It wasn't the original title, but this is explained in the closing sentence:

> Hopefully, though, they'll see this content as it's intended to be seen: As a very weird love letter to thrifting from a very weird person.

So, the author is admitting they are weird for doing such an unsolicited analysis. But weird in a good way.

I do love all this conjecture on the titling (and your comment that women's clothing is an important subject helps me feel a bit validated in my time spent on this). I categorize it as weird because it's quite niche, there's no actual call to action or news story, and I spent waaaaay too much time on it.

Ha! I thought as much.

Women’s apparel is a 600B industry. It is highly segmented, and literal armies of people analyze category and product performance across millions of skus. So spending a lot of time on something like this is definitely not unusual.

It's really fun to see the moment people realize things like this exist outside their bubble of knowledge.

I had some first and second-hand knowledge around pricing household appliances. There's a common assumption that "the manufacturer says 'charge X'", the retailer charges X+Y% and you all go home happy. And you could not be further from the truth if you tried: pricing is an insanely complicated process with negotiation from both sides and monitored by an army of secret shoppers to keep both sides honest.

One of the reasons I like Hacker News is seeing all the people who will commit to days/weeks/months of work just to satisfy their curiosity. You’re in good company, this isn’t weird by HN standards.

fwiw, i think you can drop the '.com' from the title for a smoother punny title without ambiguity: "Goodwill.com Hunting" -> "Goodwill Hunting" since the movie is "Good Will Hunting". =)

I would have said it's impressively detailed.

This is describing what I imagine a few savvy bargain hunters know from experience and interest in the market. Being able to see massively undervalued items that don't fit in the catalogue, kind of like being able to pick horses at the races.

Looks like a moderator took the weird details out of the title above. Submitted title was "Show HN: A weirdly detailed graphical analysis of women's tops sold by Goodwill".

We took Show HN out too, because while this looks like an excellent submission, it's not a product or project that people can try out - see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

I think it means 'weirdly' as in 'obsessively', or 'nerding out over'.

Something can be both a not normal thing to do and a wonderful or useful thing to do.

I think it’s a bit of clickbait. My very initial impression was that this was going to be a strange sexualized analysis of how women of varying body types would look in tops sold by Goodwill. That was followed by “but that’s insane and this is on HN, it must be charts and graphs, hmm, better to click to confirm.”

Agreed on clickbait, I thought it would be some near pervy analysis of how the tops made some guy feel..

That sounds like a better article.

... so you clicked on it ...

"for research purposes"

Titled like clickbait. "You won't believe what analysis of Goodwill women's tops sales reveals"

This article is very much not clickbait.