The first image's caption said "note the massive nose in the middle of the game's frame" and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise.
"particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there."
Yeah, that's me not finding the nose.
EDIT: Another such HN headline misreading was when I read "The contribution of Cheese to western civilization" as "The contribution of Chinese to western civilization" .
I wonder if it is related to optical illusions.
Have you ever read the paragraph where every word is misspelled but people tend to be able to read with very little reduction in speed?
I wonder if it's partly due to the proportional font... nose and noise look pretty distinct in a monospaced font because of the length difference.
Easy mix-up, everyone read it as "digital noise" and thought to themselves, "grainy screen? noise as in randomness of the input timing? that doesn't sound helpful."