Hacker News Reader

Comment by aristidb | Hacker News Reader

There's not a single line in the interview that confirms this title. In fact he says he does not code anymore today. WTF?

View on HN

Yeah, the interview is better than the linkbait headline imo. I'm not sure what HN etiquette is on that these days. I used to try to come up with better titles if I thought the original was poor, but they always get changed back by moderators, so it seems the de-facto rule is to use the original?

I think they get changed by the server itself, without human intervention.

If the poster has enough karma, I think the HN code should trust the user's title over the <h1>.

In addition to how error prone that would be (we'd see at least occasional weird title glitches) combined with how titles sometimes are actually changed by moderators in the other direction (as in, away from the real title, as I noticed with the recently posted article about someone just discovering malloc's overcommit behavior), a few days ago pg explicitly stated that this belief was not true (but seemed to think the idea that people thought the human moderators were so fast and accurate so as to be mistaken for computers worthy of note).

There are some rules in the guidelines (link is in the footer) which say more or less that, if reasonable, the original title should be used.

Unfortunately this is quite hidden away. It might be more useful to have a short statement on the submission page. Maybe including the rule to add a year in parentheses for older articles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com