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The title was better before the edit, since "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a work of fiction, has been borrowed in many contexts, and the additional title mate

The title was better before the edit, since "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a work of fiction, has been borrowed in many contexts, and the additional title material clarified that it was borrowing that title to talk about an experience in a particular field. I'm always sad when titles get edited to "match the post" in a way that actually removes clarity as to what the linked material is.

ableal 12y ago
> since "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a work of fiction A tad older: "And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land." ( Exodus 2:22, e.g. http://www.bartleby.com/108/02/2.html#S2 http://www.bartleby.com/108/02/2.html#S2 ) A good portion of the titles in English are taken either from the KJV Bible or Shakespeare, not that there is much difference.
- __Joker 12y ago
  " not that there is much difference.". Curios, can you explain, why there is not much difference ?
  - scott_karana 12y ago
    Each corpus is dauntingly large (arcane?), making knowledge of the source difficult to determine for casual onlookers. Both have exerted tremendous influences (both overt and subtle) on traditional Western culture.
  - ableal 12y ago
    They were contemporaneous, and both pretty much hailed as the best use of English around. To my (foreign) ear, they sound similar. Some writers even go so far as fictionalizing Shakespeare sticking his finger in the KJV - I think Anthony Burgess did that.
dang 12y ago
Ok, I restored the "original" title. For my part, I'm always sad when a meta comment that has nothing to do with the content of the post ends up getting voted overwhelmingly to the top. It's less your fault than that of the overwhelming upvoters. But it's an unfortunate glitch that reliably mars HN discussions, and I don't know of a good answer to it. By the way, the reason we reverted the title in the first place is that the editorialized subtitle immediately provoked a bikeshed debate about the "communities" and whether they're really distinct or not—when the meat of the post is about things like fault tolerance in distributed computing.
- lmm 12y ago
  I've said this before and I'll say it again: please either stop mod-editing titles, or remove the title field on submissions and set the title automatically from the linked page. Even when a mod changes to a better title, it causes enough confusion and disagreement to be a net negative.
- DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
  (This is of course wandering down the same meta path, but...) I've always wondered if it would be possible to tag comments with tags like "tangent" or "meta" (or whatever else seems good), and then apply sorts based on that (probably in some user selectable way). > By the way, the reason we reverted the title in the first place is that the editorialized subtitle immediately provoked a bikeshed debate about the "communities" and whether they're really distinct or not—when the meat of the post is about things like fault tolerance in distributed computing. I disagree that the comment was a bikeshed debate: the article spends several paragraphs (and the first four!) talking about the relationship of the two communities, and the discussion of their relationship (both in the article and here) explained some of the ways that knowledge I knew about math intensive computing (and related technologies, such as GPUs) related to problems I hadn't previously worked on. Exploring the relationships between subdisciplines, especially closely related ones like these, is a benefit both in the article and in the related discussion.

ableal 12y ago

> since "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a work of fiction A tad older: "And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land." ( Exodus 2:22, e.g. http://www.bartleby.com/108/02/2.html#S2 http://www.bartleby.com/108/02/2.html#S2 ) A good portion of the titles in English are taken either from the KJV Bible or Shakespeare, not that there is much difference.

__Joker 12y ago
" not that there is much difference.". Curios, can you explain, why there is not much difference ?
- scott_karana 12y ago
  Each corpus is dauntingly large (arcane?), making knowledge of the source difficult to determine for casual onlookers. Both have exerted tremendous influences (both overt and subtle) on traditional Western culture.
- ableal 12y ago
  They were contemporaneous, and both pretty much hailed as the best use of English around. To my (foreign) ear, they sound similar. Some writers even go so far as fictionalizing Shakespeare sticking his finger in the KJV - I think Anthony Burgess did that.

dang 12y ago

Ok, I restored the "original" title. For my part, I'm always sad when a meta comment that has nothing to do with the content of the post ends up getting voted overwhelmingly to the top. It's less your fault than that of the overwhelming upvoters. But it's an unfortunate glitch that reliably mars HN discussions, and I don't know of a good answer to it. By the way, the reason we reverted the title in the first place is that the editorialized subtitle immediately provoked a bikeshed debate about the "communities" and whether they're really distinct or not—when the meat of the post is about things like fault tolerance in distributed computing.

lmm 12y ago
I've said this before and I'll say it again: please either stop mod-editing titles, or remove the title field on submissions and set the title automatically from the linked page. Even when a mod changes to a better title, it causes enough confusion and disagreement to be a net negative.
DerpDerpDerp 12y ago
(This is of course wandering down the same meta path, but...) I've always wondered if it would be possible to tag comments with tags like "tangent" or "meta" (or whatever else seems good), and then apply sorts based on that (probably in some user selectable way). > By the way, the reason we reverted the title in the first place is that the editorialized subtitle immediately provoked a bikeshed debate about the "communities" and whether they're really distinct or not—when the meat of the post is about things like fault tolerance in distributed computing. I disagree that the comment was a bikeshed debate: the article spends several paragraphs (and the first four!) talking about the relationship of the two communities, and the discussion of their relationship (both in the article and here) explained some of the ways that knowledge I knew about math intensive computing (and related technologies, such as GPUs) related to problems I hadn't previously worked on. Exploring the relationships between subdisciplines, especially closely related ones like these, is a benefit both in the article and in the related discussion.