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by dang 1189 days ago
> especially, the fixation on the number

Oh yes! - that's a whole other level to this. pg figured that out 15+ years ago*:

If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Excessive specificity has almost a hypnotic effect on the mind, and group effects compound that.

* not quite - looks like some time between March 2009 (https://web.archive.org/web/20090324091356/http://ycombinato... - no number rule) and July 2009 (https://web.archive.org/web/20090712034454/http://ycombinato... - number rule). Someone should make an Internet Archive binary search service...