The HN headline shorterner has really run off the rails here. The actual headline is "The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages" but HN shortens this to "The Mystery of People Who Speak Languages" which makes no sense at all.
It's really dumb in general. I'm an adult, I don't need this paternalistic protection from a headline that's trying to grab me. I also don't need constant reminders of the absurdity of our hubris that technology can solve any problem.
You make it sound as if the HN system itself arbitrarily shortens titles, which it does not. It just enforces a limit on how long titles can be. It is the user who must make the edits to fit the title into the limited space. And it was not a great editing job by the submitter.
The HN system does indeed shorten titles automatically, e.g. removing initial "How". I wish HN would stop doing this; it makes many legitimate titles nonsensical, and incidentally can remove a signal that a link originally had a clickbait-style title.
The submitter can click "Edit" to restore their original title after the autoshortener has changed it; but there is no way to tell HN "Please use exactly this title in the first place."
(I remember this submission of mine being affected by the autoshortener, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114482 "How thumb indexes are cut" autoshortened to "Thumb indexes are cut".)
This is simply a UI issue. It would be totally fine if, when you went to submit a link to HN, the UI before posting said "I'm going to use this title; is that OK? [default is yes]". The only problem is that HN's UI doesn't do that confirmation step; instead it forces everyone to double-check their own post after posting. And then when someone innocently fails to do that double-check, we get these meta subthreads and the only recourse is to ask a mod to retitle the post. It's a silly aspect in a system that otherwise tends to "trust the user."
Once in a while, the HN titling system mangles a title, and people complain. What doesn't get much comment are the many hundreds of titles it improves, all the more impressive given how much effort goes into gaming titles. Cut the site some slack. You can call out suboptimal titling without building up a dudgeon.
Interesting. I never noticed my submission titles being modified. I only ever hit the length requirement. And once I post something I only look at the comments, and not the title. I should go back and see what's been done to my submissions.
