[mpweiher]

Submitter here.

Getting to the HN front-page has a very large random component. That doesn't mean you can't improve the odds, in this case by providing an appropriate title. To me this seemed like a story that deserved attention, and the auto-generated title from the twitter post was sufficiently useless to warrant editing the title (which I usually don't do).

Also, this happens all the time and sometimes you will be lucky and sometimes somebody else will be lucky. I've had dups of my earlier submissions go to front-page so many times I can't really keep track. But it really isn't a big deal, this isn't exactly doing years of research and getting scooped by someone else filing a patent first or publishing more quickly. It's just a submission to a web-site, effort was a few clicks.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯