For me, I don't think that the longer titles are any better than the shorter ones, at least for the examples that you give above. Looking at the articles themse

For me, I don't think that the longer titles are any better than the shorter ones, at least for the examples that you give above. Looking at the articles themselves, they have completely different titles to the ones that you picked (both the short and longer versions). This goes against the Hacker News Guidelines [0] which state: "...Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." Indeed, a general rule on Hacker News is not to editorialize headlines (ie make up headlines that look good in order to attract people to click on the link). This does of course raise the question of whether the Hacker News Guidelines are a good idea or not and I am torn on this one. On the one hand, I suppose there are occasions where a headline can be made clearer and more useful by rewriting it. On the other hand, I see the current guidelines as a backlash against the state of linkbait headlines on Reddit when Hacker News was first created all those years ago. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html