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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Title missing the leading "How"

I believe HN auto-strips such "filler" words, needs to be added again by a mod

Perhaps it should not? Why would such a silly feature be explained over and over rather than removed?

HN does a lot of title editorializing. Like the one a few days ago that turned the acronym RATs into Rats and completely changed the meaning.

Because there are a lot of articles in the news that add this word for no reason.

Ahhh.. wouldn't that be better by using a percentage of filler words/total words in title threshold?? I don't know if a feature simply strips out the filler words in title, it's not always useful and rather harmful is what I would argue.

Humans work better. HN is small scale enough that a moderator can come along, collapse the off topic comments and fix the title, and it's not an issue.

Seems like title cleanup is a good use for an LLM actually. (Not to remove the human option, but as the first smarter pass instead of simple stopword lists.)

Is it, though?

An LLM burns through how much power, compared to the tiny Arc server? You could outsource it, of course... But then you have a third party dependency.

Then you have the problem that LLMs continually and constantly change words to be "simpler" and destroy the very sensitive meanings, especially words in tech. Like auto-correcting Fediverse into Universe. Or C into C++.

Yeah, especially when it changes the meaning in silly ways.

My brain spent quite some time trying to figure out what the headline was trying to say.

I did add it into the title originally, must've been stripped. Thanks for the heads up, didn't know HN had this "useful feature".

The submitter can edit the title after it has been auto-modified. It doesn't take a mod to do it unless some amount of time has passed.

Can't see any way of modifying the title, unless I'm missing something – maybe I missed the edit window.

Yeah, after an hour, you've probably missed it. (Source: I frequently edit titles of posts I submit to HN because HN changed it to nonsense. :) )

Thanks for letting me know, I'll make sure to edit it quickly next time :-)

IIRC, if the original submitter edits the title once it has been posted, the edited version sticks, i.e. the filter only works the first time and you can override it if you notice it.

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