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But mostly we take the author's/presenter's name out of titles, in keeping with HN's focus on content over personalities.
> Yup, yawn
You two are reacting to nothing more than a single objectionable word ("domesticating") in the title. That's a good reason to change the title, but an unfair reason to be so dismissive of the article. It wasn't a bad popular treatment and the story is obviously interesting.
HN generally prefers the most substantive popular article on a story, as opposed to specialized academic papers, except when the specialty is one that the audience here is comfortable with (i.e. computing). A link to the original paper usually appears in the thread for those who are experts or want more.
We've changed the URL from http://www.businessinsider.com/are-these-monkeys-domesticati... to the New Scientist article it points to.
The harder cases are posts like this one, where the community is divided on a political question, some want it on HN and others don't. In that case we usually stop short of overriding the rank penalty. The voting and flagging systems have been in a stable equilibrium for years, and we've learned that it's a mistake to fight that very much or very often.
But we do do it sometimes, I'd guess maybe 10% of the time (but haven't looked at the data). For example, sometimes an article is so substantive and otherwise so obviously a good fit for HN that it doesn't seem fair to the community to let the flags have their usual say. Sometimes a thread turns out to be unexpectedly high-quality and not a flamewar. And sometimes a story is of so much interest to the community that we couldn't stop it even if we wanted to (a recent example being the Strange Loop/Yarvin thing), in which case we turn flagging off for hopefully the best submission on the topic and treat the others as dupes.
In the end, there's no escaping editorial judgment, though not every HN user shares your positive view of it. We try not to over-exercise it, but never doing so would be suboptimal for the community. There's a tragedy of the commons paradox in there somewhere.
Edit: Ok, we took a crack at it. Can change it again if anyone has a better idea.
Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431395 and tell us how you know he is dead.
We've attempted to replace the title of this article with a more neutral one.
We'll change the title to your suggestion. Thanks!
All: the best way to complain about a bad title is to suggest a better one. We see hundreds of articles and titles a day—the idea of getting all of those perfect is cruel. Therefore we're delighted to get help, as long as the principles are clear: an HN title should be accurate and neutral while staying as close to the article's own words as possible.
In this case the content itself has changed as the satellites were launched, so we've updated the title again.
Edit: we cribbed one from the url.
I'll change the title to make the cofounder bit explicit.
When the story title is linkbait and there are no good subtitles, we sometimes draw on the first sentence of the story. In this case I used the description under the photo. The key thing is to use only language that's already there.
On HN, your title should match what the article actually says ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" -https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I think if we change the title to "When I don't discuss politics with friends", that would be more accurate given what you've written here.
Edit: I looked at the article and didn't see anything that particularly mitigated the title, so I've put it back to "Why" above.
I'm not going to change the title because this entire thread was determined by it.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HN is lucky to have so many non-native English speakers and they/you are all welcome here. We don't let HN users criticize others for their English - especially since most of the rest of us have no second language at all.
If this thread had gotten a lot of attention, standard mod practice would probably have been to (1) let the article stand, but (2) change the title to something a bit more neutral.
Titles are by far the biggest influence on discussion. Most comments below are not about the article as a whole—just the cherry-picked bit of the article that the title singled out. Normally we'd change the title to e.g. "The Future of Programming - Interview with Richard Eisenberg" and remove the flags, but in this case the thread is already so skewed I don't think we can.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's great, but do so by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: there's an earlier submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35993993 which I've just added to the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
People always comment on HN title edits based on the cases that they noticed and disliked. That's not a valid generalization because it leaves out all the cases which actually improve things—those go unnoticed and unremarked on. From my point of view, meaningful discussion would have to be about what general rules or practices could improve HN's quality as a whole. For example: leave titles unedited? that would be catastrophic. Edit them differently? if so, how exactly? Edit titles such that no one is ever annoyed by an edit? impossible.
Obviously the way we do it isn't perfect and there are going to be false positives no matter what we do—but I'm not aware of any other approach that would lead to significantly greater front page quality. Quite the opposite actually.
One thing that also goes unremarked on is that when we see people complaining about titles, we nearly always change the title until the complaints stop. I'm sorry that didn't happen in the case of this title and your complaint—but it usually does work out. If it didn't, title complaints (either about edited titles or unedited ones) would be far more dominant here than they are. That's actually how we learned to do things this way. Community feedback is a pretty rigorous trainer.
