Hacker News Reader

Comment by timdierks | Hacker News Reader

I submitted the link with the title you note for the following three reasons:

1. Josh Bloch is an author of particular interest to this community.

2. When I searched to see if the page had already been submitted, I noted that recent HN posts on LIDAR were on technical laser ranging (e.g. in mapping applications), not on speed enforcement.

3. I thought it was an article that would be of interest to HN readers, so I thought they would be well-served by an appealing link title which conveyed the content and tone of the presentation and invited a click.

View on HN

I saw the title after it was changed and I definitely thought that this was going to be a technical article about LIDAR in its 3D mapping application.

From the guidelines:

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

and

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

The submitter didn't do this.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

Guidelines != rules. Sometimes authors write poor headlines (this is a great example). The community benefits from headlines that are more descriptive of the article. Having mods change them back for consistency's sake harms HN more than it helps.

I'd rather be on a website that errs on the side of "no linkbait" than a website that allows too much linkbait.

I'd rather not be on a website that takes itself so seriously that people obsess over rules/guidelines. It seems like every popular post has this confusion and argument about changing titles.

The original title is, indeed, misleading. The article is not about LIDAR specifically, but about how LIDAR is (mis)used in speed enforcement. IMO, the title change was warranted.

I think at this point your beef is with PG himself, or whoever he had write those guidelines.

The thing the mods are trying to avoid is link baiting, and they tend to err on the side of "no exceptions". I prefer this, as any other option may lead to more unintentional bias, or worse.

I suppose that "Josh Bloch Fights a LIDAR Speeding Ticket (with Science)" is a bit more link bait-y than "The Lowdown on LIDAR". I would also argue that the former compactly explains the entire content of the article, much more so than the latter, especially given that the author claims no expertise on LIDAR.

Regardless, I still would have preferred the original title. Perhaps removing the reference to Josh Bloch (and, perhaps, the parenthetical "with science") could have been dropped to reduce its link baity-ness.

As an addendum, I clicked on the link and read the article after the title had been changed to match the article's title, so perhaps my stated preference, as an afterthought, is completely unfounded.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"The Lowdown on LIDAR (Josh Blochs presentation)" is 47 chars and would probably have been kept.

Your title is link-baity. "Beats speeding ticket" and "with science" are obvious link bait. I'm kind of surprised that you thought your replacements would stick.

How would a reader know that this has to do with speeding radar, and not LIDAR use in ranging / mapping?

And I think it's relevant that the content of the presentation is scientific/analytic, rather than related to using legal strategies to invalidate a speeding ticket, for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com