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Comment by techolic | Hacker News Reader

See also https://twitter.com/robinhouston/status/1169877007045296128. I was prompted the twitter link has been submitted but wasn't able to find it.

Edit: And apologies for using unicode ㊷ in the title, the ascii 42 was removed from the title after initial submission.

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I spent a few seconds wondering if the 'circle-around-a-' was a ring operator of which I was previously unaware ...

Ok, we've switched the URL from https://math.mit.edu/~drew/ and removed the housing from 42 above.

Have you considered surfacing how titles will be changed when they're posted?

I'm not sure I understand your question, but we've posted countless times about this and are happy to answer about specific cases. You can find a lot of information via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and similar searches.

During the submission process where the form say a title is too long you could also be displaying how any transformations will affect it.

That shows up as soon as the submission is created, and there's an 'edit' link if you need to change it. Just don't change it in ways that break the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If it displays during the title entry process it is educating the users about the transformations that occur too. It's a positive-reinforcement loop that supplements the guidelines. It's the reason you don't have to document in the guidelines that the maximum title length is 80 characters.

The title processing logic is surprisingly complex, just as the whole issue of titles on HN is surprisingly complex. That means the code runs on the server, which would make it awkward to run during the data entry process, which of course is browser-side.

The best solution would of course be instantaneously with some javascript but if it's not CPU-taxing it would still be plenty fast to send the title to the server as the input value changes. It's not uncommon for forms to do this with username eligibility checks etc.

Hacker News, unlike most websites, likely has a very significant number of users who keep Javascript disabled.

I think they're getting at transformations that happen after submission, such as dropping initial question words and the like, not just the length restriction (which does appear).

Yup, basically this. Another idea would be to add a "please review this title that Hacker News won't let me submit with" button that would get these kinds of things in front of you sooner.

why did you switch from the mit site to twitter ? (i'm currently blocked on twitter - they want a phone number and are blocking all content till i provide one)

Can't you just log out? Or are you IP blocked?

given that they blocked me for "rules violations" (which i clearly didn't do, as it was a brand new account that had taken zero actions and my previous account was fine when i closed it) i didn't want to circumvent the block (which might have actually been against the rules) so i didn't use technical measures (which certainly would have worked). i ended up just giving them my phone number, but it's a sad reality that we've accepted all these walled gardens

There's more information there.

The title is sanitized on first submission, but you can edit the title afterward and put it back in. This works with some punctuation that gets cleaned out too.

How about "Forty-two"?

Just page @dang because this is a filtering thing -

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

     If the title begins with a number or number + 
     gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop 
     it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," 
     and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number 
     is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

Please don't use code formatting for quotes. It makes the text unreadable on mobile.

Please don't criticize others for using features of the website you are visiting. If you bring a keyhole to view a landscape you won't get the full experience either.

Rendering pages is a matter that should be solved by the client.

Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)

I don't see what the issue is with reminding people to be considerate of those who are browsing on mobile. Unfortunately, the latter group is also usually the ones with the least ability to actual solve their rendering problems.

It seems to be readable on iOS Safari. Scrolling sideways works fine. Worse than a regular quote, but not actually that bad. It is a client issue if it’s more broken than that.

Same on Android Firefox, although it is a bit annoying to have to scroll back and forth to read multi-line quotes formatted like this.

It's very much the website's fault that it uses an awkwardly scrolling span that's much smaller than the viewport.

Interesting, I didn't even think of changing to "Forty-two".

You thought of using an obscure Unicode character before you thought of spelling it out? Well the good news is that you really do belong here on Hacker News :-)

I seemed to be focusing on replacing 42 with a visual equivalence, I even started with ４２ then felt it looked quite ugly.

Or "The Number 42..."

I spent a while trying to work out if 42 in-a-circle was some kind of operator like 42! (factorial) or the like, because those three large numbers, cubed, didn't seem to refer to anything two-digit.

I've just installed ttf-code2000 just so I could see that character in your comment!

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