Deceptive is not the right word. How about attention-grabbing, or excellent, to describe the headline instead?

First of all, it's a direct quote from the article. Second, I think some people (like you) object to any attention-grabbing headline, for no reason at all. It was a good article, and that was a good quote to use to get people to click and read.

I can't even imagine how terrible Hacker News would be if all the titles were like what one of the people who responded to your comment said:

"How I learned to delegate and realise people were part of the asernal of tools available at my command prompt"

This is a drab, dull, and terrible headline.

> Second, I think some people (like you) object to any attention-grabbing headline, for no reason at all. It was a good article, and that was a good quote to use to get people to click and read.

I think that's unfair. If an attention grabbing headline is deceptive but leads to a good article, it's still deceptive.

But it's not deceptive, it's what Linus said, and I think it gets at a good key idea in the interview - that Linus has transitioned from being primarily a code reviewer to primarily a manager of people. The part about moving to being a manager of people is just not included in the headline - you learn that by clicking the intriguing title.

That quote, on it's own, has a very different meaning to readers if it is not accompanied by the rest of the article.

That is why it is deceptive.

Now, of course you could say that you should read the article and then you would not be left with the wrong impression... but I think few people read the articles of every headline that they see. Nor should they be expected to, our time is all valuable, we can't all do HN 24/7. Certainly you should always read the article before commenting, but as it stands this headline is deceptive to people who plan on doing neither.

Nor is it reasonable to expect people to not take away impressions from headlines that they don't plan on investigating further. Even if you decided to do that, it would be near impossible to prevent yourself from making unconscious associations.

Headlines should be short, more or less informative, but never deceptive. "Massive PHP bug ...that I almost let through code-review" and "Massive PHP bug" could both be headlines to the same article, but one is deceptive. Unfortunately, it is also the one that is likely to get more hits... Readers who do not particularly find PHP of interest will skip reading either, but the second headline will also (unjustly) form/strengthen a negative association they have with PHP.

> That quote, on it's own, has a very different meaning to readers if it is not accompanied by the rest of the article.

No, it doesn't. I read the title, then I read the entire article, and at the end, I was left with the understanding that Linus Torvalds no longer reads the code for kernel patches, which was exactly what I expected from the title.

The only people who might possibly be confused by the title are people who try to be hyper-literal and pedantic, but those are the same people who would see a quote that says "I don't read" and assume it means the person quoted is illiterate. That kind of thing is a reader-specific problem, and not a problem with the quote.

All that I can tell you concretely is that when I read the headline, this is more or less what went through my head:

>"!?! ...something seems off, I better check the comments for quick clarification"

I then went to the comments, found (as the top comment) a clear clarification, and upvoted it.

Now, that initial "!?!", roughly described as a combination of apprehension and alarm, was not the product of hyper-literalism. Rather it was the product of the headline text and several fuzzy associations I have formed over the years, conscious and otherwise. A quick sampling of some of the prominent conscious associations, translated to english, could be "HN loves when Linus says crazy things", "Linus doesn't write code, he manages and merges.", and "News means something has changed".

Had I been less interested in the topic of "Linus says things", I would have left it at that and moved onto another article.

I think I would describe the notion "It cannot be deceptive because it is a quote and true" as the real hyper-literalism. Truth and deception are not mutually exclusive by any means.

I didn't say a quote cannot be deceptive. I don't see this one as even remotely deceptive, though. If you know who Linus is, you know he owns the Linux kernel. A quote about him not reading code would therefore be taken to refer to the kernel code. In that context, the quote is accurate. Linus by his own admission is not reading the kernel code any more.

I find the quote to be both accurate and (in the context of it being a headline on HN) deceptive.

What exactly about the quote do you consider deceptive "in the context of it being a headline on HN"?

It gave me the impression that Linus's role in the project has changed dramatically, or that he was suggesting something somewhat outlandish.

So it gave you an accurate impression. Linus's role has changed dramatically.

As for you thinking he's suggesting something outlandish, I don't see him suggesting anything. The quote is a statement about something he does.

> Linus's role has changed dramatically.

Not really... Not from what I already perceived it.

> I don't see him suggesting anything

Um, I am not suggesting that he is?

What are you trying to get at here? Do you think I am lying when I say I felt deceived? I don't doubt you when you say you didn't feel deceived.. both are legitimate experiences.

> Not really... Not from what I already perceived it.

What did/do you perceive his role to be? He manages and he doesn't read code, exactly what the headline says.

> Um, I am not suggesting that he is?

Then I have no idea what you mean when you said "or that he was suggesting something somewhat outlandish".

> What are you trying to get at here? Do you think I am lying when I say I felt deceived? I don't doubt you when you say you didn't feel deceived.. both are legitimate experiences.

I'm just trying to understand what you felt deceived about. If you felt deceived, then you felt deceived, and I'm not disputing that. I just don't understand why you felt deceived.

The article was just as I expected from the title. I can't think of a way that anyone who knows who Linus is could misinterpret the title. It's not deceptive at all, and is a good summary of that section of the interview.

I do not think myself unfamiliar with Linus, but I felt deceived after reading the headline and reading the article/comments. I have described my thought process above as best as I can.

Certainly different people can have different take-aways from the same content. Yours is no less legitimate than mine, but I can only speak to my own.

The replacement suggestion is only bad because it's too long, and it's still better than what's there. "Torvalds interview on community, kernel development, & more" would be a way better headline.

The quality of a headline has nothing to do with attention-grabbiness; it's a good headline if I can read it and know whether I'm interested in the contents. To optimize for attention-grabbiness over helpfulness is to defect in the HN posting game.

I agree about the title, I would of gone with:

"How I learned to delegate and realise people were part of the asernal of tools available at my command prompt"

Okay, I should have read your post, we wrote the same thing...

> Most of his work on the kernel is sorting out arguments, and making sure things go to the right person.

tl;dr for your tl;dr:

Linus Torvalds is, in fact, a good manager.

So does this makes GIT an ERP system, for geeks with code?

More like MS-project/MS-excel for geeks...

I would say no unless financial transactions became an integral part of git - which isn't exactly a pleasant thought.

I like it: sign off on commits with SHAs of bitcoin transactions to the original developer. "Linus Torvalds gave SirClueless $10.00 for fixing issue #12073"

The bounty is calculated according to the diff's Levenshtein distance