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Comment by legobmw99 | Hacker News Reader

This is only tangentially related, but after all the posts here the last few days about thought terminating cliches, I can’t help but reflect on the “X considered harmful” title cliche

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Yes, I absolutely hate them. I was thinking of creating a "considered harmful" considered harmful rant but it already exists [0].

[0] https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

Is it thought terminating, though? "X considered harmful" seems more intended to spark discussion in an intentionally inflammatory way than to stifle it.

(In any case, this surely is tangential, since the title is not "X considered harmful" for any value of X—at best it comments on a post by that title, as, indeed, you are doing.)

I've been thinking about titles, and it's hard to make a good one that doesn't look like a total cliché. "X considered harmful", "an opinionated guide to X", some kind of joke or reference, what could be a collection of tags (X, Y and Z), "things I have learned doing X", etc.

In this case a less cliche/click-baity title could simply be:

"A Response to Xargs Criticism"

I think this title is fine, it's mostly that after spending some time on Hacker News all the titles start to look the same.

I specifically clicked on this topic because of the word “opinionated”. As I already know how to use xargs, I was curious what kind of non-conventional or controversial opinion the author might have.

As I've said to a sibling comment, I don't think it's a bad title, and "an opinionated guide to X" is one of the better cliché for titles that I see (the worst being the journalist that feels like they have to make a joke).

What every X should know about Y, an opinionated take on Z considered harmful

...with an example Lisp implementation written in APL translating into 6502 assembly :)

Would you say the title terminated your consideration of the article?

No I think if anything seeing it was a response to “xargs considered harmful” made me take the authors side quicker

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