If you (i.e. anyone) really wants to be helpful about things like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Downweighting off-topic subthreads that get upvoted to the top is one of the best interventions we can do for discussion quality. We do that whenever we see them, but we don't see them all.
There are a couple of users who email us regularly when they see things like that. This is one of the highest-leverage contributions anybody can make to HN, so we'd certainly appreciate hearing from more such users. Actually I only found out about this subthread because of such an email.
Supercilious complaints, on the other hand, just make the thread even worse. Please don't do that. The thing where some HN commenters use HN to posture over the rest of HN is tedious, and in poor taste. Let's just work together to make it better, to the extent possible.
Which, I would argue, says at least as much about the HN crowd as it does about whoever posted the article under this specific title.
EDIT: more specifically .. it's rather ironic how judgmental (and honestly: pretty darn pretentiously) so many here instantly get, yet how there is this implied assumption that the collective wisdom and judgement of this community is above criticism itself, somehow. It might say far more about HN, that nobody appears to be discussing the article's content itself, than it says about the (mis)use of alphabets.
I can read Cyrillic fluently, and a bit of Greek too, yet I'm not in the least bit upset about this pun. If this does upset anyone, maybe it's time for some seriously self-reflection for those people, about what they decide to get upset about and what not.
FWIW, it's not annoying or upsetting to me. However, I took Russian years ago. The only thing I remember is the alphabet and some random words. I also live in a country where the language is not my native one. So, when I saw this in a language I may be able to pronounce like a 3 year old, my immediate response was to think "oh, let's see if I can guess what this says" into "wait what..." into "wtaf" into "oh, that's dumb." I skipped that article this morning because while I wasn't upset or annoyed, I was disappointed. I was disappointed that a skill I once worked very hard for was wasted. Since it was also at the top of the page, I felt like it was abused in this community. In fact, I attributed the title for the only reason it was on the front page. When I just clicked to see what the comments were, I was pleasantly surprised to find I was not the only one disappointed with the alphabets chosen for this title.
It's probably more virtue signalling than actually being upset. Complaining is a way for the complainer to show off they know the actual pronunciations.
The stupid game was getting too cute with the title, in a way that essentially invited a backfire. Arguably, it's still better than many titles from the newsrooms, but newsrooms reached the bottom long ago and decided to open a deep mine.
Thus, the stupid game led to a stupid prize, where major thread (in fact, one that felt like drowning any other discussion) was about the title technicalities, but not about content.
IMO this is not in the same category as people complaining about a website requiring Javascript or using the wrong font. It's an unreadable title for screenreaders. And unlike Javascript or CSS styling or trackers, needing a screenreader is not a personal choice, or a limitation that people can turn on and off.
I think it's fair to point out when a good article makes itself inaccessible due to a trivially correctable problem.
I'm not even saying that the author can't make the joke they're trying to make, but even a small title change like "αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε (actually portable executable)" would basically solve the entire problem without sacrificing any of the meaning behind what the author wants to convey with their misuse of Unicode.
It is a good article, which is why the pointless pushback over accessibility is so frustrating. There would be no engineering effort or large compromise required to make the title of the submission readable. It wouldn't suddenly make the article bad, or not worth reading. It feels like it's being exclusionary just for the sake of being exclusionary.
