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Hey, HN Admins, is it really necessary to micro-manage the titles?! I had “by John McCarthy” (which is highly relevant, and in the next line in the doc)! It’s j
by abrax3141 9y ago
Hey, HN Admins, is it really necessary to micro-manage the titles?! I had “by John McCarthy” (which is highly relevant, and in the next line in the doc)! It’s just a bit prissy to have to have the titles your favorite way all the time. Please stop it, and if you need to micromanage peoples posts, you should be working for Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah, I know ... OFF TOPIC!
- molteanu 9y agoOh, I wouldn't have opened the link if it wasn't for the John McCarthy mention.
- kazinator 9y agoIndeed; I read this specifically because I was curious specifically what MacCarthy's requirements or specifications would have been for such a thing, back in 1964. I.e. the young MacCarthy take on the problem and how it reveals his thinking about such a thing. What it reveals is that he had a very firm grasp on advanced computer and operating system architecture. He describes the requirements for an interrupt-driven concurrent system which has two levels of protection: a user and executive mode. Moreover, he recommends a small, well-debugged kernel be used, architected in such a way that errors in other pieces such as peripheral drivers, are recoverable. It's almost as if he's hinting at a micro-kernel architecture.
- ceejayoz 9y agoIIRC, it's automatic.
- manan_doshi 9y agoHow do they do it? Prune "By X" every time? Or is there a more sophisticated system?
- ceejayoz 9y agoThis seems to indicate some sort of cron just fetches the <title> tag a little while after something's posted and updates accordingly. Matches with my experience - I've seen perfectly good titles reverted to nonsensical garbage no admin would've manually reverted to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572910
- abrax3141 9y agoBut the title of this page was noise. The title was embedded in the pdf.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- abrax3141 9y agoI think it’s manually done. They also moved the date to the end.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dang 9y agoI know it feels like prissy micromanaging when your title is changed, but what you're really asking here is for us not to do our job. Having titles be neutral and (to use pg's original word) bookish is one of HN's key features and a far bigger deal than it might seem. If we didn't maintain that, HN would go to seed. There are important principles behind everything we do with titles. In this case the principle is that HN works better when the emphasis is on content over personalities, so we edit out most author names and/or celebrity names in titles. This has been consistent for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7518157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7518157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9919304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9919304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12573986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12573986
- abrax3141 9y agoYes, fine, but most of the point of this particular post was that it was John McCarthy, who is the father of Lisp. Otherwise, as someone said, it's just old flaming about mars landers. Moreover, if you take all personality out of science, you're doing science a disservice.