Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The submitted title was "Truecrypt was written by a international arms dealer named Paul LeRoux". That broke the HN guidelines by cherry-picking a single detail from the article, and it's also misleading enough that we're getting emails complaining about it. Rather than litigate what the article does or doesn't show, we've simply reverted the title.

It seems particularly bad to make the title say something that the article doesn't actually claim.

View on HN

The old title was wrong, the new one is devoid of any meaning. I guess the TrueCrypt connection is what got most of us interested in the piece, so something along the lines of "Truecrypt predecessor was started by international drug dealer Paul LeRoux" might have been helpful.

The article is still near the top of HN, and no one who looks at the thread will have much trouble figuring out what it's about.

If the community agreed amongst itself, obviously we'd follow suit, but it doesn't, and people are going to complain no matter what we do.

Echoing the other sentiments here - the connection to Truecrypt is what made this story interesting. As rewritten, the title is basically meaningless.

This title is much worse. There's no clue what it's even about.

It's a real shame that a bunch of people were tricked into reading an excellent piece of long-form journalism because someone singled out why it might interest them.

The HN front page has a context, and the new title is completely incoherent there. Do better.

The previous title was factually incorrect: it did not match the claims of the article. Even the OP admits it was a mistake.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11382412

The new title may not be great (as it's copied from the article, where it exists in the context of a larger series), but it's at least an improvement over one that was simply wrong.

Are you joking? The new title would barely be an improvement over a blank line. At best, it's poorly written clickbait (who is "he"? Why do we care?), but really it doesn't even qualify as a "title" except for where it's placed on the page. It might seem like anything would be better than a title which exaggerates the claims of the article (no, the article does not prove that he was involved in the creation of TC -- it does, however, hypothesize it), but we've somehow arrived at one which if not worse, is certainly very bad in a different way.

If dang wants to mangle the titles of articles into incoherency after they've already been on the front page for hours, that's clearly his prerogative, but let's not pretend that it's any kind of improvement. It would be easy to rewrite this title to both keep it in context and remove the factual inaccuracy. Instead, we get this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com