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.

Bonus points for using Drupal instead of Wordpress.

You might prefer to do this exercise using a webhost like Slicehost. They'll hand you a VPS for $20 a month. The advantage here is that, when you're done, you'll have a public website instead of just a local PC that nobody can visit.

Read up on basic security and set up a firewall on your web server. Read up on DNS and get that working. Get a mail provider, like gmail, and wire up your new domain's email.

This exercise is actually really easy, nowadays. But it's a start. It will teach you a bunch of fundamentals, like how to use Google to solve all your problems ;). You will learn how much you enjoy tinkering with web technologies. And, for the purposes of many, many profitable online businesses, you'll be almost done. :)

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When it comes to actually learning programming: Try Ruby or Python. Although I still never find time to use it, I will once again plug Hackety Hack at hacketyhack.net. Consider learning Rails by using Heroku: http://heroku.com/ .

If you want to impress folks around here with your earnestness, read SICP. Just Google "SICP". You can even find free online lectures from the MIT class that SICP is for. If you read it, you'll know Lisp, and you'll be well launched on your career of bluffing your way through computer science. As an economist, you might be enough of a math guy that you'll fall in love with Lisp. It does happen.

Oh, and two key words: emacs. git. Buy and read Learning emacs; it's worth it. And learn about version control -- I do recommend git, but it's still kind of confusing to learn, despite the best efforts of the Peepcode screencast guy and Randal Schwartz. You may find better intro material for Subversion: google for "svn book".

1 - Find something you want to build

2 - Learn everything you need along the way

3 - ???? <!-- Lots of hard work -->

4 - Profit

I built a pop-up blocker and privacy suite this way (as a single founder) and earned more than I was making at my day job, so I eventually quit.

I see a lot of "things you should know" in other posts, but in my experience, they won't be interesting until you need them. You'll have to go step-by-step, though. I'd probably start with HTML and work my way out if you're interested in web apps.

# 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

In Russia, sure. But the Pushkin example is completely atypical of our society. When was the last time you heard Pushkin mentioned among non-Russian non-specialists?

The obscurity of Pushkin is actually the point in this case. If she had said "He hadn't even heard of Shakespeare!" the implication would have been "He's a lout", which is quite different. "He hadn't even heard of Pushkin" is more along the lines of, "He doesn't pass the minimum test for my exacting, boutique tastes".

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.

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.

On the other hand, if some elephants managed to use operant conditioning (and a special prosthetic, like a big drum) to teach a human how to subsonically tell another elephant ten miles away that the herd is gathering near the water hole, that human would be the star of the elephant world. The elephants would gather round to marvel at the human's astonishing front feet -- they aren't really very strong, but they can pick things up with their toes, almost as if they were using a trunk!

Not sure if it's significantly different from DH6, but Karl Popper's style of debate might be termed DH7.

It's similar to DH6, but first you patch up the opponent's arguments to make the best possible case. Then you find the central point in that case, even if the author doesn't explicitly state it. It's what he really meant to say and might indeed have said if he was on good form. (If there's a stronger or more general version of that point you might select that instead.)

And _then_ you carefully demolish it.