Yes. There are a few other title-mangle rules that HN has.
It's an attempted technical solution to try to remove / limit the amount of "clickbait" in titles.
It does not work very well.
It's an attempted technical solution to try to remove / limit the amount of "clickbait" in titles.
It does not work very well.
I don't know if Hacker News will pop up any extra confirmation to the submitter to warn that their submitted title were automatically edited, but I think that would be a better interface than relying on submitters and readers to fix the mistake after the article is already visible and ranked.
Whether any automated editing of titles actually helps with reducing clickbait is a different question.
[1]
How wolves became dogs (2026-01-09) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553433
How Samba Was Written (2026-01-04) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551531
Why I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky (2025-12-19) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327832
How they clean the balls in a ball pit (2025-10-15) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45592984
Why we didn't rewrite our feed handler in Rust (2025-10-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517240
How Spain put up wealth taxes (2025-08-16) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44927460
[2]
Majority of the submitted titles never had "how" or "why" to begin with, and sometimes the submitter catches the change in time, for example:
How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code (2026-01-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620
I didn't see any mentions of the title being edited here.