echo -en 'Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story' | wc -c
107
HN also forces editorializing to less than 81 characters. I too sometimes struggle to editorialize the title to something that fits and ideally does not lose context.
Heck no, that's removing the important part of the news! Specifically, that a new kind of unregulated anonymous bet-making is leading to new kind of violence against journalists.
In contrast, the piece isn't really about Iran, or about Missiles, although those underscore the gravity or perversion of what's going on.
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Such a cut isn't necessary either, compare the original versus this 79-character version:
Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
Gamblers on Polymarket vow to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
The assumption that Gamblers care about winning a bet should be obvious and implicit, so that's an obvious thing to omit. The ongoing nature of the vowing is also unnecessary when simply having past cases is bad enough.
It's a big deal to me! I have a bet riding on this! If the mods don't change the headline to contain the word "rewrite" by midnight PST, then... eh, nvm, I probably shouldn't even joke about this.
(To be clear, this whole story is horrifying. I hope there's a way to identify these bettors and bring them to justice.)
A priori, you'd get different impressions between a regular journalist death threats and someone engaging to re-write an article leading to death threats.
That original headline is longer than what HN accepts. What editorialized message are you accusing the shorter "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story" of inserting?
For starters, no mention of re-write option. The HN headline makes me assume pre-emptive death threats instead of escalation over dialogue to re-write.
"I will kill you if you do not do X" is still a threat to kill you. All the more so when X is a thing the person will obviously not do. Rewriting the story would destroy whatever credibility they have as a journalist, and probably is literally not even possible assuming they work for any kind of reasonable organization (hey boss, I need you to update that story I wrote so a different set of gamblers win). Also, even if they did update it, they'd probably start receiving death threats from the gamblers on the other side of the bet they just screwed over.
Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option", as if that diminishes the fact that it's a death threat in any way whatsoever.
"Offered a chance to re-write." How is it even possibly to downplay something to this degree? I suppose "I'm going to kill you if you don't wire me everything in your bank account" is not a death threat, because hey, they're offering you a chance to give them all of your money. When someone on the street holds you at knifepoint, they're just offering you a chance to give them your wallet and phone!
When someone makes an "offer" to a journalist to rewrite something in a way that the journalist believes to be untrue in exchange for dropping death threats against the journalist… that isn't a "nuance."
> You just made my point on why it's more nuanced that this author engaged…
As the article clearly explains, the author replied ("engaged") without knowing why his interlocutors were interested in the minor details of the story.
His initial interlocutor ("Aviv") seemed to be engaging in good faith: "Alternatively, if you have information that it was indeed a full missile that was not intercepted, I would be glad to be corrected."
The author was naturally interested in getting the story right, and wanted to understand what his interlocutors might know about it, how they might be misunderstanding it, or why it might be so important to them.
> … and was offered a chance to re-write.
Do you truly believe that an "offer" to rewrite a story in a way that the author believes to be inaccurate—accompanied by death threats—is an important "nuance" that must be conveyed in the headline of a posting about this?
Here's the actual headline:
> Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story