It's a very common style of headlines recently, and a lot of the time you can remove the "How" without changing the meaning. For example, if I look down The Verge's recent posts, the first one starting with "How" is "How sampling and streaming are changing the future of music" [1]. Titling that "Sampling and streaming are changing the future of music" works fine.
I don't know that it's particularly useful most of the time, it's usually just unnecessary. An example where it actually should have been removed that I remember was this article on The Guardian a while back: "Suburb in the sky: how Jakartans built an entire village on top of a mall" [2]. There's nothing in the article at all about how they built it. It's just a trendy headline style for some reason, and gets used even in cases where it doesn't apply, like that one.
Edit: whoops, I thought you were replying to the request to add 2017 to the title.
If you've possibly already read it and are wondering if it's a repeat, if you have knowledge that the topic has had changes since then which might make it less accurate, and any number of other things.
In the end, it's more information, if people want to assume something negative about it, I feel that's on them (as long as the information shown is accurate).
I feel you’re talking about the date in brackets, which most people agree is useful. However the GP is discussing a different behaviour on HN where the word “How” is automatically dropped from headlines when it is used as a prefix. This behaviour doesn’t provide more information, as you state, though your opinion of its desirability might still differ from the GPs.
Yeah, I noticed that myself a bit ago, and edited my comment. You're correct in that I was talking about the date. Thread comprehension fail on my part. :)
