The original title has the word "rescue."
The top comment is questioning the use of this word.
It seems likely that when the story originally appeared on HN, it had the accurate title reflecting the title of the article. Thus the comment from dotnet00, which I'm neutral on. But then, it would appear, the title was altered, to dampen a controversy? Is this how things are done around here? Anyone know more?
Yes. Often I add a comment (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but this time I didn't.
When a single word starts sucking most of the thread's attention and leading to acrimonious nitpickery, it's an easy call to take that word out of the title.
Striving for accurate and neutral titles is one of the best established principles of HN moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It has a big influence on discussion quality.
In the present case, for example, it behooves us all to learn about the real situation that is actually happening, rather than arguing about whether or not it deserves the term 'rescue', a semantic dispute which seems correlated with people's priors on the most divisive associations (e.g. the Elonian Dimension) and is therefore mostly a proxy for a repetitive and tedious argument.
No--
AP:
SpaceX launches rescue mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck in space until next year
Original HN title:
SpaceX launches rescue mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS
Current HN title:
SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISSParticularly at large publications, headlines are written by specialists in sensationalism (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
That said, it’s also very easy to see what HN’s intended bias is since the publish it; it’s explained in the “on-topic” and “off-topic” paragraphs at the top of the guidelines page.