I don't think "physically" is redundant. It could be legally impossible, or practically impossible.
I played around with the title and character limit for a minute, and managed to get: "A small flat-rate USPS box's weight limit is physically impossible to exceed". How's that?
That sounds awkward to me. The best way to shorten titles is to omit words - then you keep the prosody of the original.
I've taken another crack at it. Now someone will complain about USPS being missing, but "flat rate" implies someone's rate, and it's not as if USPS is a misleading surprise.
(Submitted title was "It is physically impossible to exceed the weight limit for a USPS flat rate box".
First edit was
"It is impossible to exceed the weight limit for a small USPS flat rate box".)
p.s. If anyone wonders why HN spends so much obsessive energy getting titles right - I wondered that for years, too. Then it eventually made sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573. It's like this tiny corner of the universe where one's voice can be heard and correctness actually matters.
That's my theory anyhow. All I know for sure is that the beast likes it if you soothe it about titles.
Perhaps use „Small Flat Rate Box“ rather than „small flat-rate box“, to bring it in line with usps website and indicate that it’s the name of a specific product.
I usually cringe when people show me mainstream news titles (I attributed it to a good literature teacher who taught me to read someone's agenda and bias), but it might also be getting used to that calmed "bookish as PG said' tone here.
Perhaps there would be some value to extending the allowable length for titles, but having a soft limit equal to (or even slightly less than) the current one? If over the soft limit there could be a message that it's preferable to shorten titles to under that length if it can be done without losing useful information.
In theory that way you still get titles shortened where possible, but don't have to wrestle with this kind of issue. Of course the cost is added complexity, so likely not worth it. Maybe just increase the limit then?
I have occasionally thought of writing code to allow this (sort of a 'burst' feature for occasional exceptions) but the 80 char limit is not a real problem in practice. In fact it functions as a classic creative constraint.
> In fact it functions as a classic creative constraint.
If I might play devil's advocate a bit—aren't submitters not supposed to be creative in titles?
"Unless it's misleading or clickbait", yes, but I don't think there's a correlation between click-bait and length. I feel like a lot of titles get edited because of the character limit.
(fueled by three amazing strong coffees in Ginza and the first idle moments on the interwebs I've enjoyed in a long long time)
HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark [1].
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.
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[1] - I hope I didn't jinx this by writing this "ode" :)
The described practice sounds like it would make HN an excellent source of training data for a machine learning model to generate appropriate titles for a piece of long-form content.
