skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit ones's opponent."

How do you measure the spirit? An author may detect bad spirit everywhere and take all DH5-but-not-DH6 disagreements as effectively DH1.

Anyway, the quoted paragraph seems very harsh on many small-point DH5 disagreers. Some people just feel the "duty" (xkcd.com/386) to correct mistakes, without being deliberately dishonest. And there is a lot of uncharted importance space between grammar mistakes and the central point. As an example, what if the central point were correct and worthy but illustrated by two examples, one of them bad? The argument doesn't depend on it, but is it still clear that the only purpose of correcting the author is to discredit him?

Why not generalize DH6 from "stating the central point and refuting it" to "refuting a point and commenting on its importance"? Then you could even correct grammar mistakes, just add explicitly that you're aware that as a grammar mistake it's minor. DH6 would no longer imply power or effort, but, as pointed out in the essay, it already doesn't imply truth.
The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese :-)
SearchMe: Search with a Visual Twist
Growth vs. Size
What are your views on what the aim of a company should be;

a) a target size or

b) continuous growth of some rate.

Also, should it be relative to what else is out there?

For example, should Microsoft continue its pursuit of Yahoo! (at the costs of its stock value)? Once upon a time MS was probably happy with their size, but since Google is a bigger kid on the block now, they feel they need to grow more simply to be #1 again.

Someone else recently asked why YC startups don't strive for even grander visions of Facebook proportions (the fact that is easier said than done is a different issue).

So my question is, should you as a company decide a target size/market-share to reach at which point you will be happy, or is it a continuous growth that matters more regardless of your current size (or lack thereof). And does the existence of a bigger competitor mean you must do whatever it takes to outmatch them?

Somewhat related, is the question poised by Michael Arrington as to whether YC News wanted to grow or stay under the radar.
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I've had an idea for an online game that would secretly teach you circuit design. In the game, you would build a series of water pipes to preform a certain tasks for each level. The amount of water in a pipe would be voltage, and how fast the water flows would be current. The game would start off very simply, and after "beating" a level, you would get more devices available to complete the tasks.
The Future of Video Games.
Driving down video game memory lane.
Facebook Apps Reach 20,000; How Many Are Time Savers?
You would get the most out of taking the freshman/sophomore level electric circuit analysis series from either your local community college or university. in the lab that goes with the course you can use the o-scopes, function generators, etc. if you like it then take the analog design classes where you really get into active filter and circuit design first at the op amp level then transistor.
Yes, learning is most definitely a critical skill! Fortunately, my early education (pre-high school) placed a huge emphasis on learning to love learning, and I spent a great deal of my free time learning from textbooks etc. I've actually realized that Comp Sci isn't as unrelated to industry as I thought, but CS at RPI is worse than a joke. So I might actually want to stay in college specifically _for_ the curriculum.
not much beef but a valid point of view. of more interest is i read this straight after pg's heirachy of comments essay - hilarious! ;-)
>You can always go back to school...

Yeah, I've been thinking that. However, a lot of schools I've looked at are looking for Junior-year transfer students. If I take a break now, I'm basically looking at a full 4 years. Granted, I've only lost one, but it seems like a bit of a waste.

>Have you considered working for a startup in Europe? (broaden your worldview - old cliche: if the world is a book and you don't travel, you've only read a couple pages..)

Absolutely! I fully intend to spend some of my earlier years in Europe, and I've already visited Amsterdam twice. I'm actually in the process of talking to a small robotics company there, but how else do you make the connections to get the VISA and stuff?

>Read the "4-hour Work Week". It might give you some good ideas.

Will do!
Great article. Paul provides a useful illumination of the issue. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas operated at level DH6, often with devastating effect. He would formulate and state the argument he planned to refute with clarity, depth, accuracy, and precision. He often would make his opponent's case better than the opponent had done! I believe his secret was that he was humbly interested in the truth wherever it led. Given his lack of a pre-conceived agenda, he could take a proposition and explore its implications 20 plies deep, giving it the benefit of the doubt and making the best case for it at each step. Having fully plumbed an idea and 'grokked' it, then he could unwind the stack as it were, and state his conclusions in a powerfully convincing manner. Humility, detachment, an agenda-free willingness to listen and follow the truth where it leads, and strength in defending hard-won truth when found all seem to be good places to start.
I interact with a lot of small bands on the fringe of the music scene (death metal, thrash, black metal etc) some signed and some not. All but the very large are having a really tough time. While the internet gives them exposure it's not really giving them a revenue stream. Not everyone has the pulling power of Reznor.

A lot of these small bands can't see a future at the moment and whether you like this genre of music or not all the fringe genre's are suffering.

It's hard to see if things are worse in their world then ten years ago but according to them and their publishers things are indeed worse. I wish I knew the answer to this.
That's funny, I prefer igoogle
Ok, now I figured it out: the wheel still puts the focus on the position on the mouse pointer. I somehow expect it to just zoom into the middle - perhaps I am used to it from some other software. Now that I know it, I guess my user experience will be greatly improved ;-)
The catch 22 is that if everyone agreed and if everyone came here for one type of discussion, then it would not be diverse and interesting. If everyone here had shared the same points of view, things would get boring quick.

It is one of the first facts about teams... dynamic and diverse teams have a higher probability of success, I would think that could apply to a discussion based community.
The original title of Schopenhauer's “Art of Controversy” could be more accurately translated as “The Art of being always Right” (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten). The reason why he described those stratagems was to prove his point: that the goal of a controversy is not finding the truth. According to him, it was like a fight where you just want to win.

PG advocates for controversies that help find the truth. Thus he makes a difference between fallacies and real arguments. To Schopenhauer, real arguments are actually fallacies, because mere humans have other goals than the truth. Ironically, in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, PG followed Wittgenstein in that “most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language”. In a philosophical context, at least, this should lead to a similar conclusion as Schopenhauer's.

Now, whether the case of philosophy should be extended to the rest of controversies is an interesting question. My answer would be yes. I wonder what PG would say. The fun part is that, whatever he says, Schopenhauer will still be right (look: he doesn't care of the truth, he just wants to win the argument!). That's the whole fun of controversies about controversy...
You're obviously making a satirical criticism implying you aren't catching the satire in his/her post.

Meta-satire, well done sir/mam.
It's not enough!
If it's a logical argument, you can explain where he went wrong without psychoanalyzing him. Just point out the step in his reasoning that's fallacious, or the premise which is incorrect.

Most people don't take well to having their fallacious reasoning questioned, but they do appreciate having incorrect premises pointed out, particularly if it's done politely.

If you need to psychoanalyze the other person to explain the flaw in his ideas, then chances are you're arguing over opinions rather than facts or conclusions. Opinions, by definition, can't be right or wrong, so you're wasting your time.
For me its 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9. Don't think I have much of 10 and occasional 8 and I like it sometimes when my wife has 7. :D
Does YC accepts projects from any part of the world ? In fact I'm from Sri Lanka, story like this was always in my dreams
"It's just that less mean people have a tendency to move up the DH-hierarchy."

How did you intend for that to be parsed, (fewer (mean people)) or ((less mean) people)?
LOL! Actually I also felt the same... Anyway its the voice of Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WP.
I tend to agree with you, but I don't think there's any way to change it.

HN naturally attracts the sort of people who can't resist twiddling the knobs, making grand proposals to twiddle the knobs, putting up charts and graphs depicting the results of their knob-twiddling simulations, and (of course) complaining that the current setting of the knobs is responsible for all of the evils in the world today.

This is how many hacker personalities work, and you're not going to drive out this kind of meta-discussion without driving out many of the hackers, which would be bad.

I just try to ignore it to the extent that I can. Which is not very well -- it's kind of fun to watch people propose 1,001 variations on the moderation system. I'm particularly fond of the genre that involves turning those of us with hundreds of karma points into all-powerful demigods. I don't think that's a good idea at all, but, like the One Ring, it is hard to resist. :)
Google switches to black background for Earth Hour
' The author is a self-important dilettante.

is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag."'

This really illustrates to me how fuzzy the border between some of the hierarchy levels (particularly those that involve orthogonal aspects of the disagreed piece). If that statement was simply changed to "The author comes across as a self-important dilettante," I'd classify it as DH2. Even without the change, "is" can still be interpreted as "seems to probably be based on what I've just read," and thus that statement can still be placed in both DH2.

As dfranke said elsewhere, rather than being a true linear hierarchy, this is just hierarchies of various general classes of disagreement forced into a linear hierarchy, and thus it's possible for a statement to have aspects of one of DH0-DH1, DH2, and one of DH3-DH6 all at once. E.g.: "How can this idiot so adamantly argue for intelligent design in the quoted paragraph, when the presence of vestigial organs proves to the dullest that species descended from ancestors where the full functions of the organ were beneficial?"

Perhaps the answer is separate hierarchies for the various aspects, or fuzzy set theory.
Where does education and personal responsibility come into play? Just because one qualifies for a loan doesn't mean one should enter into a loan, no matter what the means of qualification. It doesn't really matter if one qualifies by some government mandate or by the lender's willingness to accept more risk, responsibility still lies with the borrower to honestly analyze whether or not they will be able to make good. In my mind, the real failure lies with our nation's inability to educate it's citizens on how to manage their own finances effectively.
Entrepreneurial investors
Winning is only a problem if your definition of it is fucked up. Winning an argument means you have found or are closer to a particular truth.

The poisoning of various phrases and words leads to you focus on the emotions that are evoked rather than the definition.

This is why I dislike arguing about politics or anything else. No one wants to really argue (where the argument is a logical and reasoned debate), they want agreement or acknowledgment that their beliefs are okay.
Virtual reality game relieves burn victims' pain
http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
I didn't know much about this stuff either here are some websites I found that were helpful in getting me started.

http://www.sparkfun.com has a lot of cool electronics type stuff to learn with.
http://www.batchpcb.com to manufacture custom circuit board designs for cheap (2.50 per/sq in). If you want to design something simple FreePCB is super easy to learn http://www.freepcb.com/

YouTube has a lot of videos on how to solder if that interests you.

For FPGAs http://www.fpga4fun.com/ and http://www.knjn.com/

Other cool hardware related sites...
http://www.curiousinventor.com/
http://www.gumstix.com/
http://www.cmucam.org/
http://www.electronics123.com/
This is difficult to read because there are too many words per line.
More:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrpain/
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=36442
To the moderator who fixed the headline, s..l.o.w.n.e.s.s was a visual pun. RubyGems displays dots during gem updates while you wait. Anyhow, it wasn't intended as a cheap ploy for attention.

edit: cool, thanks!
It was a reasonable assumption to assume that selling books online was unviable. It was enevitable that the cost, speed and quantity of data online would exceed all printed books. However, quality and conciseness hasn't been exceeded in the general case. (Encyclopedias are a debatable exception.)

The reason may be a case of game theory. If I cannot immediately find the information online then my choices are to search harder, find an expert, derive the answer myself or buy a book. Of course, when anyone takes the latter option, it discourages said information from becoming freely available in the near future in its entirity.
Very nice post, thank you!

Here's something to think about. According to Aristotle's Rhetoric, a person making a point to an audience has three things to offer:

-- Ethos -- who they are and why they speak with authority.
-- Pathos -- empathy with the audience.
-- Logos -- the substance of the argument.

So, an opponent can try to undermine any of these three.

Undermining a person's ethos can be nasty "yo' momma" style language, or it can be more sophisticated. If the person's argument relies on their ethos, however, it may be legitimate. For example, when Nobel laureate William Schockley argues for racial eugenics on the strength of his physics background, it's legitimate to say "Professor, your expertise is in physics, not genetics." This is helpful with anyone who says, effectively, "I'm a bigshot so what I say must be true."

Undermining pathos can also be helpful. For example, "thus-and-such software marketer doesn't want to help you and me, she wants to sell more software licenses for her company. Do not blindly accept her claims that her product is better."

Of course, undermining the logos -- the substance of the argument -- is a very effective way to disagree.

But, my point is, undermining a speaker's pathos and ethos are also legitimate, especially when their argument critically depends on those aspects of their rhetoric.
There are some constraints that consistently encourage creativity, and others that do not. Someone should come up with a list of examples of constraints and look for patterns. I briefly mentioned this on my blog a while back:

"The rich and variegated use of Twitter seems to be a case of technological constraints forcing creativity. One can't help but wonder, "At one point does less become more?" When adding new features we worry about increased cognitive load and reduced usability; should we worry about damping creativity as well? And is it possible to purposely restrict functionality to encourage ingenuity?"
I think we have reached the point in the patent wars where nobody cares what the actual patents are. Whenever I hear that a patent has been invalidated, I just reflexively smile.

This is surely an irrational overreaction, but it's not as if the patent system hasn't been asking for it. If the patent bar wants me to bother reading the things they need to clean out the spam, the trolls, and the nonsense.
Well, my theory is that the problems are caused by the fact that Vista uses 3D acceleration for its Aero Glass UI. Graphics drivers almost never crash in 2D mode in my experience, on both WinXP and Linux. 3D mode tends to be much less robust. Having programmed 3D graphics hardware on the "down to the metal" level in game consoles, I'm not that surprised. GPUs hare hugely complex and tend to have a significant amount of hardware bugs or quirks that can make the developer's life really hard.

By the way, I don't use Vista on any of my systems (yet) so I'm just assuming that the reports of instability are accurate.
Research finds "runner's high" is real
Can anyone confirm this is true? I find it surprising that Linux is widely used for production-type work.

What programs are used? I'm a bit skeptical when the author doesn't mention any specifics.

EDIT: Assortment of linux film production applications available, apparently: http://www.linuxmovies.org/software.html
Well I think its impossible to make a statement like this and not lose points because of the sheer number of people who strongly strongly disagree with the statement (and the fact that it isn't connected to support directly, in the same post, and people dont always read downward in the thread) -- Also there seems to be this peer pressure to downmod when something looks disagreeable.
I agree in a way; the Ask YC News threads can be repetitive and annoying.

But, some of the best contributions, from the view point of myself, have been Ask YC News posts. When an individual challenges me to critically think about a topic, I generally learn a lot - it is where I gain the most benefit from this website (forced thinking). So in a way the Ask YC News posts are an annoying aspect about this website, and in another way they are the best thing about this website. I would hate to think that an individual would be censored simply because they are not an experienced member of this community, especially when their insight is particularly valuable.
I could probably list off $15,000 of Electrical Engineering course text books, but for getting into "hardware type projects" they really won't get you very far. You'll learn far more (and far more quickly) by finding more hacker oriented resources that will bootstrap you with absolutely necessary information and skip the rest.

# Introductions #

To begin with, Sparkfun[1] has a bunch of tutorials, including a great introduction to embedded electronics.[2] This encompasses much of what you'll need for basic hardware projects.

As someone with a software background, the Arduino[2] is a great platform to start playing around with hardware. It acts as something of a bridge between software and hardware hacking by allowing you to program a micro-controller in a (relatively) high level language, and abstracting away a lot of the messy hardware details. This not only lets you start getting simple things done quickly, but also allows you to easily interface with virtually any other hardware modules you can come up with so you can push the boundaries of your knowledge. By making experimentation cheap, it strongly encourages the best types of exploratory learning.

# Projects #

Beyond the project tutorials listed on Sparkfun, OpenCircuits[3] is a great resource for more project ideas.
Hack a Day[4] is often a good resource for inspiration, and the venerable Make[5] seems to always have something interesting.

# Sourcing Parts #

Sparkfun[1] is a terrific online electronic components store. It is extremely hacker friendly, having been founded to serve preciecesly that group. For some items the prices may be slightly higher than at Digikey[5], but this is more than made up by the fact that they have sorted through the bewildering number of seemingly-identical components available.

If you know exactly what you need, and especially if you can't find it through Sparkfun, Digikey is your friend. They have everything. And its uncle. The site is aimed at commercial designers who know what they're doing, so navigating the site isn't easy. If you're browsing without a specific component in mind, Digikey isn't the right place, but Octopart[7] might be. Its a search engine for electronic components that checks availability and compares prices of different retailers and also has some features to organize project shopping lists.

When buying electrical components, always buy plenty extra. You will burn things out. Five times in a row. Unit costs are cheap enough that its worth having lots of spares on hand.

As others have mentioned, this is a very broad topic. If you give us more details on what it is you're looking to learn, we'll probably be able to give more useful answers.

Good luck!

[1]: http://www.sparkfun.com - Well organized, hacker friendly

[2]: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/hdr.php?p=tutorials#BEE

[3]: http://www.opencircuits.com

[4]: http://www.hackaday.com/

[5]: http://www.makezine.com

[6]: http://digikey.com - Huge selection. Great if you know what you want.

[7]: http://octopart.com/ - Electronic Component search engine
I've always wondered about this. I think many automatically assume (falsely) that most "popular" companies buy or make custom fonts for their logos. I'm happy to realize that this isn't the case.
It's not you, it's your books
Whats amazing is that before the internet you would have never even considered questions like this so early and immediately in the life cycle of a business.
a lot of aged web companies seem moribund. You could say the same thing about geocities. To tweak PGs question a bit, can you think of any sites that got massively popular and didn't have the opportunity to make a ton of money?
Whatever it is, it probably was done by http://www.wilsonminer.com , send him an email
I didn't mean studying his motivations so much as reconstructing his chain of reasoning all the way back to the faulty step.
00 20 29 03 * /sbin/poweroff
You may want to get started by jumping into the BasicStamp world. The advantage is that it is programmable, so it's be straightforward for you to make it "do stuff".

Get it with the development board and you can make LEDs blink, drive a LCD panel, etc. Grab a high-level book on robotics and bam! it'll quickly click how all this fits together.

It's high-level way to start, but a great way to dive into the hardware world without worrying too much about hardcore hardware stuff. (Which, as a fellow software hacker, is pretty boring! I want stuff I can code!)
This is superb; thank you for taking your time to write a meaningful post that is not only applicable to the internet, but normal life!
How Hampus Söderström created an online community around the martial arts game Toribash
Some thoughts. I often wonder what is Paul Graham currently doing, what captures his interest at the moment. I have developed a "social consequences" approach to both the planning and observation of human interactions -and I think Paul does as well, in his own way. [So does Clay Shirky too.]

Recently we've seen comments and motions here that, on hindsight, explain the new article: Paul is working on keeping this forum healthy, creative, useful, attractive, alive. Thanks man, I am learning.
EKA - The world’s fastest privately funded supercomputer