Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesgill | Hacker News Reader

HN truncated it, unfortunately.

Sorry about that! Recapitated.

Hey, thank you.

You can edit the title after submission, for some limited period of time. The HN auto-rewrite rules are only applied upon submission, not when editing the title subsequently. It's recommended to always check the title immediately after submission, and correct it if the auto-rewrite did the wrong thing.

Are we sure it did the wrong thing? If a rule was put in to remove an initial "How" then presumably TFA is a fine exemplar; I can't imagine such a rule having some majority of outcomes be somehow better than this one. If this was a bad outcome, then the rule itself needs to go, unless I'm missing some very different and more typical syntax that it's good for.

If the "how" of a situation is newsworthy, presumably the existence of the situation is as well, so the benefit of a more concise title isn't creating a major downside. On the other hand, I wouldn't consider the more verbose title a major downside either, so the adjustment isn't worth the potential issues.

As the submitter you can be the judge of whether it did the wrong thing, you don't have to agree with the auto-rewrite rules. I often don’t agree with them, but they are what they are, and I see it as my responsibility to adjust the title when necessary after submitting. So far I never had an edit reverted by moderation.

I agree with that completely. I'm just struggling to agree that what we see in this case is an edge case to be manually adjusted back, due to my inability to think of examples that we wouldn't see as having the exact same "wrong" nature. If virtually every application of this rule feels the same as this one, then leaving the adjustment in place (or abolishing the rule if possible) would be the more sensible outcome.

As with many things in life, rarely are you in a position to change the rules. You just have to find workarounds to get the desired results

Yes, but I'm accepting of this result, with no inclination to work around it, if this is actually considered good by the rule maker. If the rule maker would say "this instance is a poor outcome, but here are examples of the more-typical good outcomes" then in that scenario, the latter half of which I don't yet believe in but am interested to learn, I'm all for the workaround (manual edit).

Oh so that's why I like paying paper board games with friends in person so much!

Good to know. We are all not experts on the HN ui of course

Reply on news.ycombinator.com