That's a fair point, and one I thought about for awhile. Both this post and the previous one were originally a single Yegge-length post entitled "The Eternal Optimism of Programmers." The problem was a) Yegge's columns are so long that even when they're great, people zone out, and b) I'm no Steve Yegge. So I split the column into its two general parts and started editing two essays: the one in which I said software sucked, and the one in which I seemed to be calling out Hacker News. I realized that no matter what I titled the first one, someone was going to end up posting it as me saying open-source software sucked, so I simply decided to one-up them and meet that title on its own terms: the usability side of the equation. At that point, turning the working titles into the actual titles made sense.
Are they provocative titles? Yes. Are they fair titles? I think also yes. That means they're good titles. There's nothing wrong with being provocative, as long as you're not being provocative for the sake of being provocative. I don't think I'm doing that here, but I understand if you disagree.
Ben, off-topic: I really like the way you've done bitquabit, and I wanted to look at the Django code you used, but when I went to your bitbucket account, it doesn't seem like it's up there? Did I miss something?
I'm tentatively aiming to release it around the end of July. At the moment, there's a bit too much hard-coded to handle my site (e.g., there's an entire urls.py that does nothing but map my old MovableType and WordPress URLs to Django, which can be messy, and my DB passwords are in the source repository), and there are a few features I want to add before I release to the world (like putting StackOverflow's markdown editor into the post editor so you don't have to guess-and-check whether your Markdown looks right), but once I do that, she's all yours.
