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Comment by dwringer | Hacker News Reader

> _Google hopes prove ..._

I am guessing that was meant to be "hopes _to_ prove", or else we're at the point now where for Google, merely hoping for something to be true makes it true.

Or are we using the mechanism of "hope" to delineate between classical computers and quantum computers, one of which we now consider Google to be?

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When I submitted it I used the article's title Google Plans to Demonstrate the Supremacy of Quantum Computing, apparently one of the mods felt this was an improvement /shrug

The HN guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". This article's title is grandiose enough to count as linkbait. In such cases, mods change titles, nearly always using either a subtitle or a representative phrase from the article.

The reason we do this, btw, is that if we don't, the comment threads fill up with shallow objections to the title. We don't always get it 100% right, of course, and are pleased when readers suggest better. But the basic principle is that, on HN, a good title is accurate, neutral, and uses the article's own language.

I hope you don't consider mine a shallow objection. I rather liked the change :)

Not at all, I meant that if the title above were still "Google Plans to Demonstrate the Supremacy of Quantum Computing", there would be complaints about linkbait and whatnot. Of course the complaints are usually justified on their own terms, but they're predictable and therefore tedious, and they take threads way off topic.

Yeah we had a typo in there—sorry.

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