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I'm just tired of people on HN complaining about misleading titles like if they were something that kicked your dog. If you are a native speaker that was famili

by vacri 10y ago

I'm just tired of people on HN complaining about misleading titles like if they were something that kicked your dog. If you are a native speaker that was familiar enough with nuclear power to know what a 'molten salt reactor' might be (the journal is 'powermag', after all), then for you to read that title as "omg! there might be a meltdown" is just being lazy. Please don't demand the dumbing-down of content for everyone else because you want to be spoon-fed.

mileycyrusXOXO 10y ago
Your hostile tone is not lending any credibility to your argument. I'm a native English speaker. In retrospect, I see how the title is supposed to read - but that is not how I initially read it - and it took me several times to actually realize that 'claims' was not the verb.
tgb 10y ago
I really find your tone unnecessarily aggressive. There's nothing dumbed-down about titles that read clearly on the first scan.
- vacri 10y ago
  Two centuries of journalistic tradition disagree with you. Newspapers have always dones this, hence my comment on the native speaker. If you're a native speaker, you will have grown up with this kind of pun happening around you all the time. And yes, my tone might be a bit aggressive, but people making trivial complaints about titles has been on the rise at HN recently. I've been hanging around here for years, and it's never been a problem before. You then talk about (horror!) having to read the first two sentences of the article to realise that it's not in fact a nuclear meltdown, though really you should have realised there wasn't a nuclear meltdown when it mentioned students a dozen words in. Besides, reading it the way you're suggesting would mean that the supposed nuclear meltdown was caused by the scrutiny, which is just nonsensical. This is what frustrates me into making these comments; that people prefer to be spoon-fed content rather than use their brain a little.

by vacri 10y ago

mileycyrusXOXO 10y ago

Your hostile tone is not lending any credibility to your argument. I'm a native English speaker. In retrospect, I see how the title is supposed to read - but that is not how I initially read it - and it took me several times to actually realize that 'claims' was not the verb.

tgb 10y ago

I really find your tone unnecessarily aggressive. There's nothing dumbed-down about titles that read clearly on the first scan.

vacri 10y ago
Two centuries of journalistic tradition disagree with you. Newspapers have always dones this, hence my comment on the native speaker. If you're a native speaker, you will have grown up with this kind of pun happening around you all the time. And yes, my tone might be a bit aggressive, but people making trivial complaints about titles has been on the rise at HN recently. I've been hanging around here for years, and it's never been a problem before. You then talk about (horror!) having to read the first two sentences of the article to realise that it's not in fact a nuclear meltdown, though really you should have realised there wasn't a nuclear meltdown when it mentioned students a dozen words in. Besides, reading it the way you're suggesting would mean that the supposed nuclear meltdown was caused by the scrutiny, which is just nonsensical. This is what frustrates me into making these comments; that people prefer to be spoon-fed content rather than use their brain a little.