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To play the devil's advocate, we already have the URL so the title (at least directly on https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com, experience o

by 3825 13y ago

To play the devil's advocate, we already have the URL so the title (at least directly on https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com, experience on hn-android and other clients will vary): A New Beginning (us.php.net) Is that not good enough?

anigbrowl 13y ago
No. Titles like that are often heavily biased towards regular readers of a blog/forum/interest group, and meaningless to people outside that small circle, even though the article itself may be well worth knowing about.
- cube13 13y ago
  Github submissions are typically terrible with it. Especially because people use their personal repos as a blog of sorts, which means that it's hard to tell when a submission from Github is an official blog post, a code repo, or an article to read. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101 is on the front page right now. The title is: Modeling your App's User Session (github.com) It's a blog post by Github staff about how they're now tracking user sessions with Rails, cookies, and their DB. Unfortunately, due to the way that the Github site is structured, from the title, one might think that this is a link to a library repo for user session tracking on a mobile app. A small change to the title, like "Github's modeling of user sessions" would convey the meaning of the blog post much better than the title.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    That's a good point. I've had a similar problem with submissions from google.com, which may be official google stuff or may be comment from Groups or G+ (though I think this might have been fixed by showing more of the URL, haven't checked lately).
manuelflara 13y ago
In that case, yes. But what if the domain is somedudesname.com and that is the blog of some company's CEO? It'd be preferable to have a title like "XCompany changes direction, elects new leader".
- pbreit 13y ago
  But he responded to a specific example. If you want to come up with more examples, fine. But don't tell him he's wrong or do a "yes, but".
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    The example was only there to show that there are cases where editing the title helps. If you want to get to the best answer, don't argue against what someone said, argue against what they should have said. Being right or wrong about dismissing a bad example doesn't matter. The important thing is to fix the example and then evaluate it.
    - pbreit 13y ago
      Then say something like: "True, for that example. But a better example is...". I guess I have a problem with jumping on someone who was correct.
      - 3825 13y ago
        Thank you for your help. I agree that the information in the URL is not always enough. I am glad it started a discussion and I hope pg reads the rebuttals to what I wrote. (github.com) is a good example. It shows why github was so eager to move gh-pages to github.io Perhaps a way to get around the ambiguity (at least in case of github) would be to encourage people to use/link to gh-pages (so we see github.io as distinct from github.com) when they are available?
j_baker 13y ago
That's still not enough useful info. It tells us that someone has posted a webpage about A New Beginning on php.net, but it doesn't give us enough info to infer that it's a blog post about a new leader taking over PHP. Even worse if it's from some generic URL (blogspot.com, etc).

by 3825 13y ago

anigbrowl 13y ago

No. Titles like that are often heavily biased towards regular readers of a blog/forum/interest group, and meaningless to people outside that small circle, even though the article itself may be well worth knowing about.

cube13 13y ago
Github submissions are typically terrible with it. Especially because people use their personal repos as a blog of sorts, which means that it's hard to tell when a submission from Github is an official blog post, a code repo, or an article to read. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573101 is on the front page right now. The title is: Modeling your App's User Session (github.com) It's a blog post by Github staff about how they're now tracking user sessions with Rails, cookies, and their DB. Unfortunately, due to the way that the Github site is structured, from the title, one might think that this is a link to a library repo for user session tracking on a mobile app. A small change to the title, like "Github's modeling of user sessions" would convey the meaning of the blog post much better than the title.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  That's a good point. I've had a similar problem with submissions from google.com, which may be official google stuff or may be comment from Groups or G+ (though I think this might have been fixed by showing more of the URL, haven't checked lately).

manuelflara 13y ago

In that case, yes. But what if the domain is somedudesname.com and that is the blog of some company's CEO? It'd be preferable to have a title like "XCompany changes direction, elects new leader".

pbreit 13y ago
But he responded to a specific example. If you want to come up with more examples, fine. But don't tell him he's wrong or do a "yes, but".
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  The example was only there to show that there are cases where editing the title helps. If you want to get to the best answer, don't argue against what someone said, argue against what they should have said. Being right or wrong about dismissing a bad example doesn't matter. The important thing is to fix the example and then evaluate it.
  - pbreit 13y ago
    Then say something like: "True, for that example. But a better example is...". I guess I have a problem with jumping on someone who was correct.
    - 3825 13y ago
      Thank you for your help. I agree that the information in the URL is not always enough. I am glad it started a discussion and I hope pg reads the rebuttals to what I wrote. (github.com) is a good example. It shows why github was so eager to move gh-pages to github.io Perhaps a way to get around the ambiguity (at least in case of github) would be to encourage people to use/link to gh-pages (so we see github.io as distinct from github.com) when they are available?

j_baker 13y ago

That's still not enough useful info. It tells us that someone has posted a webpage about A New Beginning on php.net, but it doesn't give us enough info to infer that it's a blog post about a new leader taking over PHP. Even worse if it's from some generic URL (blogspot.com, etc).