Comment by gjm11
3 days ago
Has anyone ever seen an instance in which the automated "How" removal actually improves an article title on HN rather than just making them wrong?
(There probably are some. Most likely I notice the bad ones more than the good ones. But it does seem like I notice a lot of bad ones, and never any good ones.)
[EDITED to add:] For context, the actual article title begins "Superpowers: How I'm using ..." and it has been auto-rewritten to "Superpowers: I'm using ...", which completely changes what "Superpowers" is understood as applying to. (The actual intention: superpowers for LLM coding agents. The meaning after the change: LLM coding agents as superpowers for humans.)
I agree, I'm sure I've seen instances of where it's worked but the problem is that when it messes it up it's much more annoying than any benefit it brings when it does work. Some of us don't want to be reminded that tech is full of hubris, overconfidence, poor judgment, and failure about what can/should be abstracted and automated.
I've had it happen with me a few times where it was reasonable, sometimes where it was debatable, and if it was just wrong I edit it to add the How back in.
Yeah, to the point I can recall several examples where the title stuck out as dumb on HN and only when visiting the original page it started to make sense, but not a single case where I could say the automated removal really did a good job.