Seriously 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.

Speaking 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?

How 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.

The 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.

I'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.

I 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.

You're one of those people who spends all their time deleting articles on wikipedia, aren't you?

Nope. 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.

Taken from 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.

> 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.

Eh, I try to be a nice guy, I like to assume the best of most people. Of course the voters are good hackers.

Good 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.

That was precisely my point. If this article had the sort of analysis and data that would be included in the sort of paper published in a social science journal, then it would be appropriate. I think the fact that almost all of the high-ranking posts are anecdotes that do not contribute data, or analogies to similar social problems (needle exchange, etc.) indicate that this post is more of a chit-chat post than anything with rigor.

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.

I 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 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.

Yes, the thinking that "it must be hacker news because lots of people voted for it" bothers me.

This thread is worth perusing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235206

Looking at that thread, I think I understand what's going on, which was really not very clear from your intervention. I thought you were being petty about terminology.

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.

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

So we agree, then?

Good. Glad to put that to bed.

It's interesting.

Why 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.

How 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 ). 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.

I'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!"

I 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?

http://www.metafilter.com already exists; I'm not sure why Hacker News should try to become it.

Plus, you can donate to metafilter and feel good about yourself. :-)

It's late Saturday night in California? :)

Hah, you had the same idea I did about five minutes after I posted my comment.

It's quiet...almost too quiet... :-)