I suggest it may also have, possibly, more reason to do with the autism, which is an interesting topic of mind which has a lot of interest at Hacker News. Also, there are lots of cases of autism in and around silicon valley which raises consciousness of the topic in the minds of many hackers.
There's nothing odd about being fascinated by drugs and/or altered states of consciousness. The fact that our laws, culture, art, and religions are seemingly inseparable from their influence is intellectually interesting, to say the least.
I'm not saying that everyone should do drugs, certainly not, but if you don't at least take the time to learn about this stuff then you're cheating yourself out of a big piece of the human experience.
It's on Slate, not some hemp advocacy site, and it was interesting. Hence, submitted. I don't think I have an odd fascination with drugs (I actually think expirimenting with cannabis on a disabled school-age boy is ethically repugnant).
Here I might add, for no particular reason except human interest, that I have never in my life consumed marijuana.
It points to a moderator specifically changing how the sorting algorithm is applied to this story. Vote weighting. Or maybe it's a new change to automatically vote weight stories where there are more comments than points.
I didn't do anything specific to this story, and there is still no vote weighting yet.
I changed the frontpage ranking algorithm slightly yesterday, and I tweaked it again today. The reason it seemed to take effect suddenly is that I had pasted the new version yesterday into the server repl, and news had restarted since then. When I pasted the tweaked version into the repl 2 hours ago, it visibly changed rankings.
At least it isn't as bad as reddit where it's nearly everyday that an article about drugs gets upvoted. It could be worse, and at least this article is an interesting read namely due to the fact that they're not claiming it's a miracle or a cure, it just helps.
