Ask HN: Should all submissions involving mice state that fact in the HN title? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should all submissions involving mice state that fact in the HN title?

12 pointsbookofjoe12 comments

I say yes, if only to eliminate the predictable "in mice" comments

I could do without the incessant hall monitoring in every thread explaining why the title is clickbait or the article isn't substantive enough or that it was published last year.

I'm an adult, I can decide what I think about a submission. We're smart people who need to understand that it's on each of us to have the skills to figure out cancer wasn't just cured in humans overnight, we don't need the nuance of every article explained to us.

So should this title

  Disney backs down from 'Steamboat Willie' YouTube copyright claim

be changed to

  Disney backs down from 'Steamboat Willie' YouTube copyright claim (in mice)

?

That only involves one specific mouse, so perhaps we should grant an exemption. We'll revisit it every few years, extend as necessary. I'm sure there's no problematic downstream problems that will create.

Maybe titles should be just reverse domain names ala Usenet:

    health.cancer.cure.mice
    energy.solar.breakthrough.25%
    space.mars.water.found

I understand all of the words in the post and yet I comprehend nothing about it.

It's a bit of a trope on HN that there will be some scientific "breakthrough" like curing a specific cancer or similar, but omitted from the submission will be the important part that the researchers only made the breakthrough in lab mice/rats, not human trials.

Yes, 100% agreement, for that reason.

Along the same lines, security vulnerability links should have "Windows" or "Linux" or "iOS" or whatever, for the same reason.

No, just follow the guidelines to use the original title, and downvote the "in mice" comments as they are shallow comments that don't add value.

> and downvote the "in mice" comments

Since we're getting meta, there's often a lot of complaints about HN changing and "becoming more like reddit." So I just want to remind people that a thing you can do is to downvote low quality comments. People that simply leave jokes, comments that are more masturbatory in nature, and especially naive comments. And if anything looks bad faith, downvote and move on. Hell, I'll even downvote comments that make me laugh or even some I agree with if I don't feel like they contribute to the conversation. HN is the place you want to make it. Personal behavior, I even work on is not needing to correct people or always replying (especially to bad faith). The reason I came to HN was because it had a better faith community and was a bit nerdier community where there was a higher likelihood of a domain expert having the top comment than buried under a bunch of jokes or naive answers from non-experts.

But that's just me. Feel free to say what you do/want. Feel free to upvote or even downvote. I'm not a cop. You do you.

There is limited space in the title and the primary guideline is to use the same title from the other side of the link

"No, Pinky, this will complicate my plans for tomorrow night."

Are you ok?

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