I had changed it because I knew nobody cares about the Library of Congress, and no one knows what Portolan means. I read the story, determined a meaningful title, and the moderator decided that was no good. Since I have edited many, many newspapers, and written countless headlines, I felt particularly annoyed.
We need moderators aggressively retitling articles submitted with stupid or biased titles. (Not only because that fixes those titles, but also because it reduces the incentive for submitters to submit with bad titles.) And if we have that, then inevitably there will be occasional misjudged retitlings. The question is whether the benefit outweighs the cost, and in my mind there's very little doubt that it does.
For what its worth, whatever was wrong with the original title I feel like yours was pretty misleading after going and reading the article (great article by the way, thanks for sharing it). The article was very explicitly about the library congress meeting to talk about the origins of the map, rather than a general piece about the map. If thats all you found interesting, perhaps you should have linked to a wikipedia page or a more general article.
Time spent arguing helps define which should get the free-time, though. Otherwise, ultimately, it would be "best" if every developer ignored every bit of feedback their applications caused, because their time is best spent making changes, not debating over what to change.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390895
I don't know what title you used when submitting it, but the current title wasn't written by a moderator. It's the original article title.
It's true that YC founders' accounts have a field set saying so, but the only code that looks at this field is the code for posting jobs. None of the anti-abuse code does. And the jobs page has been around for years.