Why use a digital stadiometer? | Hacker News Reader

Why use a digital stadiometer?

blog.plover.com

29 pointsColinWright8 comments

The original title reflected the actual point of the article, but the mods have changed it. It's captured in the last sentence:

    [A]ssume that bad technical decisions are made
        rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.

I suppose changing the title from informative to non-informative is a decision being made rationally for reasons that are not apparent.

To the moderators:

I understand why you sometimes change the titles on submissions, setting them to the original title on the source page. I get it, I really do. But this article really, really isn't about the stadiometer, and while it's true that you've changed it to the original title on the source page, it is deeply misleading, and the extent to which it's not misleading, it's uninformative.

Please, please, can you sort this out? The title I carefully provided was intended to get to the intent and content of the item, and I feel that it was much, much more informative. You are removing information, and that feels like a really bad thing.

It can't be a 'bot doing the change, because it would've happened sooner, so there must be a human looking at this and making the decision to change it. They are already expending brain-power on the task, they are already looking at the submission, why not actually make a decision, rather than acting in a purely mechanical fashion?

Case in point, consider this submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7245505

You haven't changed the title on that. Why not? Because the title is "pub". If you change the informative title on this post to one that's non-informative, why not change the title on that one?

Someone, somewhere, is making decisions already. For the sake of making HN a better place, please consider a better process for doing so.

Yes, a thousand times!

A title exists in a context. The context of the original medium is completely different than a list of articles on HN. For instance, people who subscribe to an author's blog typically know the author's voice and typical subject matter, whereas people who see a title in a long list of possibly interesting content pieces do not have that context, so the original title does not communicate to those what the author was intending to communicate.

There must be a better solution than blindly reverting every title.

For some reason it seems to be a simple posting rule in HN and mods like to do this. Yet it's not always adhered to. Confusing!

This is the kind of wisdom I wish I had when I started my career and assumed that everyone who did things differently from me was stupid. I wish I could give it to all my current smunderlings when they complain about "bad" code written by otherwise smart and capable people last year... There's always a story behind what is, and it's worth learning before passing judgement.

> the manual stadiometers were always giving inaccurate readings

An amazing feat, considering that the mechanical ones I've seen consist of a horizontal bracket that slides on the vertical scale attached to a wall (or a stand), and one just needs to read the number shown when the bracket touches the top of the head.

And it's not like that data needs micrometer precision ...

That struck me too. All the errors I can think of from the manual devices would happen with the electronic devices. (People not standing straight, people with big hair, etc etc.)

While you don't need micrometre precision a person's hight (and weight, and thus BMI) can be used as part of the process that deprives them of their liberty and subjects them to forced feeding against their will via NG tube. So accuracy is probably a reasonable requirement.

> And it's not like that data needs micrometer precision ...

But maybe that's the point. Maybe it does need very high precision and that is the unappreciated point of the story.

Perhaps the digital stadiometer eliminates service calls simply by giving a stable reading that you can write down whether it's accurate or not. This is a psychological advantage of digital readouts, but one that is not lost on the makers of measurement instruments.

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