Got it. The title of an article is a detail and this title in particular doesn't draw any attention from people interested in C or the claims made by performance comparisons between different types of programming languages in general.
That's probably also the reason why the title was changed on HN after this criticism was made and the submission disappeared from the front page a short while after that.
I get your point, but it's a blog post by a Ruby & Rails core member, published on a Ruby-oriented blog named "Rails at Scale", with a particular audience in mind, and is written as a response to an ongoing discussion in the Ruby community. In context, I think the title is fine. But, for those without the context the title may be misleading. At no point is the goal to convince people to throw away C and switch to Ruby for everything.
This title in particular encourages sharing the article out of context, because it is a bit sensational.
That's why the title is so important.
If an article is aimed at a particular audience only and could be misunderstood otherwise, that's a good indication that the title should reflect that fact. (As the revised one does.)
As a sidenote: This submission has been tried multiple times on HN and it would very likely not have been successful here without the sensational title. [0]
