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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This post was briefly killed by user flags. It's not hard to see why: its deliberately outrageous linkbait title violated the HN guidelines. Please don't do that again.

The post itself is substantive [1], so we've unkilled it and attempted to give it a neutral title.

1. Edit: though dismayingly not free of the same drama-mongering. Hopefully the HN thread will stay substantive in response.

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Fair enough -- and thank you for seeing that it is, indeed, quite technically meaty (I submitted it, but I didn't write it). Please note that I titled the submission with the title of the blog entry itself -- which feels like it should always be safe. While I see the line in the guidelines you're referring to ("please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"), it's hard to know where that line is. In this case, it feels like the title is certainly acidic, bitter, wrathful, etc. -- but I don't think it was intended to be linkbait.

I think this post is linkbait. The author's title is "Golang is trash," but the post doesn't discuss anything about Golang. Golang is a programming language, and the author admits that he has "no real opinion on the language itself" (his words). This blog post discusses some pretty esoteric details about a particular toolchain, which is not even the only production-ready toolchain available for Golang at the moment, as the author freely acknowledges. If there were a blog post titled "Lisp is trash," that proceeded to talk about obscure implementation details of a certain version of CMUCL, I think it would be flagkilled-- and this should be too.

I also feel like there are some factual errors. He chides the Go developers for "arrogantly ignoring" existing tools for linking code. But the gccgo integration was done by Ian Lance Taylor, who is on the Go team at Google. I believe Rob Pike is on record as saying that he wanted multiple implementations of Go to increase the robustness of the language.

I would appreciate a good critical look at the Golang runtime and toolchain. How does its performance stack up, how fast does it compile, etc. But this ain't it. This is a guy complaining that he doesn't like the naming of registers in machine-generated binary files. I will literally never need to care about any of this. I don't even need to know this to make use of assembly language in my Go programs, since I can use the C library integration for that.

I probably should have been clearer. By "substantive" I meant substantive enough not to be flag-killed. In most such cases we typically replace the title with a more neutral one and, if the thread goes flamewar, penalize it. It's rare for a controversial post about programming to get killed outright, unless it's obvious junk.

The title was certainly provocative, but I don't see any justification for calling it "outrageous linkbait".

Actually, I think the term "linkbait" is thrown around far too freely here and should probably be banned.

It is a substantive article though, even if one happens to disagree with the author's conclusions. I'm glad it was resurrected from flagkilled state.

Call it provocative if you prefer. Actually a more accurate term might be flamewar bait. Either way, it should be obvious that such a title is inappropriate for HN.

Out of curiosity, what was the previous title?

Golang is trash

> This post was briefly killed by user flags.

So what happened with those users that flagged a link without reading the article?

The previous title was inflammatory and by itself may deserve flagging, even though the content of the article actually has substance (in between the white-hot flames).

Doubt an article titled "PHP is trash" (with the same quality of content) would have been flag killed

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