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Ask HN: The unreasonable effectiveness of certain headlines on Hacker News

18 points by omarhaneef ↗ HN
Certain headlings work really well such as:

The unreasonable effectiveness of X

n myths that people believe about X

These are the hacker news equivalents of

"X happened. You won't believe what happened next."

"Do X with this one weird trick."

My question is:

1. Do you have other examples of these repeating, and successful headlines?

2. Why do they work?

10 comments

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[dead] draw_down
I don’t know but the “falsehoods developers believe about x” drives me batty. Such a shit headline.
latexr
I don’t recall seeing many of those on Hacker News, but it may be that they have been renamed by the time I get to them.

What you’re asking about is known as “clickbait”. Search for that term and you’ll find plenty of information. They work by putting us in a state of anticipation, hijacking our dopamine reward system.

eb0la
"$(PropietarySoftwareCO) [is now using|adopts|champions] $(OpenSourceTechnology)"

This works because there is an implict conflict.

sgillen
For the two examples you listed I think they work because they imply that the article has some quick tips to “level up” as a developer. Either by adding a new and powerful tool to their belt, or by dispelling some previous false notion they have.
eb0la
Another patterns:

- $(SHINY_NEW_TECH) [beats|as a better|replaces] $(OLD_TECH)

- $(OLD_OR_BORING_TECH) beats $(SHINY_NEW_TECH) (because)

- $(OLD__TECH) refuses to die

psv1
[Some-software-tool-or-library-that-you-already-know-and-use]... written in Rust.
F-0X
Great articles for when you want to know how it works but want the code to play hard to get.
Isamu
>The unreasonable effectiveness of X

These are just allusions to classic "unreasonable effectiveness" papers, probably starting with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

>n myths that people believe about X

Again there are well-known articles that specifically address programmer myths and short-sightedness, generally a good topic.

Many people remember the original, well written articles and want to read more of the same.

Isamu
Not quite the same as click bait.