Yes, that is quite pedantic. It is clear from the article that Betteridge meant headlines that could be phrased assertively but are not (i.e. yes-or-no questions).

And the word "universal" is generally scoped to some domain — if we say "living human brings universally have some cardiac organ, whether natural or man-made", that does not extend to dead human beings or to rocks. In this case, the domain is, as noted above, newspaper newspaper headlines that question an assertion.

Your domain was scoped by the "living human brings(sic)," that is why it is clear that dead people or rocks where irrelevant. I have always taken universally to mean as wide of a scope as possible.

I was not sure where you where referring to when you said "as noted above?"

The two pg essays I linked to could have been an assertion but the answer did not seem to be no, but I could be wrong. From the quick essays of pg's that I read he seemed to use the question mark for pieces that required a much more nuanced answer than yes or no.

In many countries, the question "When Should Juvenile Offenders Receive Life Sentences?" is in fact simply "no".

He should have said any headline that is a yes or no question.

That wouldn't have been as good a headline.

That's implied in the law: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

If it wasn't a yes/no question, you couldn't reasonably answer "no".

Given how often these light and frothy publications appear on HN you would think that they have their fingers on the pulse of the "hacker community."

I am not sure what you are talking about?

I'm using this as an opportunity to complain about seeing the NYT and friends on here so often. This is somewhat related to the fact that they also have vote-bait headlines.

That is what I was guessing you meant, but I have never heard anyone say the NYT or Washington Post were frothy examples of newspapers. And it did not seem relevant because the wikipedia page that pg submitted is not expressly about HN culture.

However in order to cover all my bases I added two of pg's own essay titles/headlines to the list to make sure it meets your HN notability requirements.

I intended that to mean "light and frothy general technology news." As I understand it they're respected for the journalism they do but I don't think half of it belongs here.

I don't like the links you posted. It would be much better to find headlines which can be answered "NO" but, according to the text are answered "yes".