Human After All IMHO is probably the worst Daft Punk album Bangalter and Homem-Christo put together. Technologic is one of, if not the worst song on the entire album.
What about Fluxbuntu? I thought that distro's goal was to be lightweight and put little demand on system resources? In the article he mentions the distro, but instead draws a comparison between Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu. What?
Every time someone acts like a troll, we don't need to read through someone's witty retort in response. He's trolling, he knows it, we all know it, and he's downmodded to oblivion for it. That's enough.
Just going from posts in hn would give me the impression that usage of Firefox is quite common. What's giving you an impression to the contrary?
And what would having had used Greasemonkey already or not have to do with adoption of this script? If the script is useful, users would use the the script and whatever Firefox addons it required regardless.
Yeah, seeing "follow me on twitter here" has started to get annoying.
Still, I'm pretty dubious of the notion of "finding your own hacks". I mean just look at written english in most articles, they aren't comprised of just a list of sanitized opinions and facts. They're full of prestigious jargon, funny quips to pull the audience to pull the audience to the readers side or at least entertain (the same goal?), etc, etc; as far as I'm concerned, just more "cognitive hacks".
Yuck. Yes, I must really resist the temptation to comment after all nighters. Manipulation == psychopathy, is a bit much.
I too assert however that manipulating the audience in spite of appealing to reason is unethical, and that some sort of notion that we should practice manipulation so as to strengthen ourselves to it is rubbish, if we consider manipulation to be unethical in the first place. Hence, if it's beneath us, even if using manipulation made us better at persuasion through appeals to ethos and pathos, or at least better apt at detecting and exposing manipulation, what what would be the point after having compromised our own values in the first place?
But now you are putting your own ethics on the concept of manipulation
No kidding. That's the whole point of the parent post in the first place isn't it? He's asserting that manipulation, is self evidently wrong, that there is no justification to resort to manipulative tactics over argument through reason.
Here's a counter example for you: If we taught that murder is wrong, we'll never use it and we are less able to defend against it... etc. That's actually, exactly how most people are brought up and for good reason. We generally consider murder to be wrong.
Let me tell you something, the world seems to be raising more individuals comfortable with implementing these sort of manipulative tactics, "appealing to the audience" as it were. As far as I can tell, what this article promotes is a sure fire way to encourage your child to grow up into being a manipulating psychopath; nothing could be further from fostering talent for argument through reason.
I consider humor here to be mostly unwanted noise. Most of the time IMHO, commentators' attempts at witticism reduce to just groping around for self esteem boosts and/or goading one another into flamewars. Having been at /. for many years, I've really come to appreciate and miss the (+X, Funny) header, it saved me a lot of time when screening comments. I came to hackernews for knowledge, not users' forced online group therapy sessions.
I think you're absolutely right about rglullis's methods here, they strike me as pretty slimy. I also find the whole To those who have objections to the choices: I did a copy-and-paste of PG's poll when he was deciding whether or not to ban valleywag. just a weak grab at legitimizing his behavior through canonizing something pg did for a fringe case. All in all, rglullis is plainly taking this all very personally and trying to rationalize his reaction.
As for the "jerk" aside, well, it goes either way. You can either say something politely, knowing that most people who disagree with you will probably ignore you. Or you can say something more heavy that will get their attention, but then you'll have to deal with character assassination tactics like marginalizing you as a extremist or a jerk, etc. Either way you're kinda screwed.
Since when has masterbation been a considered a bad thing?
In all honesty, I speculate nearly all 'bad' and 'good' goals undertaken by individuals are for at some level their own gratification, satisfaction, medication, pleasure, whatever the semantic of choice.
There isn't anything wrong with that. From deliberately catching a glance of a beautiful woman across the street to tirelessly working at finding a way to end world hunger, it's done at some level for your own satisfaction. It's what drives the world.
To those who feel so threatened by the idea of associating whatever endeavor with pleasure as a motivation, calm down. It's part of what makes us human. It certainly doesn't strip an accomplishment of it's value.
Terrible.