[zamadatix]

This is the key case I wish HN allowed editorializing the title. Regardless how good the article is (or isn't) when they have titles like this it's inevitable the conversation will be about how the title was overreaching. If people were encouraged to make titles like this into something like "Making a simple DNS resolver with miekg/dns in Go" or even just "A DNS resolver in Go" when posting we'd avoid this multiple times a day recurring problem.

Or maybe it already is encouraged and people just aren't aware this counts as "misleading" or "linkbait" since it's not well described what the cutoff point is.

Either way both titles like this one and discussions of have long gotten old.

Edit: looks like the article moved to "A toy DNS resolver", excellent choice of wording IMO.

[djur]

"Making a simple DNS resolver with miekg/dns in Go" would have given me the false impression that the article was about how to use miekg/dns. "A DNS resolver in Go" would have given me the false impression that it was about a full-fledged DNS resolver meant for integrating with Go applications. The current title at least pushed me in the direction of understanding what the article is about, which is demonstrating how DNS resolution works using a short Go program.

[zamadatix]

That wouldn't be a false impression, this article is indeed about how to use miekg/dns to make a resolver. Your comments on the other title already apply to the current title as is, it's one of things people hate about these titles but at least the cut title avoids the line count/"nothing is from scratch" debates.

Increasingly more accurate titles always accepted of course though but one thing for sure is the class of "<x> in <y lines>" are demonstrably a continuous problem to the point they are talked about instead of the articles they represent, they are not just minor wording nits one could come up with after staring at a title long enough.

Edit: I really like the title the article itself changed to "A toy DNS resolver".

[pvg]

A small nit but it's actually important for the HN Rules of Titles: 'edit' and 'editorialize' are different things. You can sometimes edit a title, for instance if it's misleading or clickbait. You can't editorialize in titles no matter what.

[justsomehnguy]

> This is the key case I wish HN allowed editorializing the title

The ability to leave a short (less than 100? 140?) description would be one the ways which would allows not to clickba^W editorialize the titles.

Or the submission author can do the same by leaving the comment about it in the first comment.

[throwaway1777]

Leaving description opens up other bad avenues though. Like posting an article with a description about how stupid the article or the author is.

[zamadatix]

The more general take I have seen is that it would give a "priority comment". That can result in problems like that but also more commonly just cause the comments to all act like a response to the "main" comment rather than general discourse on the topic. I can definitely see that though I also see the poster having a large amount of that control already in most cases since they get to pick the source they post.

[airstrike]

> Like posting an article with a description about how stupid the article or the author is.

The community can moderate that, though