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Just curious dang, how would you have edited the title to satisfy HN requirements? Here's the original: Congress plans to expand Patriot Act with DOJ access t

Just curious dang, how would you have edited the title to satisfy HN requirements? Here's the original: Congress plans to expand Patriot Act with DOJ access to your web browsing and search activity without a warrant Here's mine: Congress to expand Patriot Act access to browsing/search history without warrant Seeing how you would edit this title would help me write better titles in the future. I just didn't know how else to edit this given the character limitation.

philwelch 6y ago
“Congress” as a body has done no such thing. Some members of Congress have introduced a bill. Congress is a bicameral legislature whose members debate and vote on a variety of proposed bills, many of which are at cross purposes to each other. None of these actions are the actions of Congress as a whole until the bill passes.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  That’s fair, how would you concisely convey that in an HN article title? Edit: my only point is that it’s incredibly difficult to post articles on HN without title modification criticism. I don’t disagree with your semantic point, but how do you post that article within the HN character limit while simultaneously conveying your point?
  - philwelch 6y ago
    “Bill introduced to...” Which really gets back to dang’s point, which is basically, “so what?”. Bills get introduced all the time and most of them don’t go anywhere.
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      > “Bill introduced to” That’s great, but how do you fit that into the original title? I encourage you to try it as an exercise, that title was incredibly hard to fit within HN’s requirements. Your suggestion adds over a dozen characters over “Congress”. Seriously, it’s not easy to edit these titles sometimes. > “so what?” Well, if a bill isn’t worth discussing until after it becomes law, then how do bills like SOPA or any other recent and unpopular bills get stopped? If you don’t talk about it beforehand, how is discussing the bill after passage more effective?
dang 6y ago
Ok, I worked through this example and watched what I did, and my process macroexpands to the following: > Congress plans to This is misleading so we need to take it out (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). > expand Patriot Act with DOJ access to your web browsing and search activity without a warrant This sounds accurate once it's clear that it's a proposed amendment, but needs shortening. How could we shorten it? Well, "without a warrant" can turn into "warrantless". "DOJ" can probably be dropped, since whether it's DOJ or some other government branch isn't of top-level importance. And "you" or "your" can almost always be dropped from titles; that's a linkbait trope anyhow (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20you%20linkbait%20trope&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Applying those edits I get: > expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web browsing and search activity That's shorter but not short enough because we need to get the amendment bit in there. At this point I'd probably compress "web browsing and search activity" into a short phrase that covers both. "Web history" comes to mind. Edit: on second thought, we can just keep the title's original word, "activity"—it's always best not to introduce new words if the existing ones will do: > expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity Now we have 22 chars before the 80 limit. We can do this: > Amendment to expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity Can we do this? > Proposed amendment to expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity Yes we can! 80 chars on the nose. So I'd probably go with that and then wait for users to tell me how I got it wrong. Edit: changed the title. Submitted title was "Congress to expand Patriot Act access to browsing/search history without warrant".

philwelch 6y ago

“Congress” as a body has done no such thing. Some members of Congress have introduced a bill. Congress is a bicameral legislature whose members debate and vote on a variety of proposed bills, many of which are at cross purposes to each other. None of these actions are the actions of Congress as a whole until the bill passes.

save_ferris 6y ago
That’s fair, how would you concisely convey that in an HN article title? Edit: my only point is that it’s incredibly difficult to post articles on HN without title modification criticism. I don’t disagree with your semantic point, but how do you post that article within the HN character limit while simultaneously conveying your point?
- philwelch 6y ago
  “Bill introduced to...” Which really gets back to dang’s point, which is basically, “so what?”. Bills get introduced all the time and most of them don’t go anywhere.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    > “Bill introduced to” That’s great, but how do you fit that into the original title? I encourage you to try it as an exercise, that title was incredibly hard to fit within HN’s requirements. Your suggestion adds over a dozen characters over “Congress”. Seriously, it’s not easy to edit these titles sometimes. > “so what?” Well, if a bill isn’t worth discussing until after it becomes law, then how do bills like SOPA or any other recent and unpopular bills get stopped? If you don’t talk about it beforehand, how is discussing the bill after passage more effective?

dang 6y ago

Ok, I worked through this example and watched what I did, and my process macroexpands to the following: > Congress plans to This is misleading so we need to take it out (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). > expand Patriot Act with DOJ access to your web browsing and search activity without a warrant This sounds accurate once it's clear that it's a proposed amendment, but needs shortening. How could we shorten it? Well, "without a warrant" can turn into "warrantless". "DOJ" can probably be dropped, since whether it's DOJ or some other government branch isn't of top-level importance. And "you" or "your" can almost always be dropped from titles; that's a linkbait trope anyhow (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20you%20linkbait%20trope&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Applying those edits I get: > expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web browsing and search activity That's shorter but not short enough because we need to get the amendment bit in there. At this point I'd probably compress "web browsing and search activity" into a short phrase that covers both. "Web history" comes to mind. Edit: on second thought, we can just keep the title's original word, "activity"—it's always best not to introduce new words if the existing ones will do: > expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity Now we have 22 chars before the 80 limit. We can do this: > Amendment to expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity Can we do this? > Proposed amendment to expand Patriot Act with warrantless access to web activity Yes we can! 80 chars on the nose. So I'd probably go with that and then wait for users to tell me how I got it wrong. Edit: changed the title. Submitted title was "Congress to expand Patriot Act access to browsing/search history without warrant".