I can't speak to your specific use cases, but on hacker news (or a blog about scalability) I think it's completely reasonable to have such a title. It's not li

I can't speak to your specific use cases, but on hacker news (or a blog about scalability) I think it's completely reasonable to have such a title. It's not link bait. Anyone building a system (e.g., for a startup) or maintaining/extending an existing system should be aware of these numbers -- if for no other reason than that they are fully aware of any tradeoffs they are choosing to make ("well, optimizing for seeks on write is premature at te moment, we need some users first, but I can at least add a level of indirection to prepare for future improvements." or even "yes, I know this will require refactoring as soon as we have XXXX users, but f-it, we gotta get to market. Let me notify others of the iceberg I'm building and why.") Knowledge, properly applied, can be power.