1) I could accept I'm wrong about stories being killed by humans, but I know the titles get edited by humans. I remember one story I posted about some really ancient, accurate maps, and I made the title something like "Accurate maps from the 1500s unearthed." And then some moderator made it the story headline instead "Named building in DC hosts map show" or something equally uninformative.
2) I'm positive YC companies get at least one special privilege - the ability to post jobs.
3) I've been told YC accounts are excluded from anti-spam measures, but I can't prove it.
EDIT: Also, regarding the zero-sum-game argument. All of us developers know we have limited time to spend on things. But a HUGE change to a non-priority that takes almost no time (for example improving the CSS on mobile) should be squeezed in between these experiments that may or may not make the content better, and take hours.
I like the UI. I know it's hard for some to believe, but it's stark and functional and fast and mostly stays out of the way; it works. The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write; other than that, what's to improve? Taking back votes? How about, just forget about the vote.
If HN has a problem with titles, it's with not enough stores having their titles rewritten to the article original.
The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write
People keep saying this, but it would severely limit the utility of the site. When I chance upon a post with more than ~50 comments, I only want to read the 6-7 or so that the community has agreed are best. I perceive a positive correlation between comment scores and quality. That is, the odds that a post with 50 points contains good content do empirically seem to be higher than for posts with 2 points.
In short: I need a comment filter that is more strict than than simply "appears on Hacker News". I don't want to read every single one.
I like using votes to determine whether or not it's worth devling into a deep thread. If there's a conversation that goes 5 levels deep, you can just scan the bottom layers - if they're getting votes, then it's likely to be a worthwhile conversation.
Similarly, if there's a bunch of responses with a score of 1 with replies forking off all over the place, having a visible score lets you catch that at-a-glance and avoid bothering with a conversation that is clearly digressing.
I agree. I love the spartan UI. That said, reading HN sucks on mobile and this would only take a few minutes to fix without compromising the simplicity of the main UX.
I don't know what title you used when submitting it, but the current title wasn't written by a moderator. It's the original article title.
It's true that YC founders' accounts have a field set saying so, but the only code that looks at this field is the code for posting jobs. None of the anti-abuse code does. And the jobs page has been around for years.
Yes, as I said in the parent comment, the moderator changed it back to the original story headline.
I had changed it because I knew nobody cares about the Library of Congress, and no one knows what Portolan means. I read the story, determined a meaningful title, and the moderator decided that was no good. Since I have edited many, many newspapers, and written countless headlines, I felt particularly annoyed.
It's worth distinguishing between (1) "The moderators retitled such-and-such an article, and it wasn't an improvement" and (2) "The moderators retitle articles, and that's bad". #1 might be true in this case (I see greendestiny doesn't think so; I'm on the fence) but it's very weak evidence for #2. For what it's worth (and I know this is also weak evidence) when I've looked at an article and thought "Wow, HN should have used a different title for this" it's much much much more often been because of editorializing by the submitter than because the original article title was used but wasn't very good.
We need moderators aggressively retitling articles submitted with stupid or biased titles. (Not only because that fixes those titles, but also because it reduces the incentive for submitters to submit with bad titles.) And if we have that, then inevitably there will be occasional misjudged retitlings. The question is whether the benefit outweighs the cost, and in my mind there's very little doubt that it does.
I find mods retitling links to be a strongly positive feature of HN. It is one of those things thats very touchy though, but it'd be a shame if people's territoriality meant we had to accept wrong and misleading titles.
For what its worth, whatever was wrong with the original title I feel like yours was pretty misleading after going and reading the article (great article by the way, thanks for sharing it). The article was very explicitly about the library congress meeting to talk about the origins of the map, rather than a general piece about the map. If thats all you found interesting, perhaps you should have linked to a wikipedia page or a more general article.
Time spent arguing helps define which should get the free-time, though. Otherwise, ultimately, it would be "best" if every developer ignored every bit of feedback their applications caused, because their time is best spent making changes, not debating over what to change.
2) I'm positive YC companies get at least one special privilege - the ability to post jobs.
3) I've been told YC accounts are excluded from anti-spam measures, but I can't prove it.
EDIT: Also, regarding the zero-sum-game argument. All of us developers know we have limited time to spend on things. But a HUGE change to a non-priority that takes almost no time (for example improving the CSS on mobile) should be squeezed in between these experiments that may or may not make the content better, and take hours.