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Comment by pachouli-please | Hacker News Reader

I love all Geerling's projects, writings, and videos over the years. I was actually concerned that based on the brevity of the title that something tragic had happened. Glad that's not the case!

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Probably the headline auto "correcter" lopped off the "Meet" part of the original title. Yet another example of that piece of software being too clever by half if you ask me.

This is the stupidest HN feature. It does very little for clickbait (flagging and voting is better), and routinely screws up titles to the point it drastically changes or reverses their meaning.

Yep it's a complete anti-feature and I have no idea why it's still in use.

Because you can edit the title after the fact?

If - to paraphrase the other folks before me - it causes more annoyance than it does good, then the fact that one can spend more effort undoing its damage after the fact is, in fact, a bug rather than a feature.

But you're only hearing from the people who are annoyed enough to write a comment complaining about it. Many other users (such as myself) may be +1 or +0 on the functionality, in which case you can't conclude that "it causes more annoyance than it does good". You'd need to know user's preferences (if you're solving for that) or the value HN admin attributes to the feature vs. the value they attribute to the cost imposed on users (if you're solving for that)

Fair enough.

Any feature is a "complete anti-feature" if you only count the things it gets wrong! The ones it gets right don't get noticed or commented on. It does more good than bad, so keeping it is an easy call.

It's true that the ones it gets wrong stand out like sore thumbs. Then again, it's probably good for the community to have something innocuous to hate.

When you submit it’s worth checking how much HN chewed up the title. I often face the need to fix it myself.

Eh, it's fine. It does help for many things, and if you don't like the choice it's made, you can edit it and it won't butcher it again.

Same, especially since he has shared a lot about his Crohn disease online https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/crohns-disease-takes-...

I should hope I have time to post more before I'd have anything too radical happen :D

Typically with Crohn's issues you have weeks or months of fun issues that lead up to anything too serious! (But not always)

I wish you infinite time without troubles :-)

I share this sentiment. Whenever I see his name I end up reading his article and whether I agree with him or not, the quality of content he puts out sets a very high bar. Whenever he writes a comment on HN it's one of those rare instances where I'll stop and read it carefully rather than blaze through it. Jeff is truly a gem in the community.

FWIW I did not expect bad news since I didn't see a date range after the name in parens.

Or "has died"

Same reaction here, when I read the title I reflexively yelled out "No!"

Geerling's an excellent trailblazer, explainer, and all round lovely guy, and his specialties are much broader than just R-Pi.

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