And boo, incidentally, to whomever changed the HN title - from the most memorably evocative title this site has ever seen to one of the blandest.
Probably not mainly, but isn't this one of its functions?
Hacker News seems to me a news aggregator, just with a certain limited scope.
It's not scope mismatch, it's that HN doesn't present a (nearly, roughly) complete picture of current events in any scope (other than the scope of itself, of course).
is a famous quote attributed to him afaik (maybe i mangled it a bit).
Dec 7, 1941: “200,000 tons of steel relocated to sea floor”
As others have noted, derived from RTFA (read TFA), which comes from RTFM (read the fine manual).
I don't know if RTFA/TFA originated at Slashdot, but both were certainly heavily used there, as noted in ... this fine Wikipedia article:
It sounds like an old timey quote, but a cursory Google search turns up nothing. I can't even see who wrote the article!
in this case i definitely felt "wow, that's an interesting quote, and i can see what they are getting at. let's read the article to see how it's substantiated or used as a springboard".
clickbait is more "we have some amazing!!!!! information to tell you but to find out what you will have to read the article", e.g. the classic listicle format "10 things we imagined a beowulf cluster of - number 4 will shock you!", the spammy "one weird trick doctors don't want you to know" or the tabloid "john brown's shocking affair!". and yes, that sort of thing is a plague on the internet and i would not like to see more of it, but also that is not what is going on here.
This is admittedly a subtle point, but I’d be perfectly fine with starting the article with the same quote, attributed to someone, as a decorative introduction. That’s a pretty common writing device. (And importantly in that case, the quote doesn’t need to be substantiated.) It’s just using it for the title in this case that rubs me the wrong way.
Using the word “lies” is almost never good, especially when you are explicitly criticizing someone or something. IMO using “lies” is more or less equivalent to your example “number 4 will shock you”, use of that word is designed to invoke the same response. They stopped a hair short of literally stating Google is lying, but the implication combined with the first line of the article is very strong. One real problem with such an implication is that it may itself be wrong. It’s presuming active dishonesty when the problem could easily be a mistake. When putting these things together with the article’s misuse of the Y axis to again make emotional but not necessarily accurate points, I still think “clickbait” is warranted here - this writing is being a tiny bit manipulative.
For reference incidentally, the title is a callback to the last line of a previous post[1] by the same author, on an unrelated topic. So it's presumably meant to be less a statement about Ngrams, and more a recurring theme in the author's views on language.