

Why use a digital stadiometer? - ColinWright
http://blog.plover.com/tech/stadiometer.html

======
ColinWright
The original title reflected the actual point of the article, but the mods
have changed it. It's captured in the last sentence:

    
    
        [A]ssume that bad technical decisions are made
            rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.
    

I suppose changing the title from informative to non-informative is a decision
being made rationally for reasons that are not apparent.

To the moderators:

I understand why you sometimes change the titles on submissions, setting them
to the original title on the source page. I get it, I really do. But this
article really, _really_ isn't about the stadiometer, and while it's true that
you've changed it to the original title on the source page, it is deeply
misleading, and the extent to which it's not misleading, it's uninformative.

Please, please, can you sort this out? The title I carefully provided was
intended to get to the intent and content of the item, and I feel that it was
much, much more informative. You are removing information, and that feels like
a really bad thing.

It can't be a 'bot doing the change, because it would've happened sooner, so
there must be a human looking at this and making the decision to change it.
They are already expending brain-power on the task, they are already looking
at the submission, why not actually make a decision, rather than acting in a
purely mechanical fashion?

Case in point, consider this submission:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7245505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7245505)

You haven't changed the title on that. Why not? Because the title is "pub". If
you change the informative title on this post to one that's non-informative,
why not change the title on that one?

Someone, somewhere, is making decisions already. For the sake of making HN a
better place, please consider a better process for doing so.

~~~
planckscnst
Yes, a thousand times!

A title exists in a context. The context of the original medium is completely
different than a list of articles on HN. For instance, people who subscribe to
an author's blog typically know the author's voice and typical subject matter,
whereas people who see a title in a long list of possibly interesting content
pieces do not have that context, so the original title does not communicate to
those what the author was intending to communicate.

There must be a better solution than blindly reverting every title.

~~~
triplesec
For some reason it seems to be a simple posting rule in HN and mods like to do
this. Yet it's not always adhered to. Confusing!

------
scottw
This is the kind of wisdom I wish I had when I started my career and assumed
that everyone who did things differently from me was stupid. I wish I could
give it to all my current smunderlings when they complain about "bad" code
written by otherwise smart and capable people last year... There's always a
story behind what is, and it's worth learning before passing judgement.

------
ableal
> the manual stadiometers were always giving inaccurate readings

An amazing feat, considering that the mechanical ones I've seen consist of a
horizontal bracket that slides on the vertical scale attached to a wall (or a
stand), and one just needs to read the number shown when the bracket touches
the top of the head.

And it's not like that data needs micrometer precision ...

~~~
DanBC
That struck me too. All the errors I can think of from the manual devices
would happen with the electronic devices. (People not standing straight,
people with big hair, etc etc.)

While you don't need micrometre precision a person's hight (and weight, and
thus BMI) can be used as part of the process that deprives them of their
liberty and subjects them to forced feeding against their will via NG tube. So
accuracy is probably a reasonable requirement.

