Decision-making in the lane (0:00 to 8:00)

I have a question:

You're in the laning phase. You picked a hero that has a ranged attack and the capacity to harass for an extended period of time provided that you don't get doubled and/or hit with a tower. If given the opportunity to drive the lane opponent away from farm, is it OK to forego some of your farm to do it? The idea would be that you take away more farm from them than you are losing out on yourself. I am not referring to a situation in which you are the hard carry.

An example of this would be Lina or Tinker against a melee mid hero that decides that he wants to try rushing an item and farm.

In the example of yours, as long as you have good map awareness and have an idea of where your enemies are then go for it. Really depends on how much regen the enemy mid has, if he has a lot of regen then it's better to harass ever so often. Make sure the enemy mid is constantly using regen and when regen is low, continue to harass. If they stay, there's a chance to kill him or force him back to base.

Depends on what lane, what hero you're playing and who you're playing against. There are a set of rules though and for mid, I tend to follow these: Farm > Deny => Harass until I'm level 6 and what I'll do will depend on what hero I'm playing.

Pretty much this ^

The best way to shut Heroes down is to Kill them, if you can't Kill them, it's probably not worth it to slow down your own Farm.