I agree. The HN rules say not to change the title at all; to leave it as on the article being linked to. So this articles title should be "Nanolaw with Daughter".
I really have no idea what you are talking about. The rules[1] explicitly give some examples of when titles should be changed, and remark that title changes in general are fine if they aren't overly editorialized.
Ok, I was mistaken that it is against the rules. You are right, it is fine to change the title if it doesn't put too much of an editorial spin on it. My apologies.
Having said that, the title in this case was changed to emphasize something which only made up a small part of the story: that the fictitious daughter was first sued in the womb. This is only briefly mentioned in the story itself, so the title editing looks a little bit like link-baiting to me, which is why I would have preferred if it were left unedited.
Of course, another HN poster pointed out that the author posted the title on twitter. Since I do not know or follow the author, I did not know that when I wrote my first comment, at which point it looked like the title was changed purely for the purpose of catching peoples attention. Had I known this 9 hours ago, I probably wouldn't have commented.
There's precedent to change titles for old articles, such as adding "(2005)" to the end of a piece from 2005. There's also precedent to add "[pdf]" when linking directly to a pdf. I think adding "(fiction)" is in line with that.
Comments
I agree. The HN rules say not to change the title at all; to leave it as on the article being linked to. So this articles title should be "Nanolaw with Daughter".
I really have no idea what you are talking about. The rules[1] explicitly give some examples of when titles should be changed, and remark that title changes in general are fine if they aren't overly editorialized.
[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ok, I was mistaken that it is against the rules. You are right, it is fine to change the title if it doesn't put too much of an editorial spin on it. My apologies.
Having said that, the title in this case was changed to emphasize something which only made up a small part of the story: that the fictitious daughter was first sued in the womb. This is only briefly mentioned in the story itself, so the title editing looks a little bit like link-baiting to me, which is why I would have preferred if it were left unedited.
Of course, another HN poster pointed out that the author posted the title on twitter. Since I do not know or follow the author, I did not know that when I wrote my first comment, at which point it looked like the title was changed purely for the purpose of catching peoples attention. Had I known this 9 hours ago, I probably wouldn't have commented.
There's precedent to change titles for old articles, such as adding "(2005)" to the end of a piece from 2005. There's also precedent to add "[pdf]" when linking directly to a pdf. I think adding "(fiction)" is in line with that.