Often it's because it wouldn't make the front page otherwise. In general, society has democratically agreed to upvote clickbait and downvote accuracy, but glad to see that isn't the case here.
I don't disagree, but I'd more specifically say "society has democratically agreed to upvote news they want to hear and downvote news they don't, with little to no concern/consideration for how accurate or true it is."
HN community is among the better at this IMHO, but it still happens here quite a bit true. The good news is, over the course of a few hours to a day or so it usually balances/corrects itself and ends up in a good state, but sometimes not before true but hard truth comments are killed and resurrected by vouches.
As I think about it, maybe the correlation is more with reaction time? The rapid downvotes tend to early and often, so it could be that people who vote on feelings are also the ones to react very quickly? Interesting to think about
A more charitable explanation: the title length limit of 80 characters makes it difficult to keep all of the important information in the HN title.
No doubt that news publications absolutely do sometimes intentionally bury the lede and leave important information out of the original title, but I don’t think HN users are all optimizing just to hit the frontpage.
What kind of overhead does gzip have? I'd be interested to know how many characters you could fit into 80 compressed characters. Some mapping of (2 byte?) unicode characters to 3ish lowercase letters could be effective. Is there any standard way like that?
This is an interesting question. I haven't researched the overheads.
Separately, I feel like if you account for grammatical rules, it is possible to eliminate certain "filler" words in a lossy fashion but add them back later based on grammatical rules. For example, you don't need to say "in mice", you could just say "mice", the meaning is obvious, and "in" could be fixed in post-processing at the client end.
You could also quite possibly eliminate all vowels and still reconstruct everything accurately.
> For example, you don't need to say "in mice", you could just say "mice", the meaning is obvious, and "in" could be fixed in post-processing at the client end.
> You could also quite possibly eliminate all vowels and still reconstruct everything accurately.
My guess is that 10 minutes after that is rolled out, someone will have found a collision that decompresses to some kind of dirty joke
