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Comment by Goronmon | Hacker News Reader

If we are taking that attitude why not go all the way?

Titles are standard clickbait.

With LLMs, you could actually do anti-clickbait titles. Extract the article text with something like r.jina.ai, and ask an LLM to generate a ~80-character summary that explains the main point of the article for people too busy to read it.

I do think this would genuinely be useful.

You're absolutely right! (errm...oops....anyways...)

The fact that LLMs usually generate anodyne summaries is actualy a benefit here.

I used my website-to-markdown tool[0] to get the text, piped the output to claude -p and got a pretty decent "Patching Copy Fail at scale: how bpf-lsm bought us time before the kernel reboot" result.

[0] https://markshot.dev

back in my day, people just used the thing that rattles around inside their skull for such tasks

To do that, you need to read the article first, which is the point of click-bait titles. The point of the defense is to avoid exposing your neurons to that stuff.

i would hope that people are reading articles first and submitting them to hn because they are interesting, rather than submitting articles to hn blindly.

I agree with you on that, but that just holds true (we hope) for the OP.

HN already editorializes the title, to help everyone other than the OP (not all people agree over what's interesting to them). Now we're just arguing over the degree.

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