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Why precisely is this Hacker News material?
by reeses 16y ago
Why precisely is this Hacker News material?
- ekoontz 16y agoIt's late Saturday night in California? :)
- reeses 16y agoHah, you had the same idea I did about five minutes after I posted my comment. It's quiet...almost too quiet... :-)
- SamReidHughes 16y agoIt's interesting.
- reeses 16y agoWhy is it interesting? Is it interesting for a reason that would guide one to post it here vs. Reddit or Slashdot, which are both wider ranging in their topics of discussion? You state an opinion as if it were fact.
- ekoontz 16y agoSeriously though, I found it interesting and am glad it was on Hacker News. Social engineering is engineering, and engineering is Hacker News. You are minimizing the harm and cost in a society by providing a place where people can safely use alcohol. It's far better and cheaper than leaving them to do it on the streets.
- vannevar 16y agoSpeaking as an engineer myself, there is more to life than minimizing costs to society. You could argue that the cheapest path for society is to commit mass suicide, reducing our collective social burden to zero. I do think this is a good article for HN precisely because it highlights the fundamental moral question: what exactly is social engineering supposed to optimize?
- reeses 16y agoHow are you measuring the minimization of the harm and cost? Where is the methodology? What hypothesis were they testing when they conducted this "experiment?" What are the second order effects on public infrastructure? And social engineering is not engineering, unless anything involved in influencing the universe through action is engineering. Your analogies are based on logical fallacies.
- Daishiman 16y agoThe effects of this clinic can be easily compared to those of other institutions if proper statistics are kept. Judging from the article, they most likely are. Aside from that, bioethical issues, while using quantified information as tools to measure effectiveness, need an equal or greater amount of thought to the basic philosophy of the clinic, and ultimately require human judgement where we determine what is "better" and what we want as a society. So, yeah, wrong on all counts.
- nkurz 16y agoI'm not sure this is a good question. If significantly more people vote it up than flag it, and PG doesn't specifically ban it, it's Hacker News material. Personally, I thought it was an astonishing article that I was happy to read, but flagged it for fear that HN is starting to lose focus. I think the right question is how votes and flags should be weighed.
- reeses 16y agoI think you took it a step further and went meta. I asked a basic question about this particular article, and you drew back and made an observation about the forest. I think you're absolutely correct. What does a vote mean? What does a flag mean? Do they differ at an article or comment level? (Other than the obvious flag:downvote difference) I do prefer upvotes to "+1" or "me too" responses, but downvotes can either be indicators of "I disagree with you," or "this is inappropriate for this forum/discussion/etc." It's unfortunate that there is little way to disambiguate them except in certain obvious cases.
- btmorex 16y agoYou're one of those people who spends all their time deleting articles on wikipedia, aren't you?
- reeses 16y agoNope. I'm a descriptivist. However, I do see that you are one of those who prefers an ad hominem attack to one based on the issues, or on facts. Unfortunately, that's all I can respond to with your post, as you haven't addressed any issues.
- verysimple 16y agoTaken from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Are there good hackers that find this interesting? look at the votes.
- davidw 16y ago> Are there good hackers that find this interesting? look at the votes. Uhrm... there's a flaw in this logic somewhere. You could drive a train through it.
- verysimple 16y agoEh, I try to be a nice guy, I like to assume the best of most people. Of course the voters are good hackers.
- davidw 16y agoGood hackers like to look at data, and there's none that indicates whether these people upvoting the random off-topic stuff are actually good hackers or something else.
- verysimple 16y agoI just told you I was not trying to be literal. I used the term because the assumption is that HN is for good hackers in the sense that it is employed in the guidelines, intellectually curious people. Obviously this is seriously bugging you. Would you be happy if I remove the term? As far as the article being off-topic. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
- sophacles 16y agoI see it like this: I could read this article, about an interesting and unusual approach to a common problem. It seems to cost less than the previous solutions, and help those affected. Or i could read: \* 5 Amazing Vim tips (all of which are covered in your average vim tutorial) \* Why I like $LISP_VARIANT (and you should too!) \* Usability rant suffering from tragic flaw #1 (giving up power for instant understanding). \* Some fluff piece about how "our startup is great and unique because we worked really hard and didn't like the big corporate structure!". for the 10,000th time each. Which is more likely to benefit me?
- geeksam 16y agoHow is it not HN material? This reminds me of the 2006 Malcolm Gladwell piece about "Million Dollar Murray" that showed up here last summer ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1582582 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1582582 ). Both stories pose a problem that has a well-known set of "accepted" solutions, and describe a novel and counterintuitive solution for an edge case. Which sounds like one definition of a hack to me. Granted, the approach described here is more morally ambiguous than Gladwell's piece, because it has the added dimension of allowing people to continue to harm themselves. But I think there are interesting arguments to be made in both cases, and I'm glad to have had this piece brought to my attention.
- reeses 16y agoI'm surprised that you didn't get the "Oh my god, Malcolm Gladwell is the devil!" crowd after you with this one. :-) Much of the Gladwell posting here recently seems to be of the,"Look, I can make up an article or book with no intellectual rigor behind it as well as Gladwell can!"