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Why add clickbait bullshit like "impossible" to the title? The article title is A lightweight (150MB) Lisp interpreter in Malbolge Unshackled, often dubbed the

• palaiologos 5y ago
  Malbolge has been considered theoretically impossible to program for a longer time; a Lisp interpreter in Malbolge is a big breakthrough in Malbolge's history which proves that in reality, Malbolge isn't really "impossible" :) - hence I wouldn't call it a clickbait. Also, the title you proposed is exactly 45 bytes too long, so I couldn't submit it. In fact, many relatively credible places I've seen, like my national-language Wikipedia use the word "impossible" - I just want to break the myth :). BTW: In the rules, I can only see "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important." - I don't think my submissions breaks this rule (please let me know if it does!). To adress the other point, the original title/name is in the README (and it's MalbolgeLisp v1.1, or the repo name, as you wish - malbolge-lisp), not in the Github description. I felt like it's not descriptive enough and might be misleading (since you could interpret it as a malbolge interpeter _in_ lisp).
  • Causality1 5y ago
    From the HN guidelines: Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
    • lucrtz 5y ago
      Being a github project one could argue the title of the post should have been the repository description, which is too long for HN's limit, unless you expect people to change their repository descriptions just so they fit on hacker news i think it's fair to "editorialize" the title.
  • ElijahLynn 5y ago
    Would this title be an improvement? > Malbolge Lisp is an "almost impossible" language, ...
• staticassertion 5y ago
  It's in quotes, which I think is appropriate as Malboge is designed to be extremely cumbersome if not impossible to build practical programs in.
• kibwen 5y ago
  HN limits post titles to 80 characters and your proposed title is 44 characters too long, so it's reasonable to abbreviate "often dubbed the hardest Turing-complete programming language" to something like "'impossible' language".
• lucrtz 5y ago
  Since you referred to the HN rules, i think your comments itself could fall under: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...]" (you could have phrased this like "i'd have preferred if the author didn't use clickbaity terms and instead used (...)") "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." (you interpreted the "impossible" as something done for attention grabbing, while it's quite clearly simply a shorter and more interesting way to say very difficult) "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
• ElijahLynn 5y ago
  The title definitely does seem like click bait to me, as I went to the source and looked for where it said that and it does say that the Malbolge language (a Lisp dialect) is "almost impossible to use". Does that mean that Common Lisp is "impossible"? No, it doesn't, therefore that is why I think the title is click bait. > Malbolge is a public domain esoteric programming language. It was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive 'crazy operation', trinary arithmetic, and self-modifying code.
  • lucrtz 5y ago
    Malbolge is most definitely not a lisp dialect.