Japanese Newspaper for Recluses, by Recluses | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Newspaper for Recluses, by Recluses

atlasobscura.com

54 pointsbcOpus9 comments

Missing from the title, it is also a publication about recluses.

I thought this would be an ultra condensed version of news for people that kinda live under a rock. Like using Wikipedia's "in the news" section titles as your only source of information about the outside world.

Have any of their articles been translated into English?

There are some: http://www.hikikomori-news.com/?cat=38

The original title may be a bit too clickbaity sure, but the new HN title does lose some signal. (current HN title: “A Newspaper by recluses for recluses”, removing “The most interesting newspaper in japan...”

Giving you reason you should read the article is useful info, even if it’s subjective. And it helps the reader know what to suspect. Is this a landing page for the newspaper? Or is it someone’s opinion or review if it? That signal is all lost now.

Maybe instead of saying “The most interesting” it should say “An interesting”. that way the signal is not lost.

Maybe HN would benefit from implementing previewing links with open graph.

Even in the original title, it feels like "recluse" loses some signal. It seems Hikikomori is mainstream enough that it could have made it to the title, and feels more specific than "recluse". But maybe that's my non-native English living in Japan brain that didn't click on recluse...

The problem with "The most interesting..." or "An interesting..." is that it adds zero signal.

Everything is interesting to someone. So what?

It reminds me of the early days of Macintosh programming when we put "the" in front of all our variable names, like theResource, theWindow, theFile, and theCursor. It was just a lot of noise that added nothing.

Strunk and White got this right: Eschew needless words.

That said, I was glad to see this and read the article. Atlas Obscura has such a knack for finding the most interesting topics!

Starting your variables with 'the' or 'my' is a huge red flag. It betrays a complete lack of understanding of why variable names even exist.

I gave an example of signal it gives - it differentiates itself from a landing page. The current title sounds like a landing page.

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