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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

Please, dear future Hacker News submitters, edit those dumbed-down public press release titles and add some actual information. The "household plastic ingredient" they found is (mono)propylene, which is quite interesting!

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This discussion takes place about once a day. The HN guidelines state "don't editorialize titles". This is one of the guidelines that is most visibly and aggressively enforced by the moderators. For better of for worse, it's what we're stuck with.

That's to stop axe-grindey headlines like 'discovery shows why NASA needs more funding,' which injects the submitter's opinion into the title without providing any information whatsoever about the story. Over-literal enforcement of this rule by people who can't tell the difference between editorializing and factual economy is actually making HN less informative to its readers.

Is this dumbed-up headline from The Register better? (I think not.)

TUPPERWARE FOUND on ALIEN MOON: Space probe's shock discovery

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/nasa_find_tupperware...

The headline I submitted it was 'NASA discovers polypropolene on Saturn's moon Cassini, to scientists' surprise'. I too found the original title uninformative, but chose the JPL website as it was the closest thing to an original source. I am tired of HN mods modifying headlines to make them less informative. Having said that I was tired and wrote Cassini in the title instead of Titan :-/

Sadly when the submitter does that the moderators just change it to the article title anyway.

Yeah, it seems like this is becoming a problem.

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