[shmageggy]

I'd just like to point out that this is another example of the failure of the overly-rigid submission title policy here. This title tells me almost nothing about the content I'm about to see or whether it's relevant to me. Expecting to see something about 2FA in general or maybe even a library that eases implementation (given the github domain), I was let down when I opened the link and realized I didn't care in the least about this content. I wasted my time browsing, and I wasted even more time writing this rant.

[mbrubeck]

I agree. I've been a regular reader of the site for over six years (and a regular poster for 4.5 years) and I'm pretty sure this has gotten a lot worse in the last few years.

Headline-writing is very audience-specific. A headline that works fine in its original context (on a personal or company blog, for example) does not always work out of that context. In the early days, the "use original titles" guideline was much less rigidly enforced, and most users did a good job of tweaking titles to make them more informative and appropriate for the HN audience. When they failed, editors did a good job of fixing that.

Today it seems the rule is applied blindly and often detrimentally. And unlike, say, MetaFilter, where the moderators are visible and engaged with the community on questions of policy, the HN "editors" act invisibly and seem never to respond or engage with their readers. :(

[krebby]

For what it's worth, the old title was something like "Github Introduces Two-Factor Auth", which is a lot more descriptive and informative than the shorter title. Would like to know why it was changed.

[sneak]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say because the domain name in quotation marks, taken with the headline, clearly indicates that it's on Github and about Two-Factor Auth.

[mbesto]

Github repo's also use the sam (github.com) format, so it's very reasonable that one would think this was going to be a git repo on github for two-factor auth, not that github as a website has two-factor auth as a login feature.

[smackfu]

Nope, the whole rationale is "doesn't match original page title."

[jonesetc]

In the time it took you to get angry you could have just hovered over the link and seen it went to the github blog. Pretty obvious once you see that. It didn't need to say everything because if you look at the context, it was already there.

[xyzzyz]

There are 19 more links at the front page, FYI. It actually takes a lot of time to hover all of them.

[hashtree]

The point is not how much time it saves this user this instance, but rather that it is an on going site issue affecting tens of thousands of users.