The article title was linkbait: "you" and "should" are linkbait tropes, especially when combined. The site guidelines call for rewriting such titles. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
When we change titles, we always try to use representative language from the article. I replaced it with a phrase from the article where it says what it's about in a neutral way. I added a hyphen to "recently minted" because it seems to me that grammar requires it. However, if we worship different grammar gods I am happy to let yours hold sway. The hyphen is now toast.
This is bog-standard HN moderation. I dare say the reason you "really really hate it" is probably because you notice the cases you dislike and weight them much more heavily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Meanwhile the ones you don't find objectionable pass over relatively unnoticed. That is bog-standard HN perception bias.
If we didn't meticulously try to keep titles linkbait-free and less-misleading (more hyphens, sorry!), HN's front page would be completely different, and since the front page is the most important thing here, the entire forum would soon be completely different. That requires editing titles all the time. petercooper, who posted elsewhere in this thread, has an HN title-change tracker (oops, I hyphened again!) which is quite nifty. It doesn't show all of them, though, and it can't tell the difference between moderator edits and submitter edits.
There is a power shortage in my neighborhood and my laptop battery is about to expire, so if you don't see a link momentarily, or if I don't respond anywhere on the site for a few hours, it's because shelter-in-place (uh-oh!) prevents me from finding somewhere else to plug in.
I apologize for the strength of my language. There are several words I used in that comment that I should not have. It's far too easy to forget in the moment that there are real people making these decisions who may very well read what you say. I understand where you're coming from with the decision and will try to select more appropriate titles in the future. And will be much more mindful about how I register complaints.
Aw, thanks. I should have been nicer too. I was making myself chuckle while I wrote some of that, which is one way to mitigate the tedium of writing similar things over and over, but I fear that it comes across as a bit mean sometimes. By the way: nice article!
I hope you're doing alright with the shelter-in-place. Losing power sucks.
If it goes on too long, and someone has a car nearby, you can use that as a power source. (Be sure to keep the engine running though, otherwise you'll end up with two objects that need a power source...)
I was always super curious what your browser extension for modding HN is like. If there's such a huge difference between phone vs laptop, it sounds like the extension is doing much of the work. It's a neat power tool.
I'd just like to briefly comment on hyphens in compound adjectives.
It's usually not correct to add a hyphen between an adjective and an adverb that modifies it. The case of "recently minted database technologies" matches this rule. Since "linkbait-free" and "title-change" are single adjectives made up of several words each, it's correct to use the hyphen.
However, in the case of "less-misleading", the hyphen is generally incorrect as "less" is an adverb. The exception would be if it precedes an uncountable noun, where "less" could conceivably modify the noun. Example: "less misleading critique" would be ambiguous, so using a hyphen would be appropriate.
When we change titles, we always try to use representative language from the article. I replaced it with a phrase from the article where it says what it's about in a neutral way. I added a hyphen to "recently minted" because it seems to me that grammar requires it. However, if we worship different grammar gods I am happy to let yours hold sway. The hyphen is now toast.
This is bog-standard HN moderation. I dare say the reason you "really really hate it" is probably because you notice the cases you dislike and weight them much more heavily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Meanwhile the ones you don't find objectionable pass over relatively unnoticed. That is bog-standard HN perception bias.
If we didn't meticulously try to keep titles linkbait-free and less-misleading (more hyphens, sorry!), HN's front page would be completely different, and since the front page is the most important thing here, the entire forum would soon be completely different. That requires editing titles all the time. petercooper, who posted elsewhere in this thread, has an HN title-change tracker (oops, I hyphened again!) which is quite nifty. It doesn't show all of them, though, and it can't tell the difference between moderator edits and submitter edits.
There is a power shortage in my neighborhood and my laptop battery is about to expire, so if you don't see a link momentarily, or if I don't respond anywhere on the site for a few hours, it's because shelter-in-place (uh-oh!) prevents me from finding somewhere else to plug in.
Edit: here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617016. Note how we edited out the bloody pig mask.