[tzs]

The actual title of the article is "Banking Culture Encourages Dishonesty". There is no question mark at the end.

I point this out because many times people assume that a headline that is in the form of a question means that the answer is "no", and the author is trying to make it sound like there is some question to get people to read. E.g., if you were reporting on an expedition that searched for and failed to find Bigfoot, no one is going to be interested if the headline is "Bigfoot not found", so you write it as "Bigfoot found?". If the expedition had found Bigfoot, you would have written "Bigfoot found!" which would pull in a lot more readers.

There are some pretty interesting things in this article, so it would be a shame if people skipped it because of that incorrectly added question mark.

[zorrb]

Thanks for clarifying. That's exactly what I think whenever I see a headline like that and skip the article.

[dang]

I missed that point about the semantics of the question mark. We just got rid of it by changing the title to the subtitle, which is somewhat less provocative and probably should have been used in the first place.

[batemanesque]

worth noting that the HN admins often silently change submission titles so the poster wasn't necessarily responsible for this

[dang]

We added the question mark. We sometimes do that when a title makes a highly controversial claim. Otherwise the threads tend to turn into discussions about how the HN title is misleading.

I usually post a comment about this but it was late and I was impatient.

[alexqgb]

"Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: 'Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.' "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

[lotsofmangos]

lotsofmangos' Law of Headlines:

"Any online article with a headline which ends in a question mark that has comments enabled, will eventually result in a thread regarding 'Betteridge's Law of Headlines'"

edit - thankfully, my version will not become as popular