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Comment by romesmoke | Hacker News Reader

Clicked, and happy to have done so. Getting offended enough by titles to miss out on such content is a pity. I wholeheartedly encourage you to reconsider.

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Being annoyed by obnoxious nondescript clickbait titles is not the same as being offended by them. Respect my time and use a proper label for your content if you want my click.

Application Performance

Why don't we strip it down another layer and say it's about "computers."

It takes 60 seconds to read every title on the front page of HN. Nobody is disrespecting your time.

You don’t know how many times a minute I read HN.

Consider you may be the person disrespecting your time

And they might like to consider that a thread about it is disrespecting other readers time as well as their own :-)

Here’s more disrespect for your, my, and everybody else’s time. Though I was mostly joking. :)

The issue was about bait titles. Following links, reading the content (usually partially) and squaring the title with what you can summarize, is an effort.

"You Don't Know Jack about Application Performance" has very little information. Is this the title of a talk or blogpost? What runtime is it targeting? Is it because of containerization or hardware issues? Is this about statistics? This is a low quality title. If HN were full of low quality titles, the negative impact of having to weigh through the chaff would be more obvious. Better to just be vigilant and call it out when you see it.

60 seconds, if that... Because most of the links have genuinely descriptive headlines. If I had to click on each link and skim to see what was on the other end because the headline was about as descriptive as a top-level topic tag, it would take 10 minutes.

Did the tag line "How capacity planners credibly estimate application performance (acm.org)" show up?

The ACM series is called "you don't know jack", but the tag line is supposed to distinguish it from all the other "jack" articles.

And yes, the series title is not want you want for something like HN.

No— it was "you don't know jack about application performance," which is a nice fun title for the series. The current headline is much more useful totally out of context on HN.

It probably takes less since most of the titles are a vague half sentence with no context

If this were Gawker (RIP), Buzzfeed, Upworthy, or another content farm, then yes, you'd have a point. This is ACM Queue, though. Here's some other works you might never have read, based on their titles.

- Go To Statement Considered Harmful <https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p...>

- Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 <https://web.archive.org/web/20140712002547/http://www.gaudio...>

- Remembrance of Data Passed <http://simson.net/clips/academic/2003.IEEE.DiskDriveForensic...>

- Reflections on Trusting Trust <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358198.358210>

- No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering <https://doi.org/10.1109%2FMC.1987.1663532>

- The Emperor's Old Clothes <https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358549.358561>

- The next 700 programming languages. <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf>

- Attention Is All You Need <https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762>

As a matter of opinion, there are far more worthy reads in programming and computer science with "clickbait" titles than with more staid academic titles. There are untold numbers of forgettable works with forgettable titles.

ACM noticed a trend and created the "You Don't Know Jack" series to capture more of them.

None of that means it's good, and it certainly doesn't mean I have to like it. In fact, clickbait titles on good content is worse than bad content because it makes it look cheap before anyone reads the first word.

I agree with the sentiment but must admit that titles like "everything programmers should know about X" absolutely annoy me as well.

Those are a brilliant dialogue of articles covering in-depth edge cases of frequently used but poorly-understood data formats, dating back to “Things every Computer Scientist should know about Floating Point Numbers” published in 1994.

I am not saying it makes the articles bad, I'm just saying that the titles are clickbaity and annoy me.

I feel like writers want to have their cake and eat it too:

- Make weirdly evocative titles

- Get more clicks because people are positively or negatively intrigued by such a title

- If someone protests it, though, they are being shallow and nitpicky

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