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Comment by tomashubelbauer | Hacker News Reader

This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.

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The "feature" has clearly outstayed its usefulness, I really don't know why they haven't disabled it yet.

It's kind of like the Scunthorpe Problem[1]. Really, there's no better way to solve [whatever it is HN is trying to solve here] than text substitution??

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

While I have ranted already about the automated word removal being silly, too few posters are aware that you can edit the title after submission and auto-editorializing to restore anything that's been unnecessarily cut off.

Perhaps too many are aware, because the more people fix the auto-editorializing manually, the less inclined Dang will be to eventually see a reason to remove it after all.

It's an unaligned regular expression gone rogue. We became too dependent on our labor-saving string functions—not afraid enough of their corner cases, and lower cases. They were too useful. We began to normalize deviance, when we should have been normalizing Chomsky forms. We turned a blind eye to the unbounded growing evidence of something alarming.

It's too late to backtrack.

We all know what this means, but few of us have the courage to say it - we must immediately halt all research on regular expression. None of us know how it works and it has terrorized us for too long.

Wait, this is automatic? HN removes 'how'?

Yes, but you can edit your entry and re-add it. Then it stays. So, there's an override present.

It's a consistent source of unintentional comedy at least.

Worst feature ever. So many titles that get butchered for no reason.

I was thinking the same. Whatever benefit there may ostensibly be, we should consider it against the frequent, if benign, confusion it causes.

The hubris that simple code can fix deceptively complex and ambiguous human problems is too baked into the community to separate.

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