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Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

The title of this article is not the same as the original, which is "H.R.482 - Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017" and concerns "The final rule of the Department of Housing and Urban Development entitled 'Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing'".

The current title is click-bait.

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Congressional bill titles are anti-click-bait. "Nothing to see here." This title says what the bill actually does.

How is the original title preferable?

No, it's a plain English description of what the bill actually does.

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

"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. "

One could argue that the original title as misleading. As it does not say what the bill actually does. In this case a plain English description of the results seems reasonable.

Well, I don't see anything about race discrimination in the language, and it seems to be about whether zoning should be done on a local level rather than by the federal government.

The language in Sec 3 is specifically "database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing". It is true that disparities may arise from either discrimination or other sources.

Thanks for the guidance, I changed the title to comply. I'm looking forward to a bill that would dismantle support for federally maintaining climate data visualizations -- likely to be titled the "Climate Monitoring Protection Act of 2017" ;)

The original title of a law is often misleading—either merely obfuscating key elements of the law's intent or actively misrepresenting the intent—though usually the exact opposite of clickbait (a misleading title of a law is designed to avoid, rather than encourage, people digging further for the details.)

This case seems very much to be in the obfuscating category, and the whole purpose of posting it seems to be the element of the intent that the title obfuscates.

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