What happened to the headline? The post is headlined "Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?", which is a correctly formed English sentence.

The HN headline currently says "Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?", which... isn't.

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OuterVale 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Hacker News has an 80 character limit for titles. The full title is 111 characters, so the submitter editorialised it to cut down the length to 77 characters.

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thaumasiotes 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Usually, when you're editing something, you try to make sure your output is legal in the target language.

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piltdownman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The shortest 'legal' sentence I can come up with is 82 Characters

"Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack have a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?"

The had... had... is doing the heavy lifting for omitting the 'did' - but it's perfectly comprehensible.

More to the point, 'English' doesn't have a Universal agreed dialect, pronunciation, or spelling. You'd lose your mind trying to square the circle of Hiberno English - the language of Joyce, Beckett, Keane, Wilde, Yeats et al - based on your notions of 'proper' English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English

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thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> The shortest 'legal' sentence I can come up with is 82 Characters

You can put the mangled headline into actual English by shortening it:

Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris

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fragmede 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How about

> Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack announce that it had Tetris

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rsynnott 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The sticker seems like an important aspect.

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fragmede 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Which the article can state, but the headline needs to fit.

	▲	Ukv 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why it was announced specifically on a sticker (rather than on the box like the other games) is the core of the question - the headline no longer really works without it. I'd go with one of: > Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack have a sticker announcing it had Tetris? > Why did Microsoft Entertainment Pack announce that it had Tetris on a sticker? > Why the Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing it had Tetris But doesn't really matter that much.

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degamad 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Headlines have long had their own grammatical rules only roughly aligning to English in the limit...

	▲	thaumasiotes an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is not something that could appear in any newspaper.