The Frankensteinian Future Of Cybernetic Cars

The title of this post is what my mind got out of this title:

The intersection of biology and transportation

No, the piece is not actually about organo-tech vehicles. It's actually about taking lessons from human blood flow and applying them to traffic engineering. (eyes cross -- they so missed on the title)

I liked the piece and wanted to post it to Hacker News, but HN is a tough crowd and they are very picky about titles. You need to not offend their sensibilities when titling a piece there. It can live or die based largely on the title.

On Hacker News, you have an 80 character limit for titles. Generally speaking, you are also supposed to use the original title. These two things sometimes clash. Additionally, they don't like "click bait".

When the title doesn't really work for Hacker News, a common practice is to grab something from a subtitle or a descriptive phrase from the content. I initially pulled these two pieces, both of which exceed 80 characters, then edited them to get them to fit the character limit:

helpful comparisons between the arteries of the transportation network and the body’s vascular system. became Comparing the arteries of transportation networks and the body’s vascular system.

The more robotized our traffic grid will be, the more organic and alive its movement will feel. became The more robotized our traffic grid, the more organic and alive its movement.

Then I noticed that the video itself had this as the title showing and changed the title on HN one last time to it:

What a driverless world could look like.

I think I did the right thing. It finally got an upvote.

Comments