Any headline containing the word "bombshell", "destroys", "shocking" or things of that ilk are ALWAYS poorly written fluff, because editors are generally competent.
If there was an actual bombshell that would be the headline!
It wouldn't be "Surprise Computer Science Proof Stuns Mathematicians" it would be "Scientist solves Fermat's Last Theorem" or something
I mean, not every big result is FLT. This headline actually tells me, a non-mathematician, much more than something more accurate like "Strong Bounds for 3-Progressions". I have no context for interpreting that phrase at all, but I can appreciate the one chosen (if it's true, which it is).
this is actually untrue. yes it’s a decent signal of bollocks, but this is a perfectly interesting and well-written article
those headlines and similar clickbait techniques are annoying, but they’re seen as a necessary evil by plenty of “good quality” content creators and editors
this is especially evident on youtube, where it appears as if you literally cannot gain mass success without surprising facial expressions in your video thumbnails
if you think I’m exaggerating, open Youtube in a private tab and see how many of the recommended videos don’t have someone pulling an unusual facial expression in them
plenty of these videos are of perfectly good quality, but in order to succeed they have to follow a shadowy pattern
I always thought a set of satirical articles like "Mayor Slams Opponents on Support of Budget Cuts" which then go into said mayor being in custody for assault charges or other similarly overly literal interpretations of the original meaning would be good fun. Well, it probably exists I just haven't seen them yet :).
It's great headlines aren't using the overly technical description (that honestly doesn't help much either) but it is a bit depressing the reason for doing so is "nobody clicks those" not "it could be made clearer to the average person" so we end up with things that are so vague you have no clue what it could actually be about yet is written to ensure it should be interesting enough for you to click. After that they don't really care what you get out of it, you've loaded another article and ads instead of leaving. This article actually bucks the trends a bit by being decent enough with what content is in the body at least.
It's only bait if you bite on it, as you did. I did as well, because I could see it was a Quanta link, and found it quite interesting. Would I have clicked on it if the title was "The Kelley--Meka bounds for sets free of three-term arithmetic progressions?" Probably not. So in this case, I consider myself fortunately baited.
So wait, you're saying that people should just accept that headlines are uselessly hyperbolic, and either (A) click every one of them to see if they're worth your time or (B) never click any, to avoid "biting" and getting "baited"?
Eminently practical approach, but we can hope for a better world where this isn't necessary...
It seems that there is actually (C) somewhere in there, which would be "apply some judgement" i.e. look at the source, and maybe (D) let someone else on HN bite on it and get a synopsis there.
Well for (C) I don't have time to memorize the "clickbaityness" of every single news outlet on the internet (of which there are probably hundreds of thousands), so that's a non-starter in reality. For (D) that seems like a practical solution, but now I have to read all of the top-level comments (of which there may be many), to see if one of them tells me if it's clickbait, before clicking on the article?
Hey, you know what, while we're assigning WORK to other HN members, why don't we just ask that people submitting science news do a little digging and find a non-clickbait headline? Why is that unacceptable, while your assertion is acceptable?
it may be clickbait but it does provide information about the crossing over of fields, which is interesting, particularly when those fields are computer science and maths
"Improved upper bound on density of integer sets containing no subset a,a+b,a+2b"