this is a techincal dive into how cloudflare responded, not a confirmation that they responded

for whatever reason, unknown to me, hn automatically strips "how" from the start of titles. i cant remember ever seeing a title where this was an improvement.

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dpoloncsak an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Interestingly, there's a current post on the front page with "How" at the start of the title.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018715 "How do I inform Windows that I’m writing a binary file?"

I wonder if it ending in a '?' has anything to do with it?

edit: Upon review, at the time of posting it was actually on the 2nd page

	▲	john_strinlai an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		not sure about that specific case or if '?' has anything to do with it, but there is a short editing window where the submitter can re-add the "how" or whatever back in
	▲	GavinAnderegg an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’ve been hit by this when posting links. If you edit the post, you can re-add the stripped word and it will stay. “Why” is another that is often stripped.

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gamegoblin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I learned a few years ago that HN also editorializes by dropping "world's" from titles

Before: Teens break record for world's longest kickball game

After: Teens break record for longest kickball game

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Velocifyer an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I do actually agree with that change.

	▲	gamegoblin 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It occasionally leads to kinda ambiguous headlines, e.g. "China opens world's longest undersea tunnel" vs "China opens longest undersea tunnel" It's a little unclear if it's the longest undersea tunnel in the world, or just in China
	▲	jmalicki 25 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It doesn't give enough recognition to the true longest game of space kickball.

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buredoranna an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

... what a world.

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varun_ch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm yet to see a good example of the title stripping, at least for "how" and "how to" (although perhaps this is survivorship bias).

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trollbridge 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Starting a title with “How” is standard clickbait.

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Goronmon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

Titles are standard clickbait.

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miki123211 an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

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senko an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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

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john_strinlai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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senko an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

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john_strinlai 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	senko 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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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gilrain an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Starting a sentence with “How” is standard English, too.

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]