How Catherine de Medici Made Perfumed Gloves Fashionable | Hacker News Reader

How Catherine de Medici Made Perfumed Gloves Fashionable

atlasobscura.com

29 pointsPetiver12 comments

I think this is another longform article that does not do justice to the title. Yes there are interesting nuggets of information in there, but really all of that does not really lead to the "how". Tldr; Catherine brought perfumes and perfume laced gloves to france. She is rumored to have killed some one with a poison laced glove. It is not even clear if she actually ever even made a poison laced glove.

Yeah, the title should be something more like "How Catherine de Medici Probably Never Made Gloves Laced With Poison" because that's all the article is.

She certainly didn't make poison gloves a fashion trend as implied by the title.

Drinking the urine of pregnant animals for fertility isn't as crazy as it sounds. The drug premarin is made from the urine of pregnant mare and is sometimes prescribe to help with conception.

Similarly, some children with stunted growth seem to benefit from using insulin growth factor-1 (IGF-1)...with FDA approval ... For the layman, that's a supplement extracted from deer antler velvet...

That this ended up on the front page suggests a problem somewhere.

How hard would it be to semi machine-generate such vacuous articles? Would it make sense for the ad value of eye balls? Maybe if such generation becomes common place a shift in value bringing back better curation and editorial lines in social/mass media will occur?

I'm pretty sure a large chunk of internet content is machine-generated.

Read Slate Star Codex for an entire community of generated content. Basically any drug and any side effect have an auto-generated article and related community.

I've seen hundreds of articles where the headline was just repeated over and over in different ways in every paragraph with random supporting text.

Do the math.

EDIT: Read Slate Star Codex for an account of such a community. Slate Star Codex itself is pretty obviously human-generated.

Goodness, what a resource hog of a site.

I hate articles like this. The headline is deceptive and the article rambles all over the place before getting to the point at the very end. Catherine did not make "gloves laced with poison fashionable," she made perfumed gloves fashionable.

The embedded ad that autoplays when you mouse over it was also NOT appreciated.

This is why I come to the comments first. Thanks for saving me some time.

Title should have had a question mark, as the conclusion is "No."

Betteridge's law of headlines:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

Most journalists and editors are now trained to end the title of an article with a question mark when results are inconclusive...

A good way to filter what you read...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com