[thombles]

HN has some heuristics to reduce hyperbole in submissions which occasionally backfire amusingly.

[mort96]

Yeah it's a huge mistake IMO. I see it fucking up titles so frequently, and it flies in the face of the "do not editorialise titles" rule:

    [...] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

It is much worse, I think, to regularly drastically change the meaning of a title automatically until a moderator happens to notice to change it back, than to allow the occasional somewhat exaggerated original post title.

As it stands, the HN title suggests that Raymond thinks the C++ 'try' keyword is a poor imitation of some other language's 'try'. In reality, the post is about a way to mimic Java's 'finally' in C++, which the original title clearly (if humorously) encapsulates. Raymond's words have been misrepresented here for over 4 hours at this point. I do not understand how this is an acceptable trade-off.

[miki123211]

Submissions with titles that undergo this treatment should get a separate screen where both titles are proposed, and the ultimate choice belongs to the submitter.

[mcny]

Personally, I would rather we have a lower bar for killing submissions quickly with maybe five or ten flags and less automated editorializing of titles.

[johnfn]

While I disagree with you that it's "a huge mistake" (I think it works fine in 95% of cases), it strikes me that this sort of semantic textual substitution is a perfect task for an LLM. Why not just ask a cheap LLM to de-sensationalize any post which hits more than 50 points or so?

[rramadass]

You can always contact [e-mail] to point out errors of this nature and have it corrected by one of the mods.

[tux3]

It's rare to see the mangling heuristics improve a title these days. There was a specific type of clickbait title that was overused at the time, so a rule was created. And now that the original problem has passed, we're stuck with it.

[pjmlp]

You have a few minutes to change the title after the submission, I do it all the time.

[ibobev]

I intentionally shortened the title because there is a length limit. Perhaps I didn't do it the right way because I was unfamiliar with the mentioned meme. Sorry about that.

[hyghjiyhu]

It's important even without the meme. c++ has try-catch but not try-finally.