Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pardo 5385 days ago
I can find at least 4 paragraphs directly related to the title, explaining why the author considers this is not a case of a "rogue trader" but of a "rogue industry". That's about 25% of the article devoted exactly to what the title says (the rest of the article giving useful background for the author point in this 4 paragraphs).

I wouldn't say that the title is deceiving.

1 comments

Yes but instead of addressing this specific case, the author spends his time ranting and waving his hands around about the industry in general. Hell, I already knew all of that. I clicked on the article because I expected something about this particular case.

If that's not deceiving, then anybody can write an article about just about anything. Just move to the general case, throw in a lot of invective, and dance a bit. You could write stuff like this on an assembly line.

I'll put this a different way: this is an editorial piece. As such, it's a nice one. I liked it. But it's not a news article, which was what I was expecting. It just takes a news article and sticks it on top of some pre-canned outrage.

I'll put this a different way: this is an editorial piece. As such, it's a nice one. I liked it. But it's not a news article, which was what I was expecting.

You were expecting a news article from something with a title ending in the words "My Ass"?

I read informative articles on HN everyday that have "ass" "fuck" "shit" or something like that in them. It's a very popular pattern for article titles. I guess we like it?

Any more I just ignore that kind of language -- I don't think you can tell anything from it.

What was I expecting? A logical teardown of the facts of the case, with a new conclusion the MSM had missed. Perhaps a smoking gun. I love irreverent authors who poke through stuff we already know and find new stuff. People who hack news stories. I've seen quite a few articles with profanity in the title where I came away going "wow! Very cool analysis"

This was not one of them.

> I read informative articles on HN everyday that have "ass" "fuck" "shit" or something like that in them. It's a very popular pattern for article titles. I guess we like it?

Not me. I feel that they contribute to the atmosphere in a negative way. The problem is that you can't dismiss these articles out of hand, they sometimes contain valuable insight. That doesn't mean they are to be liked for their titles. I'd prefer to see that as an 'in spite of'.