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It seems like it would be more fair for the headline to use the past tense.

Agreed; edited. Explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16318122.

Gotta get that HN karma tho

You are getting down votes because HN has a policy that the HN Title should match the Title on the link to prevent editorializing in almost all cases.

This prevents users from creating click bait headlines to get that karma tho, the majority of the time. Cases where the actual title is the click bait like this one, are the unintended consequence of that policy.

That's true, except the guideline reads "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" and you can argue that once a vulnerability is fixed, implying it's still there is misleading. So we often edit those titles to past tense once that's more accurate. Same with "$site is down" -> "$site was down".

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

HN seems like the kind of place where there could be exceptions to the policy when there's good reason.

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