So whose the guy with the clumsy iron fist that keeps editing titles? LOL 'Steam Powered Blender" Here, I'll do ya a solid http://bit.ly/1a8j71D
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#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cynic would say that AirBnB is a YC company and HN doesn't want to draw attention to negative news, which makes sense (if you were the operator of this or any site, you wouldn't want bad news to surface)
Those who believe in cock-up before conspiracy would say there is a 'bot running round changing submission titles to tags, given a certain SOUNDEX gap (ie if the title is close enough, leave it, else call it editorialised) It might be feasible to test this by changing titles a lot. A mean person could build titles ("AAA AAA") to discover the algo. Whatever. Bit of a tangent.
Hah, haven't heard it as "cock-up before conspiracy" before, which seems to be a rather amusing way of stating Hanlon's razor[1].
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#123Re: undefined
#124The real question is why do they have a box for title in the first place. If they don't want editorialized titles, just have a URL box and use code to grab the title. Then we stop all these meta discussions. (Or we could leave the box and stop screwing with things once they get to the front page because the original piece was titled poorly)
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#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those who believe in cock-up before conspiracy would say there is a 'bot running round changing submission titles to tags, given a certain SOUNDEX gap (ie if the title is close enough, leave it, else call it editorialised) It might be feasible to test this by changing titles a lot. A mean person could build titles ("AAA AAA") to discover the algo. Whatever. Bit of a tangent.
Hah, haven't heard it as "cock-up before conspiracy" before, which seems to be a rather amusing way of stating Hanlon's razor[1]. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Well, I don't drink in the sort of pubs where a sentence beginning "Never attribute to malice" will be allowed to finish, but a sentence with cock and up in it will happily run its course.
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#126What confuses me is why many submissions are killed off and hidden. For example, right now, if you click new is show dead on you will see this grayed out: 15.[dead] Oracle's Larry Ellison enthusiastically applauds NSA spying (techeye.net) 1 point by Mitt 17 minutes ago | flag | discuss I copy and paste it in to google, and find what looks to me like a reasonable article. It even has a CBS video source(1). It is a leg…
You are waaaay overthinking it. Probably was just flagged to death because people are getting overloaded with NSA stories, especially when there is no new additions. I would probably have flagged it if I saw it, doesn't really advance the discussion and frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.
In my experience, few topics are off-topic here if properly presented, including politics. I don't come to HN for politics, either, but that doesn't preclude my use of the site for other topics -- well, except for sensational situations such as when the Aaron Swartz bomb dropped, I have a screenshot around here somewhere where every single post on the frontpage was related to that topic. "Meh" I said, came back a day later, and it was down to 1/2, came back the next day and it was at 1/4 or less. Not that the topic didn't interest me, but god, it was a downright masturbatory vortex; though, I didn't throw a fit, I just let it die-down and soon enough we were back to the normalcy.
With that said, point being is that I didn't flag anything simply because there was "too much" of it for my tastes -- I don't believe, even as a participant, that I have the onus to try and dictate what others on the site participate in. Only if it's intentionally bad (spam, misleading, flaming, etc.) do I ever flag or downvote.
edit: And evidently I still don't grok HN -- why is my reply here "dead" as soon as I posted it....?
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#127Why not have both the original title and a separate editorialized version that can be modified/upvoted for accuracy?
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#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, no titles but a tag cloud about contents?
Your comment, standing alone, sounds like a really interesting idea.
Further, including comments in that tag cloud (styled differently?) might also be interesting.
Let me know if you submit to YC, I might join!
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#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like hellbanning. A few people are unfairly caught out by it, but they are usually told about it. And the fact you see problem posters continuing to post on their banned accounts shows it works well enough to prevent those people just changing IP and creating new accounts.
In the case of one of our infamous hellbanned posters (hint: the guy with the random text generator, attributed to "God"), I'm fairly sure that he knows he's hellbanned.
losethos provides a certain amount of entertainment every so often ... the guy wrote his own OS, with his own compiler for his own language. Sure he is weird, and has his quirks, but I have to give him credit for what he has achieved.
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#130The problem is not that titles are edited, but that such edits are not indicated in any way, effectively putting someone else's words in submitter's mouth. It is simply unacceptable.
I think it's not really putting words in the submitters mouth since A. We all know it happens. B. It's replacing it with the actual title written by the author. It can't be confused with words written by the OP. Personally no rule is perfect and simple things like just changing it can work. We all know or quickly learn the rule. It could be worst like reddit style where the titles have collapsed and are consistently…
> A. We all know it happens.
I didn't until now.