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Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

When of course, in reality rather than clickbaity titles, they only wrote up the final, concise proof using two pages _after_ thinking about, and working on, the problem for seven years, building on decades of specific research combined with seven years of learning new mathematics (new to Huang, not necessarily new to the world) that might offer ways into cracking this problem.

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Nothing clickbaity about the title. It says two pages without describing how much effort went into those two pages.

Two pages does not imply it's easy. It implies it's elegant, which probably requires a fair amount of effort.

In his Lettres Provinciales, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously wrote:

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/03/270680304/this-...

It's been interesting to watch the rapid degradation of the term clickbait, we've quickly gone from the original targets of the term ("Local mother discovers one small trick", "He did X, you WON'T believe what happened next"), to it now being used in probably a third of HN's comment sections to describe any title which is even mildly editorialised and not a longwinded statement of plain facts.

^^ the No True Clickbait fallacy

Personally I feel that the mathematician should have used smaller font. Could have gotten it down to one page.

If anything I think the term clickbait is used more appropriately now. "Local mother discovers one small trick" is terrible clickbait because most people are used to it now in the same way a Nigerian prince scam won't work on most people.

Clickbait is anything that gets you to click on an article. In some cases, it can be good clickbait and an equally good article and in other cases it can be bad clickbait where the title states facts but the facts are misleading or require a specific interpretation or need more context or don't accurately describe the essence of the article.

The connotation of clickbait is essential to its definition.

Same with troll. Anybody you disagree with is a troll nowadays.

Thinking about it some more, that also applies to "alt-right", "SJW", "Nazi", ...

It's great that you know that, but unfortunately most of the world does not.

I suppose the title could be slightly more accurate by replacing "solves" with "proves", but I think it's fine. The fact that proof is only 2 pages long is highly notable. This is not a case of a headline making a typical event look more notable than it is.

"Simple != easy." --Rich Hickey

The closest I get in my career is striving for the simplest approach to building something in software, which is not all the easy path. The easy path always leads to complexity -- just look at any enterprise software project that's more than a year to two old.

I find the process of striving for simplicity gratifying and reading this article about similar -- but much longer process -- put a smile on my face.

The hard part about new simple things is getting people to understand the implications. Most people will shrug off something new and simple as the same as just another new complexity, when the implications are vastly different.

In that line of thinking’s defense: do you marvel at the wonders of science and human achievement every time you switch on a lightbulb?

The hardest thing in the world is to explain something in a simple way. With two pages - I say: Bravo!

I don't see anyone arguing otherwise, nor is the title clickbait. The concision and comprehensibility of the proof is part of what makes it remarkable. Just like the opposite size and complexity of Wiles' 'Last Theorem' proof was part of its story.

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