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Comment by JoeCortopassi | Hacker News Reader

Stop it, stop it, stop it, just stop. Once an article reaches the front page, it's title is no longer editable. It causes confusion and frustration, and is obviously an issue that a lot of people dislike. I don't care about prime numbers, this article was all about the visualization to me. Every time a title gets changed like this, you are telling your user base that you don't care about what they think. I feel like I'm back in Digg, waiting for something like Reddit to pop up so I don't have to deal with the 'power' users.

/rant

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Can't agree more... I care about prime numbers and also about visualizations. But this title is misleading. The article is not about patterns in prime numbers, but a way of visually/geometrically representing prime numbers, which is interesting on it's own. P.S: I don't what was the original title, but the current is definitely misleading.

Was coming into this expecting an interesting piece about the distribution of prime numbers. Either a new approach to predicting them or a proof of why they're unpredictable. But no it's a visualisation of their distribution. Interesting but entirely not what was expected.

Peculiar how this comment is at the bottom of this page, yet has enough upvotes to have made it to the best comments page http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

What are you talking about?

The title originally included something like "visualization with D3.js", which has been removed for some reason

...and which was why I clicked on the article in the first place. Because the title was, you know, helpful and descriptive.

I clicked on the title "Prime Number Patterns" and am a little disappointed.

I'm just not seeing any patterns other than the semicircles of increasing integer diameters.

Should I stare at it longer?

Umm... yes, you should actually.

Those patterns of semicircles aren't random, of course. They correspond directly to the degree of compositeness of the chosen modulus. Compare for n = 60,61,62, for example.

The higher the totient value for n, the more circles you see, basically.

Right, so I can look at the diagram and see that 59 and 61 are prime while 60 has many divisors. I can kinda see that the density of primes decreases gradually.

But I can't see a broader pattern beyond that.

Now here I can see some patterns! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

He's talking about the inability of Hacker News submissions to retain their title when it differs from the title of the article. This is particularly bothersome when the title of the article is something vague like "Prime number patterns" or "On concepts and realities."

It is against the rules to talk about this problem, though. From the guidelines: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."

So not that we'll "discuss" it, but is there an article link or a blog post available that explains the perceived rationale behind this most vexatious and utterly inane misfeature?

Not really. There is a lot of discussion in the first few results here: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+st...

> It is against the rules to talk about this problem, though. From the guidelines: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."

Because of this, I think there should be a meta-HN so rather than shutting down discussion and causing it to bubble up and eventually boil over, it can be openly ignored until a fantastic idea comes along (or refused nonetheless), instead of total silence or a constant buzzing noise like my post and the parent which, honestly, detracts from the overall quality of HN proper.

The title changed, and hence the topic. So no instead of a conversation about visualisations in JS, we'll have one about prime numbers.

If the OP thought the "prime number" aspect was interesting, he would have posted it as such.

Instead I'm sitting here looking at the OP thinking...this is not a very interesting visualisation of prime numbers.

  Top-10 Prime Numbers in Patterns

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