Users are not advised to do this themselves. The submission guidelines contain no such allowance. They specify a very limited set of cases where the title of a submission can be modified from the web page title.

This is a long-established convention to include the year if the article is a year and a bit old.

See dang, one of the moderators, affirm this multiple times at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... , most recently 17 days ago.

The guidelines are here. It's unreasonable to expect people to search for them in a comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Guidelines are not strict rules, as Captain Barbossa pointed out, but let's assume they are.

Since moderators have promoted this practice for at least a decade, it's much more likely your interpretation of the guidelines which is wrong.

Any moderately good rules lawyer would point out the guideline is "please use the original title" not "please use only the original title" nor the even stronger "use only the original title", which turns the polite request into a requirement.

Adding the year is not editorializing. Nor is adding "[video]" or "[pdf]", nor even adding the conference name and year as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37216895 did 11 hours ago.

Since there appears to be a conflict between your understanding of the guidelines and that of the moderators, you should take it up with them at hn@ycombinator.com in hopes of resolving the issue.

After all, the guidelines say "If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." ;)