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Yes, leading How in title is always removed and often leads to worse titles.

I don't like these magical (unexpected) solutions.

Yes. There is some old regex (probably written 20 years ago) which automatically tries to improve the titles. One of the more silly rules is to remove "how" from the beginning.

I would guess that author just shortened the title which was too long for hn?

No, HN has a braindead feature that autostrips certain words from titles.