Mods, please stop "improving" HN story titles to be less illuminating

5 miles 3 7/11/2025, 6:17:20 PM

Two recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531569

Original submission title matched the article itself, "You should repaste your MacBook (but don't)". It has since been changed to the far less elucidatory title of "Repaste Your MacBook".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44482978

"A 17-year-old teen refutes a mathematical conjecture proposed 40 years ago" (matching the article title) changed to "Hannah Cairo has solved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture".

No reason in cases like these to deviate from the site guidelines[1]: "[P]lease use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Comments (3)

ofalkaed · 10h ago

>Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p_ing · 11h ago

They're linkbait titles. Appropriate rewrites.

SeanAnderson · 11h ago

Eh, lightly disagree. Both the original post titles come across as slightly clickbait to me and I can see why there was a desire to rewrite them. I don't think the first rewrite is an improvement. I do think the second rewrite is an improvement.

Code search 40% faster for 100M+ line codebases with quantized vector search (augmentcode.com)

Dismantling Public Values, One Data Center at the Time (helsinki.fi)

France launches criminal investigation into Musk's X over algorithm manipulation (politico.eu)

Sport and longevity: an observational study of international athletes (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Intel bombshell: Chipmaker will lay off 2,400 Oregon workers (oregonlive.com)

An Oral History of Marge vs. the Monorail, the Episode That Changed the Simpsons (vice.com)

Playbook for Building Secure Cloud or Kubernetes Applications (medium.com)

$500K stolen via fake AI coding extension (securelist.com)

The Geological Sublime (harpers.org)

The Salt Path Controversy (theguardian.com)

Study in the UK: The Ultimate Guide for a Master in 2025 (study-from-here.com)

Show HN: Built Podflyy.com, a NoteBookLM Alternative

Psilocybin Shows Promise as Anti-Aging Therapy (neurosciencenews.com)

Show HN: OS Yamato – A gentle digital OS inspired by wabi-sabi (github.com)

Ask HN: If I write a book, is there a legal way I can stop LLMs from reading it?

Scanning for Post-Quantum Cryptographic Support (anvilsecure.com)

Software Freedom Conservancy Files Motion for Summary Adjudication in Vizio Case (sfconservancy.org)

Why the Tech Debt vs. Tech Asset Metaphor Still Holds (michaelbastos.com)

Show HN: DigitalToolPad – privacy-first, locally-run developer tool suite (digitaltoolpad.com)

Show HN: EdgeLLM – 3 offline LLMs for iOS in one SwiftPM line (github.com)

Skills and tech: hydrography's balancing act (hydro-international.com)

Difftastic: A structural diff that understands syntax (github.com)

Calibre 8.6.0 Delivers Dramatic Database Speed Boost (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Threads is nearing X's daily app users, new data shows (techcrunch.com)

Linux Containers – Incus (linuxcontainers.org)

Florida's Brightline Train Defers Bond Payment as Woes Mount (bloomberg.com)

Ask HN: Pocket is dead, what are the best alternative services?

Tesla sales rise in Norway and Spain, boosted by Model Y (reuters.com)

Trace LLM workflows at your app's semantic level, not at the OpenAI API boundary (engineeringideas.substack.com)

Before Tragedy, Texas Repeatedly Rejected Pleas for Flood Alarm Funding (nytimes.com)

King Charles's fiery gathering that shone a light on his beliefs (bbc.com)

What does it take for a software engineer to become an AI Engineer? (mltrenches.substack.com)

Predicting Competitive Pokémon VGC Leads Using Latent Semantic Analysis (jgeekstudies.org)

ABCD Study removes gender-identity data from latest NIH NDAR release (thetransmitter.org)

Porting a C JSON Tokenizer to Go: A Technical Deep-Dive into Jsmn-Go (substack.com)

As Tesla Stumbles, SpaceX's Finances Go from Strength to Strength (wsj.com)

Lunet: C runtime with LuaJIT and libuv for coroutine-based programing (github.com)

The US-UK Special Relationship Is Officially Dead (ianwelsh.net)

Show HN: Decode Base 64 (decodebase64.io)

America's largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI (reuters.com)

Rust Language Cheat Sheet (cheats.rs)

Will my tech enshittify? How to tell (optoutproject.net)

Britain and Europe need to get serious about air conditioning (ft.com)

I Stopped Using Raid on My Plex Media Server (howtogeek.com)

Resend's NewDotEmail is cloning our product, mistakes included (old.reddit.com)

Beginning to build a browser game in Clojure (clojurecivitas.github.io)

Senior Tesla AI Engineer Srihari Sampathkumar Leaves After 8 Years (gearmusk.com)

Show HN: EndBOX DIY Kit – A Basic Microcomputer (endbasic.dev)

Impulse Control in Pigeons (1974) (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors (nytimes.com)

Mods, please stop "improving" HN story titles to be less illuminating

Comments (3)