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Comment by roghummal | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't hecubus(OP) take the title or headline?

"How the chili pepper got to China" is a relatively small part of the article.

I don't know why HN doesn't just autofill the title from the submitted URL - it would clear up a lot of these types of problem. Heck, could even parse out appropriate metadata / http headers to determine date for all those old news stories that need a year in parentheses.

> just autofill the title from the submitted URL

This is a case of Jerry Weinberg's dictum that when you hear the word "just" in software development, replace it with "have a lot of trouble".

It's one of those ideas that seems like it would work until you look into it. In reality it doesn't come close to working, because many web pages have titles that violate the HN guidelines, include junk, or are meaningless. There's no substitute for editorial judgment.

Also good luck reliably even finding the title in all the horrible kinds of html floating around out there.

/html/head/title/text() should work for the vast majority of pages out there. Those that it doesn't work for, never mind - you don't lose anything wrt the current system by not being able to prefill.

You could also look for meta tags and social media (facebook, twitter, etc) tags, and probably build a decent profile for most sites[0]. It can be done fairly reliably, and would work well for any site that actually cares about its social media presence, but the end result is still no better for low quality titles and linkbait. To guarantee quality, HN would have to either send all submissions through a mod queue or have an interstitial preview page to let the user add or edit metadata before submission. That, functionally, is just a more complication version of looking at the article and pasting in the title.

[0]shameless plug of my own work: https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug

Of course; I need to get into the habit of using "just" far less than I do! But even if some titles are less than perfect, a lot will be absolutely fine, and almost anything is better than a blank headline. I.e. prefill, but retain the ability to edit the headline.

Ok, we added the main title to the subtitle above.

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