The discussion seems to have dried up. Change the packaging and you change the quality of the product, it seems. At least the perceived one.
I was afraid that this might happen. It happened in the past. So I thought about a good title that would summarize why I though this essay is relevant for this community and I was hoping for some discussion and impressions about it. It did generate some controversy but for the wrong reasons (i.e. the title). At least it was read and taken into consideration. I still think this is a very nice write-up from ~200 years ago about what it means to create something from basically nothing (from pure thought, that is), which programming is clearly a sub-field of.
Searching through HN, I'm seeing this exact link posted a week ago, with zero comments and upvotes. It gathered 10 comments and 20 votes in half an hour with the modified title, none with its original title.
Thank you for your quick response and for unflagging this post.
I am in favor of people using titles that reflect what they think will be of interest to HN readers. I know the line between that and editorializing is not always clear, but that's a fact of life.
Often an interesting article will have a misleading title for SEO reasons. Seems like those are appropriately rewritten for HN submission.
Or imagine (I'm making this up) an article in the NYT entitled "Senator presses tech firms to supply encryption keys". Yawn...I've seen that for literally decades. But it turns out that the senator drew their analysis upon specifically bad info by relying on an article in wired or maybe a non-law enforcement-specific lobbying group, but one that turns out to have been funded by google. Then a title that called out the specific reason its relevant to HN would be useful.
(This is a totally made up example; I don't mean to diss wired nor google in this post).
I was afraid that this might happen. It happened in the past. So I thought about a good title that would summarize why I though this essay is relevant for this community and I was hoping for some discussion and impressions about it. It did generate some controversy but for the wrong reasons (i.e. the title). At least it was read and taken into consideration. I still think this is a very nice write-up from ~200 years ago about what it means to create something from basically nothing (from pure thought, that is), which programming is clearly a sub-field of.
Searching through HN, I'm seeing this exact link posted a week ago, with zero comments and upvotes. It gathered 10 comments and 20 votes in half an hour with the modified title, none with its original title.
Thank you for your quick response and for unflagging this post.