Sure, but not every title needs to give away the meaning of a story. It can be frustrating when it doesn't because we're so conditioned to expect that—but interrupting such conditioning is part of the point of HN. We want something more than subsecond reflexes to be at work here.

If people encounter a title that doesn't fully yield to 300ms of parsing, that causes irritation, which is a good thing. Not good in itself—irritation is a bit painful—but good because it causes the rapid-reflexive subsystem to throw an error and pass control to the slower, reflective system that is able to process more information. That's the system we actually want to get activated. One's it's engaged there's a chance that it will remain engaged, which—this is the hypothesis anyway—will lead to higher-quality thoughts and comments. That's why I say it's good for HN users to have to work a little.

But it isn't giving away the "meaning" of the story - it's giving critical context that makes the story a story and not just some random "John Doe" on Github throwing away their personal projects to new maintainers.

I'd argue that if random John Doe is giving away their projects and that is on HN's front page, it's actually the better story. Then there's a bit of a puzzle: why? Why did people upvote this? What's interesting about it? And you have to work a little to find out. It excites curiosity, and if it doesn't, nothing will happen. That's a better starting point for HN than "new development in a hot story". Hotness and curiosity are at odds with one another.

i didn't recognize the name so it would not have made a difference for me, but having this posted on HN hinted that this is significant, and not some random little used projects.

I don't know how to distinguish that from

"You won't believe who's giving a way a repo

#2 will shock you"

Titles like that try to generate the same effect as hot-topicness by relying on gimmicky language. They activate the same reflexive responses as I described above—they just do it by form rather than content. That's even worse of course. At least with a genuine hot topic there's a feeling of satisfaction when you find out what the latest development is. It's like watching the next episode of a popular series. But titles that have only bait and no content are like feeling that anticipation, only to be tricked into watching another commercial. That works for getting views, but everyone hates it and has an icky feeling afterwards, and over time it builds up a strong residue of resentment.

That kind of title operates even less by intellectual curiosity than the kind I was talking above, so it's even worse for HN. They are the kind we edit and everyone agrees with the edit.