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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I restored the "original" title.

For my part, I'm always sad when a meta comment that has nothing to do with the content of the post ends up getting voted overwhelmingly to the top. It's less your fault than that of the overwhelming upvoters. But it's an unfortunate glitch that reliably mars HN discussions, and I don't know of a good answer to it.

By the way, the reason we reverted the title in the first place is that the editorialized subtitle immediately provoked a bikeshed debate about the "communities" and whether they're really distinct or not—when the meat of the post is about things like fault tolerance in distributed computing.

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(This is of course wandering down the same meta path, but...)

I've always wondered if it would be possible to tag comments with tags like "tangent" or "meta" (or whatever else seems good), and then apply sorts based on that (probably in some user selectable way).

> By the way, the reason we reverted the title in the first place is that the editorialized subtitle immediately provoked a bikeshed debate about the "communities" and whether they're really distinct or not—when the meat of the post is about things like fault tolerance in distributed computing.

I disagree that the comment was a bikeshed debate: the article spends several paragraphs (and the first four!) talking about the relationship of the two communities, and the discussion of their relationship (both in the article and here) explained some of the ways that knowledge I knew about math intensive computing (and related technologies, such as GPUs) related to problems I hadn't previously worked on.

Exploring the relationships between subdisciplines, especially closely related ones like these, is a benefit both in the article and in the related discussion.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: please either stop mod-editing titles, or remove the title field on submissions and set the title automatically from the linked page. Even when a mod changes to a better title, it causes enough confusion and disagreement to be a net negative.

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