3 ms·
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
by john_strinlai 6mo ago
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.
- trollbridge 6mo agoStarting a title with “How” is standard clickbait.
- Goronmon 6mo agoIf we are taking that attitude why not go all the way? Titles are standard clickbait.
- miki123211 6mo agoWith 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.
- john_strinlai 6mo agoback in my day, people just used the thing that rattles around inside their skull for such tasks
- senko 6mo agoTo 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.
- john_strinlai 6mo agoi would hope that people are reading articles first and submitting them to hn because they are interesting, rather than submitting articles to hn blindly.
- senko 6mo agoI 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.
- senko 6mo agoYou'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 https://markshot.dev
- gilrain 6mo agoStarting a sentence with “How” is standard English, too.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- trollbridge 6mo agoMuch of clickbait is standard English. HN takes a policy of applying editorial discretion to headlines, which makes the site more valuable.
- varun_ch 6mo agoI'm yet to see a good example of the title stripping, at least for "how" and "how to" (although perhaps this is survivorship bias).
- gamegoblin 6mo agoI 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
- Velocifyer 6mo agoI do actually agree with that change.
- gamegoblin 6mo agoIt 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
- jmalicki 6mo agoIt doesn't give enough recognition to the true longest game of space kickball.
- buredoranna 6mo ago... what a world.
- dpoloncsak 6mo agoInterestingly, there's a current post on the front page with "How" at the start of the title. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018715 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
- john_strinlai 6mo agonot 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
- GavinAnderegg 6mo agoI’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.
- dang 6mo agoOf course you can't, because the cases it improves don't get noticed, while the ones that break stick out like sore thumbs.
- john_strinlai 6mo agoi mean... its pretty easy to tell in either direction because i read the article titles when i click on them. given the rule about matching the article title, any discrepancy is noticeable. but its your world dang, we're just living in it. do whatever you want with the titles. you have previously made your position clear to me about receiving feedback on hn; im not under any illusions about the value of my opinion.
- dang 6mo ago> but its your world dang, we're just living in it. do whatever you want with the titles. you have previously made your position clear to me about receiving feedback on hn; im not under any illusions about the value of my opinion. Is that how you felt about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465? I can't find any other post that you might be referring to.
- john_strinlai 6mo agono, its how i felt from a few different emails i have sent, with one of the more recent ones having what i felt was a pretty off-putting reply. but there is really no need to hash it out. in the grand scheme, i understand the approach you take, despite feeling frustration over it. you've got thousands of people offering their opinions, all of them thinking they are correct. my last comment should have probably been one that i wrote in a notepad and erased afterwards, rather than one that i posted. sorry.