It's the perfect symbol of Hacker News and Silicon Valley culture, overconfidence in using technology to automate something but making it worse in the big picture.
This is the perfect example of a middlebrow dismissal. Something fails in one instance, and it results in a confident dismissal of the entire system.
The automated title changes on HN constantly break things.
Only the broken headlines that would otherwise have been good are noticeable. The vast sea of bad headlines that are fixed or buried or discouraged from posting in the first place aren't visible.
Agreed, took me 30 seconds to understand the point.
I don't see how "525" contributes any value. I gather that the point of the post is to show off a data visualization of a lot of planes leaving Las Vegas. The number feels like an implementation detail.
The title has now changed it seems and I got immensely more value out of the post.