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by segfaultbuserr 2098 days ago
It was (probably) capitalized in the original submission. But Hacker News's title autoformatting screwed it up, again. It's known to capitalize individual words but removing all-caps acronyms.
2 comments

US ist still capitalized. Or am I missing something?
It's the annoying part. The anti-all-caps-clickbait system knows some common abbreviations, but not others. For example, on multiple occasions, "MIT" was not unaffected but "CSAIL" was turned into "Csail", see [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482855

It's the first time I hear HN has title autoformatting.
There is definitely some find-and-replace code. After you click the submission button, the title is immediately "corrected" (submitters can manually edit the title back later), with good intention - anti-clickbait. It basically does three things: remove superfluous words, remove superfluous caps, and properly capitalize the title. Most of the time it works well, but annoying when there's a false-positive.

Examples I've seen so far (note that it's not always triggered, there must be some "if" conditions here. It's not always reproducible).

* All lower-case titles are capitalized.

Generally good, but not always enforced, it's strange.

* Unnecessary caps are removed.

Many false positives. "MIT CSAIL" becomes "MIT Csail", DARPA becomes "Drapa", etc.

* "%d Ways To Do X" and "How To Do X" becomes "Do X", per Guideline.

It misfired when I tried to submit "20 °C – A Short History of the Standard Temperature for Dimensional Measurements" by NIST. The "20" was removed and I had to edit it back!

A submission of "How we threat model" by GitHub became "We threat model", makes the already-short title unreadable.

* Clickbait words are removed.

Generally good. But false positives exist. For example, "Massive Parallel" is a legitimate concepts in computing, but the word "massive" will be removed. I just tried "Massive MIMO", which is similarly a legitimate concept in communication, got removed as well.

Try submitting this paper "Pilot Optimization and Channel Estimation for Multiuser Massive MIMO Systems" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.0045), you'll see that the word "massive" is deleted immediately after submission (but as I said, the reformatter is not always triggered and not always reproducible, perhaps your high karma will stop the filter from doing it).

* "Your Statement is 100% correct" becomes "Statement is 100% correct".

This is a good one, the unnecessary personal element is removed.

Thanks for the detailed examples. Maybe it's karma threshold, maybe a bug, or maybe I never wrote a title that would trigger the autoformatter, but I never noticed it.