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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

All: please don't react just to the title, and especially not to the most sensational bit of a title. That's a reflexive response, not a reflective one; we want the latter here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Also, often we'll change such titles (as I just did above), and then the shallow-title-objections become a sort of uncollected garbage, referencing something that no longer exists.

I'm going to make a stub reply and bundle those comments underneath it so as to collapse them. There are more interesting things to discuss here.

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Stub for shallow title dismissals. I'm omitting a few that led to interesting subthreads and/or contained an interesting observation. Admittedly a judgment call.

Then they aren't 99% of the way. I do not like statements like this. 99% of what?

Oh, that's great. That means they can drive on 99% of roads in all weather conditions except blizzards, hurricanes and wildfires?

Yeah, didn't think so.

Pretty sure that 1% is more of an ironic quip than a statistic. Since the things they can’t handle are listed include ‘cyclists’ and ‘rain’.

"we can safely avoid everything that does not move fast, which includes most of the earth's crust"

This article is hilarious. It's all about the march of 9's. Saying they're 99% done means they've only just begun.

Also it doesn't account for their model which requires paying engineers and installing tens of thousands of dollars in every vehicle to make it work. And the fact that they need pre established HD maps to do anything.

I can't wait for the rest of the series:

Climate change is 99% solved. The last 1% is the hardest.

We are 99% of the way to ending all wars. The last 1% will be the hardest.

Scientists are 99% of the way to curing cancer. The last 1% will be the hardest.

etc.

"First 99% and the second 99%" is a common software industry quip.

Like some other commenters said: the last 1% will require 99% of the time.

I'm certain there will have to be smart roads before there can be cars without a steering wheel.

Am I allowed to opt-in to the timeout box if I have a knee-jerk reaction to the new title? (In which I Clone the current title so that my reference to it doesn't become invalid when someone overwrites it on a different thread: "Waymo has lost its CEO and is still getting stymied by traffic cones".)

At first glance I thought the title was saying that a Waymo car carrying the CEO has been lost for days because it got trapped by traffic cones.

I don't think "At first glance I thought the title" comments are very meaningful. You can always wait for the second glance before posting, which takes care of 100% of these.

Thanks for posting it in the right place though :)

> Also, often we'll change such titles (as I just did above)

So it's ok to change titles to something that is nowhere near what the original title meant when posting a new url?

It's the article's own subtitle; I wouldn't say that's "nowhere near". In fact the subtitle is often much closer to the article's actual content, especially when the main titles are written by headline writers optimizing for linkbait.

This is standard HN moderation—it might be good to review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Lots of examples at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

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