Hacker News Reader

> "most likely to get upvoted" for which "Richard Stallman is Dead" is the optimal title

This is extremely funny, and reminds me of the famous newspaper headline "Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead". Of course, at time of writing, RMS is still alive and the optimal headline is a falsehood..

View on HN

My system uses logistic regression on words and it thinks that HN (1) really likes Richard Stallman and (2) really likes obituaries so put them together and that headline gets a great score.

I bet if it was put in as "fake news" it would get hundreds of votes and comments before dang took it down. And when it does happen for real it will certainly get 1000s votes.

For example: my #2 submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38468326

> Of course, at time of writing, RMS is still alive and the optimal headline is a falsehood..

That's where Betteridge's law of headlines comes to the rescue! Just rephrase the headline as a question - "Is Richard Stallman dead?".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com