HN's automatic editing of article titles is getting ridiculous. HN automatically removed "How" from the beginning (this is not the submitter's fault), and it wrecked the meaning of the title.
There hasn't ever been even an attempt to explain why he chose this behavior, so we can only keep guessing.
How John Smith Bought Foo Corp -> John Smith Bought Foo Corp
Why John Smith Bought Foo Corp -> John Smith Bought Foo Corp
Within some time window the OP can edit back in the missing word if it makes a difference (as it did here), and you can always email hn@ycombinator.com when one gets missed (as I shall do now).
Fare thee well, five researchers.
What I am saying is that running ChatGPT can be a new .replace()
/s
1) bad headlines that ask a question rather than provide information are so normalized that they appear everywhere now, so lots of titles are like that,
2) Auto-removing “how” addresses only some of those, and rarely well, and
3) When it doesn’t just fail to fix the problem but also mangles the headline, it generates discussion like this one we’re having now, and I think there’s a strong argument to be made that this is worse than letting the headline start with “how”.
And yeah, submitters may be able to fix the headline when submitting the link. The problem is they in-fact do not, pretty often.