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24 points by oinksoft ↗ HN
You didn't know what I was asking?

On the front page right now are two posts like this: "Mailvelope," "Drawbridge." Product/project names without accompanying descriptions are meaningless but this is the norm.

Why are submission title guidelines enforced so rigorously except for these cases?

10 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] thread
bradhe
My hunch is the people submitting these stories assumes that A) the name speaks for itself and B) they're trying to evoke some sense of wonder/excitement with the single-word title.
smlacy
Or hide it's irrelevance? "Drawbridge: In-process visualization of Win32 Binaries" will get a lot less clicks.
marcosdumay
Well, if they didn't assume that the name speaks for itself, they'd make it more likely for people that don't know the products to discover that they exist... what is the entire point of an anouncement.

And now I'm remembering Dr. Strangelove for some reason.

tptacek
It's not just the word "Drawbridge"; it's "Drawbridge (microsoft.com)". If you look through the announcements, you'll see dozens and dozens of new projects announced the same way.
diego
It may have to do with the time of the day. I would assume most mods are on Pacific time, and those stories were posted pretty early.
jonathanjaeger
Oftentimes I see one-word titles for companies that we already know of. For example, Drawbridge on Microsoft.com is most likely a new product from Microsoft and it's just as easy to clickthrough and read about it than try to decipher from an HN title. However, Mailvelope is not a company I've heard of and would have benefited from a description (however.. it was still easy to clickthrough).
bkirwi
The HN guidelines[0] ask you to (almost always) use the title from the original page. Those titles follow the guidelines to the letter.

It's arguable whether that's a good guideline or not -- it keeps out a lot of editorializing from the titles, which is fantastic, but it does mean that the submissions frequently lack context.

teach
I'll take lack of context over editorializing any day.
teach
The guideline is that submission titles should be the same as the title of the linked document. Which is true in this case.
dang
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