someone on the internet anyway? Why am I even responding to this essay, or to your comment?

It's probably because it's interesting for me to do so, to see others' views. When I disagree, I tend to enjoy it if people come back and argue. I don't really do it because I care whether the other person comes to see my point of view - although it is more fun when they do, of course. Maybe some people enjoy yelling things such as, "u r a fag!!!!", although personally I can't say I understand those people...

It's useless to try and convince them otherwise for the most part - I don't think they'd listen to you in the first place.

As for the essay itself, I just wish more people would consciously THINK about how they talk to others. It would make the internet and the world a nicer place. (Oh, and that first part, DH0, seemed to me as if it was addressed directly towards Jeff's of Coding Horror response to PG's last essay. But I can't say I disagree - I was actually rather shocked to see such a, umm, 'vehement', response. Another instance of what people probably wouldn't say in person.)
Mind if I extend your Disagreement Hierarchy?

DH-1. Flamebaiting.

This is when you preempt that with which you would disagree by stating your case in such a way as to elicit quick disagreement (in the form of DH0 to DH6). Usually done by noticing a subset of all data, forming a hypothesis to explain only that subset, and presenting it as a conclusion. Often done without even realizing it.

The relational database model is dead.

There is no future in enterprise software.

<Language du jour> is clearly the best.

No one else is doing <xyz>, so it must be a deadend.
I don't disagree in general. But.

The Xbox is one of the few products that actually break the Microsoft trend. The first one was great and the second one was better as far as value provided to the consumer goes. Manufacturing problems make me suspect Microsoft hasn't figured out this whole hardware production thing (and they haven't), but the brand itself would only be tarnished if the Xbox 360 were fundamentally broken rather that just failing more often than the industry average. Hence why I claimed the Xbox 360 is not really comparable to Vista.
Why Steve Jobs wants to sell you a music subscription
Canada: Where Art Thou iPhone?
I'm really looking forward to seeing this hierarchy applied as a meme on news.yc.
I don't consider my wife a co-founder, but she is definitely a part of my team if nothing more than being in the cheerleading section.
She was not as fully committed as myself and she smartly vetoed the mortgaging of our home to get the project done, but once she caught my vision she became as dedicated as me to seeing the project become a success.
I had her read "Internet Riches" to get her non-techy mind into the mode. It was after she read that book that she became fully committed and supportive.

I guess I can't really classify her anymore as "not_involved", and that's good for both of us.
I see your point, and of course you are right that it drives your valuation upwards if you can engage in a genuine conversation with your customers.

I was referring more to the sign-up stage though, where you tend to lose a lot of potential customers with obligatory confirmation e-mails.

But if you can get the conversation going after the critical sign-up step, you should by all means do so.
How about http://www.simplebucket.com
Clean and easy on the eyes ;)
"You do not truly know someone until you fight them" Seraph, The Matrix
Facebook may be like the Macintosh computer before desktop publishing. You may be not old enough to remember when the Macintosh was really just a toy, but it was. Don't count Facebook out yet, a killer application may just change the entire story. In fact, I am trying to build a killer application for it myself, one that takes it out of being just a game and provides a real reason for real people to use it every day. I've been working on my program for a long time, and if successful, it could change how some people perceive facebook No, it is not a 'Bit by a Vampire' applet! Even more interesting,there are probably 100s of other people just like me trying to do the same thing, find a way to leverage what is cool about facebook and make it a productive environment. Sure Facebook is Doomed, just like Apple has been doomed almost every year it has ever been around. :-) At least, that is what I hope.
Man, that is sad.
The more things change... http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/sophistical...

Edit: and on a more recent (and cynical :-) ) note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right
Ask YC: Is Corporate Identity Being Overshadowed by Startups and Independents?
A couple of hours ago (or maybe it was yesterday), someone left a link about Adobe's online version of Photoshop; a move that seems to be in competition with other online photo editors, and it kind of got me to thinking:

Does the emergence of Online Photoshop, Silverlight and other corporate produced services indicate a growing trend among the software industry that independently produced software is gaining more of a name for itself than that of corporate entities?

Flickr is now indicating the possibility of Video, Microsoft comes up with Silverlight (and even advertises it on Coudal's Deck platform, a retrospectively independent marketing source), and other moves like this while smaller sources have been operating for years.

It really looks to me like corporate identity is being lost with more and more entrepreneurs entering the marketplace with services that match, or even best their counter parts.

What are your thoughts on this?
I'm guessing that given the difficulty of characterizing voiced speech is still inaccurate, the more difficult task of translating neural impulses to speech will result in even further degradation of performance. Unsolved: At the moment, the device has a limited vocabulary: 150 words and phrases.

A long way to go.
jottit's UX is something I'm in awe of.
How open source is bringing back the hippie culture
Are you questioning whether it's important to argue, or whether it's important to win?
Did this get modded down because of the design or because a friend of mine did it?

Not that I mind, I'm just curious as to whether there is someone out there that dislikes it and why. I have a suspicion that Americans and Europeans don't quite agree on what is good design.
This is a nice catalog of some common forms of disagreement, but I'm not convinced that this set of six is exhaustive, nor am I convinced that if other forms are added that the set will remain well-ordered.
Mortgage Crisis Caused By Anti-Racist Activism
Yes, by definition.
The vast majority of "new" ideas are just several old ideas tied to together, or presented in some new way. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
This is more of a fluff piece for some market research firm than a story/article.

However, I do agree that their brand could be much stronger. Relatively few people know what the Zune is - tons of intelligent (often iPod-using) people have no idea that Microsoft has a music device. When they think Microsoft, they think Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and Xbox.
I think the Flamebaiting category is a useful addition to PG's hierarchy.

The new category brings to mind an interesting property of this hierarchy though, namely that it seems to be difficult to respond to an "argument" with a higher order technique than that which was originally presented. For example, if one were disagreeing with a purely ad hominem rant, one would find it futile and nearly impossible to disagree with the rant at any higher level; how can one truly refute an argument that has no central point? It's somewhat depressing because, if true, it implies that a discussion is upper bounded at the level of discourse that initiated the discussion.

The way out of this, as far as I can tell, is recognizing that statements are not made in a vacuum. Sometimes the only way to raise the level of discourse is to engage in a sort of meta-disagreement. In other words, sometimes the point of a statement is not the content, but the context. While it works to classify criticisms of tone, for example, as weak if one were dealing with a substantive argument, the metadata (tone, speaker, etc) around the content of a non-argument may allow one to say something intelligent about the statement by tying it to the broader context in which it was made.
Ask YC: Where do you get simple legal counsel on your startup ideas?
I'm wondering what you guys think the best way is to get quick advice on simple legal questions related to startups. I'm not talking about complex things like drafting partnership agreements and evaluating the legal merits of a patent application; I'm talking about more basic things like "is it legal to make a mashup that scrapes data from ${website}.com?" or "can I be held responsible for comments users make on my website's forum?" In my last startup I did, I was luckily able to consult with a family friend who was a lawyer, but that might not be an option this time. Is there any solution to basic legal questions short of paying hundreds for a legal consultation? (Which seems like overkill for the type of questions I have.) If I need to see a lawyer, how can I find one who's cheap and is an expert on internet issues specifically?
I disagree! :p

Actually I do not. There are many good long replies here but Reddit, at least for some of the submissions, also has some good long discussions.
I thought this was a pretty good essay. Timely as well. There was considerable disagreement over PG's last essay. You could see the hierarchy of responses on both sides, including straw man arguments.

If comments could be tagged with hierarchy levels, it might raise the general level of argument.

"Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional."

I totally agree with this, particularly on YC News where there are a lot of smart people. When the words fly, there's a tendency to overreact and say things that wouldn't occur if we were face-to-face. I admit having done this. It would be great if some optional tagging feature were built into a comment system, so writers could get some feedback when others thought they strayed.
The author's main point seems to be x. As he says:

<quotation>

But this is wrong for the following reasons: Who is this guy and what authority does he have to write about these topics? I haven't read the essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it.
I agree that it's nowhere near exhaustive, most obviously because it doesn't address the ways that writers try to directly deceive the audience (appeals to flattery, conservatism, etc).

I remember being part of an Academic Games league in high school. One of my favorite games was simply called "Propaganda." Everyone sat in a big room, listened to arguments, and identified the type of rhetorical technique being used. It may sound lame, but it was actually pretty fun and cultivated some useful skills.

Anyway, here's the technique list they used:
http://mlagonline.org/Prop_ABCE.pdf [pdf]

and a more detailed but somewhat different list of logical fallacies: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
"is it legal to make a mashup that scrapes data from ${website}.com?"

Is usually covered in either the site's privacy policy, or their TOS.

"can I be held responsible for comments users make on my website's forum?"

In many cases, no; but not all of them.

Overall, to answer your question I'm sure a business attorney would be willing to answer such questions without any cost. I've consulted with a few of them, drop in schedule a meeting and just ask some general questions without any sort of consulting fee that you'd get with people who call themselves 'specialists'. With this sort of thing, I'd go directly to a lawyer; you avoid both bs fees, and also getting involved with someone offering legal advice without a license which can land you both in trouble.
I was hanging out the other day at a mixer and the subject of travel came up. There were some well-traveled people but it evolved into a pissing contest, their travel resume vs. the other person's. It seemed almost they were trying to one-up the other even when talking about their personal experiences (e.g. Punta Cana is alright for scuba. But. Have you been to Dominica? No? Well let me tell you...)

Reading this YC thread, I was reminded of observing this party talk/jousting and had the deep thought that if we hold an agenda (e.g. He's wrong or I'm better than that guy) we lose out when it comes down to it - we don't really listen or learn anything from the other person because we're too focused on proving the muzak in our head that we're right
Hmm... Doesn't Slashdot sort of do this? Not completely, but to some extent, it does have "Flamebait" or "Interesting" or "Insightful" 'ratings' for comments.

I don't really think that's too useful, because it's usually pretty obvious what category the comment falls in after reading it anyway...
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a great book on tricks people use to "win" arguments. You could call it the Bible of sophistry:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/controve...

"Conversational terrorism" outlines more techniques used by conversational bullies:
http://www.vandruff.com/art_converse.html
The meta-solution would be to clone YC news now that it's open sourced and create legalnews.com. As a site admin you'll get all the advice you want.

Of course you'll probably also be sued.
Paul Graham does a good job outlining the different forms a disagreement can take and evaluating their effectiveness. I agree with his analysis. I'm going to expand on it.

It seems this piece was written in response to the various criticisms he received because for his "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" essay. In addition to objecting to the form these criticisms took, I think he could also have talked about one of the fundamental causes of most disagreements on the internet - lack of charitable interpretation.

Many interpreted his essay as an attack on big-company programmers - using as evidence the analogies he used, the frankness of his writing style, etc. - and reached the conclusion that he had an elitist attitude about his profession. Now, this may or may not be true (having met him, my opinion is a firm "not true"). But the point is that it doesn't matter. If we interpret charitably, we remain agnostic on what his argument implies about him (thus abstaining from DH1 and DH2 attacks) and instead focus on the actual argument. Some critics managed to do that. But many didn't. And the worst part is that the lack of charitable interpretation obscured their actual disagreements, so now we've wasted time talking about "how to disagree" instead of "what are the correlations/effects of company type on programmer happiness/ability/prospects".

Of course, an author should be careful to frame his arguments in a way that minimizes the danger from misinterpretation. In other words, an author should try to write well.
Those kinds of tags are too broad. I was thinking of some javascript to let you highlight subparts of a comment then tag it with a more specific label, like "Straw Man Argument."

People would probably view the comment differently, but readers (and the author) could then see 60% of people thought part of his comment wasn't useful. Ad hominem and straw dog attacks, for example, might be unintentionally inserted in the heat of argument. Right now, comment rating is very blocky.
Stunningly dumb Windows design
Nanotech Porn
Right. Be very careful with that, operating without a license as mentioned is sketchy and if someone calls you on it, good luck.
Oldest recorded voices sing again
Probably that nearly one out of three of them breaks with a 'red ring of death' and has to be replaced?
No, by definition (or at least English convention) if you "win" an argument you are not winning, but rather "winning" in the sarcastic "wink, wink" sense.
I can't say for sure what he's referring to, but maybe it's Dale Carnegie's philosophy that you can never "win" an argument because even when you "win" an argument, you haven't usually accomplished your objective of persuading the person. I looked for an excerpt and didn't see one. There's a small summary here, but the book says it best:

http://www.carsonified.com/biz-tips/how-to-win-an-argument

On a personal level, a relative of mine has alienated enough people that I have trouble bringing him out because he continually needs to be "right."

What good have you accomplished if you're "right", alone, and you've convinced no one.

The dynamic is different in a public debate, however, where you might be trying to persuade people other than the person you're debating, but Mr. Carnegie's ideas are still useful to remember.
Doomsday fears spark lawsuit over collider
Is this the right room for an argument? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HaRFBSq9k
I argue to learn more. If you disagree with someone, they usually spend their valuable time teaching you stuff that they would otherwise not. They get the satisfaction of winning the argument and I get the satisfaction of learning something.
You're obviously lying when you say you didn't read the essay.
Likely it was because it's not novel, and is fairly pedestrian. People who care about design have seen thousands like it already. For what it is it's ok.
Oh nice! Now instead of wasting all of that typing on "u r a fag" and other namecalling, I can just use:

author <- DH0;

Thanks Paul!
It's easy to at least get to DH3 in reply to anything. For example if they say, "you are an idiot" you can contradict them (close enough) by saying, "you haven't supported that statement". If they question your tone or authority, you can contradict by saying that isn't relevant to what position is true.

edit: btw my experience is that more often than not i get downvoted if i do this
if one side "wins" an argument that means the losing side gets ruled out. thus you both win in the search for the truth, because you've discovered that a particular position is false.
This reminds me oddly of that movie "End Day", where 5 different ways are entertained of how the world would end, this was one of them.
Text-based disagreements aside, I'd like to do an arc off this comment - to talk about the importance of perspective. Guess which two perspective(s) can fuel disagreement...

The God perspective (Yeah, you the expert?)
"This restaurant is the best in town"

The 2nd person perspective (Why should you know what I should do)
"You really should try this restaurant."

The 1st-person perspective (the only one you can truly own)
"I really like this restaurant. I like the cooking and I feel like I am welcome here."
How do you directly deceive the audience via appeal to conservatism?
are you sure that's shorter?
It's possible, you just have to remember that there are many more lurkers than posters in any given discussion and write for the benefit of the lurkers that have not yet chosen a DH level.

Actually, I've used this as a fairly effective technique for arresting flamewars. It doesn't always work, but when it does, subsequent posts are usually at the DH level of your own response rather than that of the parent comment.

The key seems to be drawing 3rd-party onlookers in before the original flamer responds. If someone else responds to your comment at a high DH level, the original flamer has a choice. He can respond to your comment with another flame, which makes him look stupid and petty because there's a sibling comment that's much more well-reasoned. He can respond with a real argument, in which case you've raised the level of discourse. Or he can go away, which seems to be what happens most of the time. Regardless of what he does, you're free to ignore his reply and continue responding to the person who engages you with actual arguments.

A corollary is that educated, rational lurkers hold a lot of power on discussion boards. If you don't get directly involved in arguments but instead cherry-pick the comments you respond to, you can set the whole tone for a community.

BTW, the same trick works in face-to-face conversations, as long as there are more than 2 people involved. The person who asks the questions controls the conversation, by virtue of which questions they choose to ask. And the person who sits back and shuts up controls whose ideas get developed, by virtue of who they choose to respond to. That's why the quietest person at a meeting usually controls it, as long as they're not just a passive onlooker.
I wish more people wrote stuff like this. There are a million writing books on grammar and style, but god forbid someone ever write something about what makes good ideas...
As opposed to the zero copies of Vista that need replacing.
Pithy quote, but do you believe the substance of it in this instance?
On my to-do someday list is a site for recording and organizing debates. Arguments would appear as boxes of text, organized into a tree structure. Opposing arguments could be added as children to a parent node. Arguments could be filtered by up/down voting or some other system. Debate trees could be searched. Etc...

Somebody really should make this. I remember messing with some Flash site somewhere that did something similar, but the interface was pretty lowzy.
In that case it wouldn't be deceit as much as it is manipulation. To avoid any political insinuations, I could recast this as appeal to status quo. It's common to argue against new ideas in this way.
As mascarenhas already posted, Aristotle spent quite a bit of time on the topic, and his ideas are still studied, though perhaps not as widely as they should be.
"No, it is not a 'Bit by a Vampire' applet!"
Oh, god, that's a relief. Facebook has enough of those. :)

Anyway, that's pretty much what I meant with my Emacs-ish response. It's a powerful platform, but people haven't really figured out what to do with it beyond small games and hundreds of friend invites.

Good luck with your app - I'd love to see it when/if you release it.
How can you question using conservative arguments? They have been used for centuries, and they've served us pretty well. :)