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Comment by Reinmar | Hacker News Reader

You're right. It took me over 5 years from the moment I assembled this PC to the moment I found the mistake ;)

Anyway, I don't think that anyone would actually think that I worked on this for 3 years. But when applied to software (to which this story lead me), I often hear "it took them 3 years to fix this". It's pretty much the same here. The bug was there, it caused serious issues (also with other systems), I applied various random workarounds and I spent a lot of time on it and yet, it got fixed by an accident much much later.

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What I think is going on here is that such titles are subverting axioms of conversations that give language meaning normally.

It's perfectly reasonable in general to say it took you 3 years when you weren't actually working on it all that time. Like, say, if you were talking to a friend who you tell everything to.

But when it's in a title or headline, it's implicitly presumed to be the most significant thing about your story to a stranger, thus what makes it notable and interesting. Given that baseline, one tends to interpret it as meaning you were working most of the time on it, because that makes it worthy of attention.

That's why it seems not unexpected to me for a person to feel disappointed and mislead.

I appreciate the sincerity and depth of your analysis. This nicely wraps words around a concept which I had considered, but never organized well, and previously never expressed. Nice work

Well, that was mostly inspired by something known as Grice's Maxims. I read about them years ago and immediately thought someone should write extensively on how discourse in reality not only often relies on assuming them, but also frequently subverts them, cooperatively or maliciously. But I'm too lazy.

Even better -- you've now given me a term to research further!

>I don't think that anyone would actually think that I worked on this for 3 years.

Your title literally says it took you 3 years.

Tragic how clickbait has become so normalized.

Become? These sorts of title tricks have been common practice in the magazine industry for decades and in newspapers before that. Now we're just in the latest stage where it's been adopted by individuals :-D

I don't think that anyone would actually think that I worked on this for 3 years.

I 'actually' thought that, of course - it's what it says, or what I read it as saying. (One of your most recent comments says "It took 3 years for 20 people to build CKEditor", which presumably means you worked on it for 3 years, but now I'm kind of uncertain what to believe.)

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