If you really want to understand HN's approach to titles, I can explain more, but I'd like to be sure first that you aren't just trying to pick a fight about it, since that's boring and never works.
One short, partial answer is that in practice, the kind of thing people do when they're trying to make titles less "bland, irrelevant, uninteresting" is actually to make them more provocative and baity, which is not at all the same thing as what the HN guidelines mean by "interesting". Provocation and curiosity not only aren't the same, they may even be disjoint states.
If you really want to understand HN's approach to titles, I can explain more, but I'd like to be sure first that you aren't just trying to pick a fight about it, since that's boring and never works.
One short, partial answer is that in practice, the kind of thing people do when they're trying to make titles less "bland, irrelevant, uninteresting" is actually to make them more provocative and baity, which is not at all the same thing as what the HN guidelines mean by "interesting". Provocation and curiosity not only aren't the same, they may even be disjoint states.