Glad to see "in mice" spelled out in the title. Too often it is an unstated condition in early tests like this.
Often it's because it wouldn't make the front page otherwise. In general, society has democratically agreed to upvote clickbait and downvote accuracy, but glad to see that isn't the case here.
A more charitable explanation: the title length limit of 80 characters makes it difficult to keep all of the important information in the HN title.
No doubt that news publications absolutely do sometimes intentionally bury the lede and leave important information out of the original title, but I don’t think HN users are all optimizing just to hit the frontpage.
Could we just post gzipped titles and distribute a plugin to overcome the limitation? This is hacker news after all.
What kind of overhead does gzip have? I'd be interested to know how many characters you could fit into 80 compressed characters. Some mapping of (2 byte?) unicode characters to 3ish lowercase letters could be effective. Is there any standard way like that?