That's a fair point, but I think calling the headline "misleading" goes too far. My own reaction to reading the title was not to assume the subject was to blame

That's a fair point, but I think calling the headline "misleading" goes too far. My own reaction to reading the title was not to assume the subject was to blame for its own troubles: that's certainly a possibility, but it could just as well be some "lack" in the environment, as turned out to be the case. Perhaps it says more about the mindset of the reader than the headline in itself. As the article illustrates, our languages are full of ambiguities. Human communication is limited in bandwidth and which features are preserved when we use lossy compression to shrink an article to a summary or title depends on priorities. For example, your suggestion: > Legislators drafted ambiguous statute and company's interpretation lost out emphasizes who is at fault, business or government, but loses what the dispute was (overtime pay), where the case was located (Maine), why there was ambiguity (the Oxford comma or lack thereof), and how much was at stake (millions of dollars). There's also something to be said about making it sound catchy (like the alliteration with "Maine" and "millions"). You could put all that back in, of course, but at the cost of more bandwidth consumption. And since everyone has different priorities (for example, someone else might want to know that the company was in the dairy business), there's always more to add until we reach the point where we're just reading the entire article. So yeah, that's a good insight, but the top HN comment shouldn't be that the article's headline could be interpreted differently.