← Back to context

Comment by dang

4 years ago

That's an egregiously baity title. That's not cool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: The submitted title was "Your source code is worthless". I've changed it now.

9 comments

dang

Reply
ontouchstart  4 years ago

Dang, your title definitely made me curious enough to click the link, had a quick glimpse of the article and went to download the original 14 page PDF the author provided

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

This is the power of web and http that opens the world to any curious mind. Your change of title made a book marketing page to a gate to new ideas to explore and discover.

Also out of curiosity I traced the HN list of the submissions of the original link, i.e., the author who is promoting his book:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=cloogshicer

You can see that your change increased the attention to his marketing effort by a factor of 2!

Unfortunately this attention would hardly help him reach his audience, who are on the hiring side of the market and have completely different constraints than the engineering minded people dominated in HN.

Interesting conversation though.

  • cloogshicer  4 years ago

    I mainly submitted this here for the discussion. I really enjoy reading people's comments and I'm very curious if my hypotheses are correct.

wnoise  4 years ago

And yet the current title ("Peter Naur's view of programming") now contains even less information about the content of the article. It may be less "clickbaity" -- I certainly am less inclined to click on it, but it's also less useful.

  • dang  4 years ago

    I would say it contains much more information, in addition to being accurate.

    If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

    • wnoise  4 years ago

      I'm not sure what you mean by neutrality here; I want the title of a piece to accurately reflect the thesis of the piece, whether or not the piece itself is biased.

      But the current HN title is not a thesis at all. At best it's a characterization of the thesis of the piece. It's not a wrong characterization, but I don't see how it's useful. Certainly, he is indeed illustrating and referring back to Peter Naur's description of programming as theory-building, but this title doesn't tell me (a) what Peter Naur's view is, nor (b) why I should care, nor (c) whether this piece even agrees or disagrees with it.

      The first subheading of "Your source code is worthless" is a running theme that connects everything. Yes, later on he calls to Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" article as an explanation for this observation, but the belief is more central than the explanation. It starts before the explanation and continues past the engagement with Naur.

      I don't see how weakening this strong thesis by hiding it helps make things either more accurate or more neutral. Is it that it seems like an insult? Leave out "your", or change to "most" or "in general".

      (In contrast, the article's title of "How to hire senior developers: Give them more autonomy" would be bad one. It is barely touched on, just thrown in at the end, as a conclusion on top of the meat of the piece.)

      If I had to suggest something that covered what I consider the main points, and had more than the central theme: 'Source code alone is worthless as "Programming as Theory Building" suggests', but that's starting to attribute a stronger point of view to Naur than may be reasonable.

      But the originally submitted title was perfectly okay.

      1 reply →

cloogshicer  4 years ago

My apologies, dang. I thought it was borderline, but it captured the essence of what I was trying to say. Sadly it kind of derailed the discussion a bit, so I guess you're right.

Thanks for changing it instead of deleting it. How do you feel about "On the Value of Source Code"?