The OP is right, the title is trashy linkbait. "Ideas having sex"? Come on. What's next, "Startups that orgasmed"?

The only people who care about complaints about "link-baiting" - as opposed to genuinely deceptive - original titles are the ones who make such complaints. For everyone else, it's pointless, self-righteous whining to skim over. It's, to continue the little theme here, posting masturbation.

This is why this is the only response you're getting from me on this thread, and why I always, always vote down any such valueless whinging about what some blogger titled eir post.

With all due respect, it sounds like you do not understand or appreciate what has made HN a higher calibre community than Reddit or other similar sites. As if that's not enough, you actively sabotage those who do, and then have the audacity to accuse these persons of "whining" and "masturbation." Methinks thou dost protest too much.

my comment was polite, fact-based and intended to help save other HN readers time, yet voted into negatives. you come back with something rude and voted up. the Internet sucks sometimes.

You were whining about a title. Worse, you were whining about an obvious metaphor being "misleading", which only makes sense unless you expect HN readers to believe concepts can literally, physically copulate.

There is nothing polite or fact-based about that. You were just making a complaint that was neither relevant nor useful.

I did not interpret the title as "[Two] Ideas Having Sex" I interpreted it as "Ideas [Had While] Having Sex." But there was no sex in the article. Therefore, I concluded that the title included sex merely for the titilation factor and to boost readership. Thus, as I originally said, it looked misleading to me. And my comment was relevant and intended to be useful.

Also, I don't think there's anything wrong with concise, specific criticism about a submitted article if the intent is to help improve the quality of HN as a resource. YMMV.

Please.

Your misreading the title is no grounds for whining about link-baiting, and offering it as an excuse indicates you did not bother to actually read the article in any detail.

YMMV, but I don't see anything useful about "tl;dr: nobody has sex in article"-style remarks, no matter how you frame them. I want to see fewer of such, and I will continue to try to discourage them, but I will not further respond to you in this thread.

Did you not interpret it as "ideas having sex"? How else could you interpret it?

ideas [while] having sex

because I've heard/seen/thought the same thing many times before, and with similar patterns such as:

thoughts while drinking

problem-solving in the shower

etc.

But to be analogous to "ideas having sex" it'd have to be "thoughts drinking" or "ideas showering".

Ideas are always having sex. And I'm usually the one that has to clean up the whiteboard afterward.

It's not hard to see the decline. A year ago, pithy, baseless insults typically languished at 1 point or went into the negatives. Now they're getting voted up more and more. I wonder what PG has in mind to fix this, or if he has the time/inclination these days.