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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

Misleading headline since after testing eight more drives, none more failed.

2/12 is not nearly as dramatic as “half”, and the ones that lost data are the cheap brands as one would expect.

You can either not editorialize the title, and accept that the thread contains updates, or editorialize it and violate HN guidelines.

Either choice will lead somebody to complain

Clearly they should only editorialize the ones that are wrong.

That doesn't help, HN mods still "correct" it back to the wrong title even in that case.

So is it the mods who are editing titles of articles to be more sensational and clickbait-y? Because this happens all the damn time, flagging does nothing, etc.

In many cases yes. I don't know if it's an automated or manual process (it seems to happen less when the US is asleep, so I suspect it's manual?), but generally if you submit a link with a title edited to be less sensational and clickbait-y it gets changed to the linked article title.

That was sarcasm, as what's "wrong" is often subjective and up to interpretation.

And it's often not.

Then it gets flagged and removed. The end.

No it doesn't. Good stories with bad titles almost always stay up.

It's clear from the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38365934#38368867

Specifically: use the original title, then express your view as a top level comment. If people agree with it, the comment is naturally voted up.

Yes, and the OP did abide by HN guidelines. But GGP implied that the title was misleading; but it was the original title! So, what to do if the original title is misleading?

Admittedly this is a twitter thread, so no "actual title" exists.

>So, what to do if the original title is misleading?

Complain about it in a comment so that people who don't click the link are aware it's misleading. It's not attacking OP.

>So, what to do if the original title is misleading?

I'd suggest posting an alternative, non-misleading source instead, or if none exists, don't post at all.

Then this very interesting piece would never never come to my attention. Which is surely the worst outcome.

Best is "you wont believe what happened when I tested NVMe SSDs"

Oh yeah, I bet something dramatic would happen if neither of us would see it.

Personally, I _do_ editorialize by posting a “summary” of what a post discusses, if there’s no real title. I try not to make it pass as my own opinion; sometimes it happened that mods reverted it to the original, less relevant title.

The trick is to write the summary from the point of view of the original author, preferably by lifting a quote from the text.

https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/ has a recent example "Kevin Scott (MSFT CTO) inviting all Open AI employees to join MSFT" which sounds like the title of a third-party article describing said event, but actually directly points to the Microsoft CTO's tweet with the offer https://twitter.com/kevin_scott/status/1726971608706031670 so it got edited to a quote "If needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation" which is an attempt to summarize the content but doesn't provide additional context so it might be condidered more clickbaity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38364315

This sounds like the religious idea that "the magical Invisible Hand of the Free Market will ensure that only the best-run businesses survive."

....except people routinely submit articles with titles edited to be clickbaity and misleading, they get upvoted, and nothing happens.

2/12 is not good, especially if the drives that failed were using off the shelf phison controllers which is basically the entire market besides sandisk/samsung/intel.

It doesn't seems to be related to the controller: the same phison controller was in some model that failed and some models that passed.

(see later in the thread: https://twitter.com/xenadu02/status/1496770658750980103)

> "... and the ones that lost data are the cheap brands as one would expect."

What a sad world to live in, when one comes to expect cheap storage devices to not fulfill intended function.

SK Hynix is a major brand and the P31 is a great midrange SSD... except for the fact that it seemingly doesn't care about your data.

> SK Hynix is a major brand

Is it? I passed on an offer for a drive carrying that name, and got something else for slightly more, the other day as I didn't know the name.

Perhaps their noteworthiness varies internationally? Or do they mainly sell to manufacturers rather than direct to the likes of me?

They are even among the manufacturers of actual flash memory chips.

> Or do they mainly sell to manufacturers rather than direct to the likes of me?

This. Think they mostly sell OEM SSDs under their name, if you buy a laptop or pre built system from a major manufacturer chances are not that low that you find a SK Hynix SSD in there.

I have a Sabrent M2 in my own PC, bought it because it was the cheapest option. Incidentally I suspect it's the cause of system-wide slowdown in the past few months, even opening the file explorer takes over ten seconds sometimes.

To me the real thing missing is whether those drive advertise power loss protection or not. The next question is whether they are to be used in a laptop where power loss protection is less relevant given the local battery.

That should be irrelevant, because flush is flush right? If your SSD does not write the data after a flush it's violating basic hard drive functionality.

GP has a point in that a laptop is much less likely to experience unplanned power loss because of the built in battery. However that does not help desktops which also use NVME SSDs.

The other problem is that this doesn't only cause problems resulting from power loss. At least some files systems guarantee consistency of data on the drive by flushing at critical points. ZFS on Linux does this. If the flush doesn't happen as promised, subsequent writes could result in corrupted files should something else like a crash interrupt operation.

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