[belval]

While I generally agree with your stance on over-policing, a third of the comments under this article are off-topic. HN is unique in that the community somewhat agrees that discussion should be on-topic and has a lot less tolerance for single-line jokes or sarcasm.

> I think comments like yours harm not help the community by making people less comfortable sharing.

Maybe I am unique in that, but if your contribution to a thread on a deep learning paper is a joke about decepticons or electrical transformers, it's okay to be less comfortable about sharing.

[kortex]

I'd be fine with a joke which somehow manages to pun NN transformers, electrical transformers, and the series about robots. That would be an interesting and sufficiently novel joke. It's high surprisal.

I have no problem policing the low-effort, un-novel, unsurprising, lame quips about expecting other use of the word transformer. It adds nothing of value and dilutes threads. I've gotten downvoted for doing it, most of us have, it's a right of passage, and one that I appreciate, since it makes HN comment threads jam-packed with interesting info.

[bee_rider]

I interpret these puns as lighthearted feedback to the point that the title is unclear and jargony. Apparently a transformer is some machine learning thing, I'm sure it is an appropriate name for a journal publication where everybody who sees it will be in the field, but to an outsider it is not really obvious what this title is about.