skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a lot of useful criticism of arguments that falls outside this hierarchy. You can attack an argument without ever disagreeing with it, such as by challenging its interestingness or applicability or its relevance to the rest of the discussion. Where does this comment fall in the hierarchy?

I think what's really going on here is that the hierarchy isn't actually a hierarchy. In a proper hierarchy, each level should necessarily entail the previous. Here DH1 entails DH0 (I call DH0 "ordinary ad hominem" and DH1 "circumstantial ad hominem") and DH6 entails DH5 entails DH4 entails DH3. But DH2 has nothing to do with any of the others, and DH3 has nothing to do with any of the previous.
They should teach these skills at school, no later than right after kindergarten and with no less stress than any other subject. I'm convinced that's amongst the most important things that could be done to make the world a better place.
I'm very proud of our UI, http://prezentit.com/tryit
Another way out is to simply ignore poor arguments and spend one's scarce time responding to the intelligent ones instead.

(Admittedly, this is not always possible or desirable.)
That's actually a very interesting thought. It might be hard to implement in a graphically pleasing manner though.
In the context/situation, talking about disagreement, I think a little conflict/drama is necessary to demonstrate how a person reacts and reveal a little more about who he/she is.

I like the quote because it reminds me that even the most logical people may default to reacting non-logically/emotionally in a stressful situation (where they may feel their ego is threatened e.g. have to "fight" to protect themselves)
I have a few Nvidia cards that reliably crash linux even though (or perhaps because) I use their official precompiled binary drivers. I've tried multiple cards, multiple mainboards, multiple distros and multiple kernels.

Just one of those things. Shrug, shudder, and use ATI.
I'm a fan of the Amarok UX.
One thing that isn't mentioned in this essay is an appreciation of the concept of having a "preponderance of evidence." In U.S. law, for example, this concept is introduced directly through the burden of proof hierarchy (terms like reasonable suspicion, clear and convincing evidence, reasonable doubt, etc.).

While only DH4-DH6 can strictly prove an argument wrong, there are many, many situations in which it is infeasible to unilaterally determine "truth." In these cases, DH1-DH3 can be used to determine the probability of a statement being true.

Take ad hominem. Sure it's a weak form of argumentation, but it is reasonable to exercise a certain amount of skepticism based on the nature of the speaker. For example, the New York Post tends to be a more conservative newspaper, while the New York Times tends to be more liberal. Obviously, neither of these facts can definitively prove or disprove a statement, but they can inform an analysis of these papers' claims.

If I'm making a counter-argument I care about, I try to take a "defense-in-depth" approach and attack the original statement at all levels that are useful and try to establish credibility in all the ways I can. I don't think arguing well maps directly to using a higher form of rhetoric. At the end of the day, it depends on your audience. Just ask Karl Rove and James Carville. ;)
Redeye VC: I Don't Know...
How To Set Up Internet Access Control And Internet Filtering With SafeSquid Proxy Server
More and more I'm starting to believe that this is the best approach. It was a wise person who said never to argue with fools because, from a distance, you can't tell who's who.
10 resumes a day, no takers
Nursing: the recession-proof job market
I say don't use them at all. If your users are giving you fake emails then they don't really care too much about your service and are just testing it out, so why not let them test and play around and minimize resistance, maybe they will like it and end up adding a real email address or even subscribing.
Massachusetts has the Insurance Partnership program which reimburses a part of the insurance premium of your business and yourself. Additionally, there's another program called the Commonwealth Connector that gives anybody 26 and under the ability to purchase good health insurance from a major carrier for about $150/mo regardless of income. Finally, Commonwealth Care is a program that will pay between a portion to the full amount of the costs of one's health insurance of residents who make 30,000 dollars a year and less.
To me UX is more important than UI, so I vote for Google Reader
u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!
I think you're on to something here. If the debates weren't structured (e.g. on a single site) but distributed across blogs.

Something that can automatically categorize the blogosphere discussion - e.g. who's agreeing/who's disagreeing (what's the median level of agreement/disagreement). I'd like it for the sole feature of finding/filtering out the (sometimes useless) echo-chamber opinions - to surface the divergent disagreements/opinions

User-originated voting is good but combining it with intelligent algorithmic appraisal (what they are voting by what they are saying) might be interesting
That's irrelevant. Even if that was 100%, it would be worth the 'risk'. Not ever living romance is sadder than certainty of pain.
Just about any of the social networks that were "the next big thing" except for Facebook and Myspace. Friendster was the first social network I joined, was massively popular, and now seems pretty moribund.
The client libs handle everything for you if you use fbml, since every request is proxied by facebook and has its own signature. If you use an iframe, like the Moods app and many other popular apps, requests go directly to your server, so you have to explicity include and validate a signature for each request.

It's still not terribly difficult, but most facebook app devs are trying to churn out apps and features so fast that there's no time for this kind of detail.
"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is." Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize laureate
Nothing on the web really satisfies me interface-wise. Some Flash apps come close, but they break browser keyboard shortcuts. So, desktop apps: foobar2000, uTorrent, Directory Opus, Thunderbird. Eclipse has a brilliant drag-and-split arrange, though I wish it was Emacs everywhere else. And Dropbox's desktop integration (no UI) is great.
Funny. :D
The way I read it, the PG essay was meant less as a statement about the absolute nature of reality and more as an attempt to get people to suck less. Even if Aristotle came up with some superset of these ideas 2400 years ago, I think there is still some value here.
Next time you go to the loo, bring your locked laptop with you
The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than the writer. The lowest form of these is to disagree with the author's tone.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123400
What does consciousness have to do with it? Eventually there will be machines that are capable of passing the Turing test or something similar. The singularity is what happens next.

``To the question, "Will there ever be a computer as smart as a human?" I think the correct answer is, "Well, yes... very briefly."'' - Vernor Vinge
This is liking asking in a prison how many people have nice cars.
So UI is 'user interface', but what is UX?
One A Day
I have never heard of any such thing, and neither has Google. I suspect you are very confused. Can you give an example of an "undefinable formal system" and say (1) how it satisfies the definition of "formal system" and (2) the sense in which it is "undefinable"?
argh, sorry about the double post. the buxfer news.yc comment submit doesn't clear itself when it submits sucessfully.

can someone with delete privs please kill the parent? thanks!
Uh, define "win". And stop using sneer quotes like that. If you want to say it's an alleged win then say so.
I can agree with that, both as a consumer and a developer. Of the 3 consoles Xbox is the easiest/cheapest to develop for and the value of Xbox Live is certainly not to be overlooked.
What's so great about it?
Cisco signals trouble ahead
Each level (DH0,1,2,etc.) could include a variety of forms of disagreement, instead of just one. The resulting chart would become a rough guide to their relative strengths: move "up" the chart for better forms, and "down" for the bad ones (eliminate the one-to-one relationship between "DH-level" and "Form of Disagreement").

It would become more comprehensive, but also harder to present in a simple, compelling, immediately understandable way. Not sure if it'd be worth it.
"At the end of the day, it depends on your audience. Just ask Karl Rove and James Carville. ;)"

I believe their area of expertise is propaganda, not argument.

(But I suppose both could be a form of rhetoric.)
I don't get it. Why would Windows name use a known network's name as its SSID?
I considered making DH-1 be physical violence...
Startup idea!

Make it so you can tag arbitrary pages from within your browser, and other people visiting the page can see the tags if they wish. Imagine the fun of doing this with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, in addition to blogs and discussion forums, etc. etc.
Favorite Hacker/Startup Food/Diet (What do you guys eat)
Come on guys what else do we eat besides Hotpockets and Mountain Dew, I like Ramen and Vault Soda as well Coffee Bean covered in Chocolate. How about you????
At first glance it looks nice, but it doesn't work in Safari :-/
What's the hierarchy level for failed attempts at humor?
Not being professional programmers probably helped them. I joined YC after working first as a "Software Engineer", then in a managerial position in a software firm.

I had to unlearn a lot of processes and "best practices" to get to the pace a startup requires. They started at the right pace.
Many times people will enter a passionate debate if they feel their lifestyle or livelihood is at stake. It's the same reason news media have long focused on crime, sex, and scandal - BAD THINGS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!

But in forming an actual dialogue, such all-or-nothing viewpoints make people defensive. The behavior of monopolies that have been obsoleted by technology is little different from that of the Luddites - they try to stop the change, even when it's irrational to try. "Irrational self-interest" is a pretty neat term to sum it up.

"You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" strikes keenly and precisely at the employed, because it primarily lists benefits of startup life, presenting an unbalanced picture. The title certainly doesn't help matters. That PG's arguments are pretty strong, and he has some established weight in online communities, makes him hard to dismiss out of hand, which further increases the tension.

Internet discussion tends to stay low on the hierarchy because the people replying are mostly stuck in defensive mode. Pragmatic, nuanced thinking doesn't seem to come naturally to humans.
These lists of rhetorical techniques are not quite the same thing. They're tactics. What I was trying to figure out are the categories of tactics.
I thought the essay was quite good. I wasn't trying to say that I thought pg was being redundant.

My point was merely that there has been plenty already written on the subjects of rhetoric and logic as ways of expressing ideas, and that the topic isn't as neglected as you seemed to believe in the post I responded to. If you're looking for more resources on the topic, they're out there.
He's right. This is a weak form of disagreement. I wasn't trying to disagree convincingly, just to discourage people from using all caps on News.YC.
Honestly I think you'd have to move his DH0 to DH-1 and then put flamebaiting as DH0. The straight up 'u r a fag!!!1' insults require much less effort than flamebait.

Although really, flamebaiting is just a more subtle way to call someone (or their idea) retarded, so maybe it's just a special (more eloquent) case of DH0.
Aside from what appears to be an intentionally combative post, it's interesting that this illustrates how difficult it can be to avoid the trap of responding to the tone of a post, especially if you read the post you're responding to as impolite.

If anything, this illustrates the point from the current essay that it's easy to fall into the trap of responding to the tenor of an argument instead of the substance unless you pay careful attention. I expect we've all been guilty of this at one time or another.

You may or may not have meant it way, but thanks for the observation.

Edited to add: I hadn't seen pg's response when I posted this. Perhaps the observation is indeed superseded by the fact that pg's post wasn't intended as a refutation.
Perhaps you should ask Shawn Fanning, or the inventors of ReplayTV, or the Youtube folks why someone who cares about "startups and hacking" might want to pay very, very close attention to the evolving strategic and legal positions of the music and movie industries.
An Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator
I'm not really looking forward to seeing this hierarchy applied as a meme on news.yc.

(DH3 ftw!)

Edit: Irony.
Just so we have some variety on the DH's:

DH1: Hmm... Same author of the article and of the comment... :)

Honestly though, I don't think you should be too insulted. Everyone has moments when perhaps they aren't particularly prime to good comments, although I suppose it would be a bit better had pg said something along the lines of, "Support that instead of just saying it" or asked for an actual discussion instead of what seemed like a loud (from the caps) one-line outburst.
I personally enjoy gmails ui. I like linkedin's as well.

Publictivity looks pretty freaking sweet... can I get access?
On a related note, I have a friend who tried to argue for Ruby on Rails in his workplace and one of the Perl guys there literally said "Whatever dude, frameworks are for fags." He was dead serious.

I mean, where do you go from there?
I will worry about it once I am done with school ;) I see nothing wrong with having a girlfriend but I don't feel alarmed not to have one at the moment.
Monster.com.
I like cooking so for me its a way to relax and get my mind off. but during the day I only drink coffee. I don't eat lunch or breakfast
It might have been a little obvious, but it was still funny.
LOL. Yeah, he did peace out and become an independent contractor shortly thereafter.
Internet now up to 1.5% of U.S. electricity
Hong Kong Tycoon May Boost Facebook Stake $100 million or more
A Simulation of Kernels
See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149196.
Geoffrey Grosenbach of the Ruby on Rails podcast interviewed this author, John Medina, in the following two podcasts:

http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-medi...

http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-medi...
No, of course not. Who has the time?
Services like Loopt turn cellphones into "friend radars"
Another way to not lose your time is to stop posting in troll infested comunities; I don't post on Digg anymore for that and I am now slowly fading out of Reddit for the same reason.

The problem on those sites is that their is not only poor comments but also tons of users who upmod them.
BECAUSE!
Confessions of Workaholics
Well, the main problem with this essay is that sometimes mocking someone's argument is the best way to disagree with it. The parody of PG's last essay on having a boss was highly effective at this: http://www.jsequeira.com/blog/2008/03/24.html

Is this a lower form of disagreement than DH6? Most definitely, however, the English language has a rich tradition of satire and mockery going back at least as far as Jonathan Swift.
It was pretty nub. You forgot the 1's mixed in!!!1!111
Right, but many applications have access to information in your profile (at least, that's what it says every time you add an application). Couldn't such vulnerabilities feasibly lead to more serious problems in Facebook itself?
It's depressing to read things like "Nope. Life as a computer science major in college and an overall geek leaves very little time."

I'm sure you play videogames, read/post on non-industry forums or do SOMETHING not work related. Socializing with women will help you find "the right one" in the long run, and will keep you from being taken advantage of once you "make it."

Personally, I broke up with my girlfriend of three years before moving to SF, independent of deciding to start YC. Overall, not having to "keep up" has definitely helped me.

I've been single throughout the nosebleed "grind-and-build-and-demo" three month YC cycle, but I regularly went out in SF and even had some flings that were fun but shallow distractions.

I've recently started dating an amazing woman who's completing her studies while working in Los Angeles; she's at least as busy as I am and we're "dating" in whatever capacity is possible. Although we're both ridiculously busy we respect our space/priorities, and it's fun and affirmative.

To each his/her own I suppose.
youre from south florida too?!? drop me an email jason [at] publictivity.com .
Web applications, especially amateurish ones, are insecure. I'm sure there are bigger sploits in FB itself.
People have always feared the world will end (doomsday!) because it's the only alternative to their guaranteed and insignificant personal demise.

It's a shame that this cowardice stands in the way of science.
It's kind of strange that Loopt seems to only be on closed, non-GSM networks. Shouldn't it be easier to reach out to the more open devices?
Nice article, and timely. But I believe your senators' salary example is technically a genetic fallacy, not ad hominem. Could be wrong - it's happened before ;-)
I pasted from PG's article, but yeah, there should be some 1's.
I got it... I thought about refuting you with a higher order argument but couldn't figure out how. Would upvote you, but we all know how that goes.
flickr is nice. Got me into whole social media thing. Gmail is also very nice.
I swear that I remember a quote from Greenspan saying that low interest rates would cause a housing bubble but I can't find it anymore. Anyone have any idea what I am thinking of?
For sure FF is a work around, but what is this bankable state you mention? IM has been around for ages, and I still have friends spread across AIM and MSN and what have you.

Sure, blog noise is obnoxious; however, I think FF has some mass market appeal since social networks seem to be getting more and more specialized. It is unlikely one dominant network will emerge.
Continuations Versus Page-Centric Programming
Continuations to Program Web Servers
Tangent: we could cut a ton of electricity use if people would just wear heavy clothes when indoors in the winter time.
It's a relevant and significant question. The west's views on romance are not the norm. For example, the Greeks considered the best relationships to be between men, since men were thought to be the most rational. This is similar in Islamic cultures too.

While I don't have a specific cite I can show you to back up the claims about the Greeks, it is pretty evident if you've read Plato and Aristotle. As for Muslims, this is pretty clear if you just look at how they treat women.

Frankly, I'm disappointed that there is so much knee jerk voting going on here. On the other hand, it is interesting that xLnt has really hit a nerve.
I don't think you are questioning that romance can cause more intense and overwhelming feelings than the social and intellectual pleasure of close bonds and mutual understanding, right?

It's quite easy to explain, in evolutionary terms, why it 'should' be like that. But I don't think this is the "should" that you are asking about. And the problem is, there are no other "should"s, no other "why"s.

In asking for a transcendent "why", you are negating the intrinsic "legitimacy" of our most basic instincts. You emphasize the "feel" in "feel happy" as if there was anything to happiness beyond the feeling of it.

Trying to submit instincts to reason doesn't make any more sense to me than trying to submit axioms to inference rules.

You may argue romance is kinda obsolescent now that culture is overriding genetics as the main driver of adaptation. But by the same radically disembodied reasoning, you shouldn't take romantic pain so seriously.

We just are what we are. Play to win; life is too short for anything else.
Carnival of Biz Dev: Hackers Helping Other Hackers
We all have our companies, startups, projects,etc. List what you're upto and others will comment below if there are some synergies or ways their startup can help. Figured this might be a good way for us to help each other. Think of it the same way all the other YC startups help each other.
You are misunderstanding the purpose of FriendFeed.

FriendFeed provides an easy way to share and discuss things with friends. It's not a work-around for anything.

Of course only time will reveal how "mass market" sharing is, but obviously I think it has a lot of potential :)
It's an L. XLNT. Abbreviation of excellent.

I don't mind the voting. It's useful information to find out that I hit a nerve.
A meme? How about a feature? I want to be able to rate things by DH level.
Why Bebo Doesn't Owe Musicians Anything
Done. http://mattmaroon.com/?p=342
See the link I just posted. He is either ignorant of the economics of the music industry, or is willfully ignoring them to make a fallacious argument. I'd assume the latter.
Interesting use of semicolons on that. :)
If you don't know, you have to keep trying.

If I had to convince you, I'd say that:

For many millions of years, selecting mates and being selected was much of what being animal/human was all about.

Right now, with the increasing sophistication of our brains, individual and collective, the game has diversified a lot. You can satisfy/sublimate your social and sexual instincts in other ways.

But all this is relatively recent, and our genetically conditioned pulsions haven't yet evolved to match the new conditions.

So the old thing still feels pretty damn good!
The wordpress design is great, lots of useful features and easy to use. But the voice of that guy in the screencast sounds like a sex phone operator or something, it was a bit freaky.
I've thought of doing that. Maybe. But not all comments disagree, and frankly I wouldn't want to do anything that increased the proportion that do.
Does HN have conflicting interests?
A) HN users want in depth, rational discussion.

B) HN users want a pro startup environment.

B means users will favor optimism and discourage anything cynical. A sometimes requires what may look like cynicism.

These two interests are therefore in conflict and will cause irrational behavior:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148830

xLnt has raised a valid issue, but most went with a knee jerk response. I am surprised that this happened, especially since pg's article is on the front page.

So the question: what is HN essentially about, startups or discourse?

This is an important issue. If it is not dealt with, the community will default with B and discourage the users who come here for A. However, HN's lasting value lies in a community that can converse well with each other. Otherwise, I fear HN will become a guru culture and lose the ability to buck the system.

In short, it will no longer be worthy of the name Hacker News.
Yes, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be disappointed with the voting.
You expected more of YC? :)