Current HN policy seems to be that the title from the article itself should be used, no matter how generic and uninformative they are, and no matter how much more useful and descriptive the submitter's chosen title is. This used to not bug me, because I read via Google Reader, which kept the original title. Now I use Feedly, and it updates if the title changes, meaning I often see a title, make a mental note to read it later, and then when latter becomes now I don't see it anymore. Grrrr.
If I ever get around to blogging and write something that is likely to get submitted here, I'm going to give it a totally useless title like "As The Yaks Go, So Go The Wombats" [1] that the submitter will surely replace with something better, just to see if the HN mods would opt for the article title even when it is absolutely dreadful. :-)
[1] Does anyone know where the phrase "as the yaks go, so go the wombats" comes from? I used it exactly twice as a signature line on Usenet in the early or mid '80s, but do not remember where I got it. The only hits Google shows are a hit on my site and me asking a few years ago if anyone knew where it came from.
My solution to this is to have the title randomly permute for each user so no user sees the same title. That way there is no consistent title for the mods to set it to.
It is of passing interest to me that this is the moderators' concern, rather than killing zero-day malware exploited site links. Wasn't it just a couple days ago that Google.ps had their dns hacked, and the link sat on HN for quite awhile at the top page?
