this is a techincal dive into how cloudflare responded, not a confirmation that they responded
for whatever reason, unknown to me, hn automatically strips "how" from the start of titles. i cant remember ever seeing a title where this was an improvement.
Of course you can't, because the cases it improves don't get noticed, while the remainder stick out like sore thumbs.
I learned a few years ago that HN also editorializes by dropping "world's" from titles
Before: Teens break record for world's longest kickball game
After: Teens break record for longest kickball game
I do actually agree with that change.
It occasionally leads to kinda ambiguous headlines, e.g.
"China opens world's longest undersea tunnel"
vs
"China opens longest undersea tunnel"
It's a little unclear if it's the longest undersea tunnel in the world, or just in China
It doesn't give enough recognition to the true longest game of space kickball.
... what a world.
I'm yet to see a good example of the title stripping, at least for "how" and "how to" (although perhaps this is survivorship bias).
Interestingly, there's a current post on the front page with "How" at the start of the title.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018715 "How do I inform Windows that I’m writing a binary file?"
I wonder if it ending in a '?' has anything to do with it?
edit: Upon review, at the time of posting it was actually on the 2nd page
not sure about that specific case or if '?' has anything to do with it, but there is a short editing window where the submitter can re-add the "how" or whatever back in
I’ve been hit by this when posting links. If you edit the post, you can re-add the stripped word and it will stay. “Why” is another that is often stripped.
Starting a title with “How” is standard clickbait.
Starting a sentence with “How” is standard English, too.
Much of clickbait is standard English. HN takes a policy of applying editorial discretion to headlines, which makes the site more valuable.
If we are taking that attitude why not go all the way?
Titles are standard clickbait.
With LLMs, you could actually do anti-clickbait titles. Extract the article text with something like r.jina.ai, and ask an LLM to generate a ~80-character summary that explains the main point of the article for people too busy to read it.
I do think this would genuinely be useful.
You're absolutely right! (errm...oops....anyways...)
The fact that LLMs usually generate anodyne summaries is actualy a benefit here.
I used my website-to-markdown tool[0] to get the text, piped the output to claude -p and got a pretty decent "Patching Copy Fail at scale: how bpf-lsm bought us time before the kernel reboot" result.
[0] https://markshot.dev
back in my day, people just used the thing that rattles around inside their skull for such tasks
To do that, you need to read the article first, which is the point of click-bait titles. The point of the defense is to avoid exposing your neurons to that stuff.
i would hope that people are reading articles first and submitting them to hn because they are interesting, rather than submitting articles to hn blindly.
I agree with you on that, but that just holds true (we hope) for the OP.
HN already editorializes the title, to help everyone other than the OP (not all people agree over what's interesting to them). Now we're just arguing over the degree.