I changed the title as part of moderating this thread
less than we normally would. We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or YC startups are part of the story—this has been established practice since the beginning:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
The way we'd normally moderate a thread like this is by downweighting it as a generic riler-upper (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Posts like the OP are extremely common, because the internet is perpetually noticing something seemingly outrageous, jumping to the most extreme interpretation, exclaiming angrily, and then egging itself on. That's how the medium works. If we didn't downweight such posts, the front page would be be nothing but sensational/indignant material; there'd be no room for anything else. This is a no-brainer as a moderation call, and this practice has also been established on HN since the beginning. However, because the thread mentions YC startups, I haven't touched it or done what we normally would.
Editing sensational/indignant titles to be more neutral and reflect the substance of a story (not that there's really a story here) is another well-established moderation practice on HN, again for what ought to be obvious reasons: if we didn't do it, then the front page would consist of nothing but that. So in this case I limited myself to the minimum viable title edit, while letting the post continue to burn at a much higher rank on the front page than it would ever normally get away with.
For me the real conflict or tradeoff here is: how do we balance the need to not suppress criticisms (even when they are unfair or untrue—because the good will of the community is more important, in fact it's the only asset HN really has), with the need to preserve HN for its intended purpose. The ecosystem is fragile and takes a lot of tending to, and one of the most important forms of tending—which only moderators can really provide—is to not allow garden-variety internet indignation to drown out the quieter, more interesting material that HN is supposed to be for. It should be clear why the rule is "we moderate less when YC is the story", rather than "we moderate not at all"—the latter would be a loophole you could drive a convoy of trucks through.
Therefore, when I asked myself what was the minimum reasonable thing to do, editing the sensational or (to use your word) salacious title to accurate reflect what (little) substance the post actually included, while not downweighting the submission the way we usually would, seemed to me the right tradeoff. This post doesn't deserve the hours on the front page that it's getting, but that's the local price we pay in favor of a global optimization.
Edit: I changed the title again after posting this, in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973106, which made a fair point.