[bobboies]

The only thing is I hate titles like this—the title is bragging a bit too much.

Maybe a title more like:

“How I’m helping my high school peers learn about CPUs”.

That way it implies you’re young, smart, and care about others—all of which I imagine are true :)

[freedomben]

I didn't really like the title of the HN post either, but I don't think it needs much change. Just drop the "I'm 17 and" part and do "I wrote this guide on hwo CPUs run progra..."

The "I'm 17" part just felt irrelevant to me in a technical work. I.e. it's either technically correct or it's not. However, I can see a strong argument about why it should be in the title. If you care about meta details of the work, it's certainly different and interesting to be produced by someone so young. I suppose part of this is my own life experience talking, and very likely means I'm projecting. When I was a teenager I hated divulging that to others on the internet because they treated me differently when they found out how old I was.

[bobboies]

Well—it could go either way but I do think it is notable that the author is young and helping peers. Based on original post seems important to them. But the exact number 17 not important either way!

I might click through and read an article to see what the youth of today are creating, but not so much care about an adult writing something on CPUs haha

[topaz0]

It's not clear whether you're referring to the HN post title or the article title itself ("Putting the You in CPU"). In either case I think your proposed edit makes it much worse.

The HN post title is accurate and describes what they did. It makes a choice to center the writer rather than the guide, which has certain consequences about how readers will approach it, but is perfectly appropriate. Of course, your proposed edit makes the same choice, and is arguably more of a brag than the original.

The article title is cute, which is not what you would want for a dry technical manual but appropriate in this case, where the style is supposed to be fun and entertaining as well as informative.

[bobboies]

The HN title I meant!

[bdcravens]

Except the title wouldn't be entirely accurate - there's plenty of "Senior Engineers" who are really just framework assembly liners who could learn something from this writing :-)

[simonw]

Hacker News automatically removes the word "How" from the beginning of submissions (and then Title Cases them for good measure) - so I believe submitting that title would instead result in this:

    I'm Helping My High School Peers Learn About CPUs

I might be wrong though, it might only do this with "How to ...".

[topaz0]

Good to hear I'm not the only one who finds that form of title unpalatable. IMO one of the most annoying headline trends of the clickbait era.

[seabass-labrax]

'How to' is one of the title forms that isn't modified, currently.

[simonw]

I submitted https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations... the other day - title "How I make annotated presentations" - and it was automatically re-titled to "I Make Annotated Presentations" - but then renamed back again, I presume by a moderator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37024398