Why precisely is this Hacker News material?
And social engineering is not engineering, unless anything involved in influencing the universe through action is engineering. Your analogies are based on logical fallacies.
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.
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.
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.
Uhrm... there's a flaw in this logic somewhere. You could drive a train through it.
As far as the article being off-topic.
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.
This thread is worth perusing:
I could not understand why you were bugging me for my use of the term good hackers, when the obvious main point to be made was, if yes or no the article was, in fact, HN material, which I felt and continue to feel it is.
Many of us haven't been around this site as long as some of the people raising their concerns in the thread you pointed me to. We don't know what it was like in the old days, our only compass for what makes a good HN post is the guidelines, which can be interpreted subjectively in many situations ([...]That includes more than hacking and startups[...], [...]anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity[...]). Some of the best articles that I've found on this site snuggly fit within those characteristics (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978295). I believe the current one to have some of those same characteristics, because it highlights an out-of-the-box approach to a problem so very uncommon in the mainstream. 4 days ago I was chatting about homelessness with my business partner, and we were discussing hypothetical solutions to fix it, or at least make it less of a problem and reasons why they would or wouldn't work and some of our solutions were pretty much along those lines and also raised some ethical/moral questions. We're both programmers and though this is arguably not hacker material, we're also entrepreneurs and our ideas often stem from these little discussions that help us look beyond the status quo.
It seems from the thread that you posted that some old timers are trying to get HN to fit back into its old box. I'm still unsure if it would have much appeal to the kind of topics I'm referring to. If their veteran status grant them a say in the direction of HN, I can only suggest to push for clearer guidelines.
Btw, I cannot remove the good hackers from the original post to the thread, it appears that the "edit" timer has expired.
So we agree, then?
Good. Glad to put that to bed.
I consider this article to be noise. Sure, it's interesting to read, but it's contributing to the creation of the sort of volume that will require either a) spending too much time skimming HN to find interesting content, or b) categorization à la Reddit/Slashdot/etc.
Chicken Scheme, the startup incubation in Chile, DSPL: Dataset Publishing Language, and "At St. Paul 'wet house,' liquor can be their life - and death."
Which of these doesn't belong?
p.s., sorry you got hit with the "I disagree with you, so I'm downvoting you" reaction on this one.
You state an opinion as if it were fact.
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.
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!"
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?
It's quiet...almost too quiet... :-)