I believe that Stallman is going to be Stallman. He made an incredible contribution to society, but what the free software movement needs with regards to public awareness is a Neil Degrasse Tyson / Temple Grandin / Steve Irwin.
engineering school environments can be very toxic. I think that for the most part it's possible to cover their amount of content in 4 standard years, but there needs to be changes in the structure of constant bewilderment and test taking
> engineering school environments can be very toxic
I still have very intense school-related nightmares from time to time, even though I'm now in my mid-30s. I decided to drop-out in my last year of CS school, but before that almost any joy of attending my school lectures or studying for its exams had been killed off inside of me (luckily enough for me I discovered PHP and Python during my student years in my free time, which gave me back the joy of building and discovering things).
If you're interested on a radical new take on engineering education, take a look at Olin College of Engineering. It's not perfect, but it's a move in the right direction -- Olin has traded strict competition for teamwork, tests and exams for project-based learning, and has gone a long way towards removing the stress associated with many other engineering schools. It's a sort of institutional petri dish, and I'm curious to see how many of the principles put in place at this smaller institution are applied in more common settings.
We all have our sore spots, and one can't always stop feeling something simply by deciding one shouldn't. So that expectation might be too high. One can, though, be aware of them and stop oneself from responding reflexively when they come up. (Or, more easily, edit the defensiveness out of one's comments after writing them.)
The quantity and range of posts to HN—plus the fact that there's one big site/community and not a bunch of little siloed ones—guarantee that whatever buttons you have will eventually get pushed here, just like any exposed spot will eventually get wet in a rainstorm. This isn't personal; it's a statistical process. But we're not hard-wired to experience statistical processes, so unless one is careful, it feels like one is dealing with a person—usually an annoying adversary with demonic powers to drive one crazy. I think this is why people often post comments personifying "HN". We each have a different imaginary arch-enemy in our heads.
I mention this in the hope that it might be helpful to anyone else who recognizes the pattern. In our case, exposure to it is an occupational hazard, so we've had little choice but to learn about it.
