I agree about the no pics, but come on, HackerNews has extremely cryptic titles more often than not.

Half of the frontpage is always made of titles that are either referencing ultra-niche products, clickbaity, misrepresent the content of the article, try to be smart, etc.

If anything, HackerNews would be BETTER if it did not have post titles but only excerpts.

There shouldn't be titles that are either clickbaity or misrepresent the article. The site guidelines call for rewriting those ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.") and we're pretty active in doing so.

But I think this is not enough. Not misrepresenting is not enough, they should instead represent the content of the article.

If I take a random one on the front page right now, "The square roots of all evil", it doesn't describe at all its content. Yet if I flagged it, I know it wouldn't be renamed.

Another example is an earlier post that got a lot of traction: "The correct amount of ads is zero". This is borderline misrepresentative to be fair, but even being lenient on that aspect, it is not at all helping me understand what I will be reading if I decide to click on this article.

Those articles thrives on HN because even if it's not exactly clickbaity, the titles have a "shock factor" that makes people click on them.

Yes, I hear you—you want titles to be more than neither-linkbait-nor-misleading, and you're right that we mostly don't go further than that on HN.

I also agree that the two titles you quoted are borderline baity and both of them are the sort that we could well do an edit on, though we didn't in those cases.