This issue comes up a lot. As a sibling comment says, if it is so common an occurrence for the character limit to lead to misleading headlines because they were overly condensed, you may want to consider slightly expanding the headline length limit (perhaps to 120-140). But I appreciate that it's a balancing act, because making it too long dilutes the punchiness of the HN front page itself. No easy answer here.

It comes up somewhat regularly but it's quite rare for there to be a case where there isn't a natural solution. For example in this case the HTML doc title not only fit the limit nicely, but was more neutral and thus better for HN. I think HN benefits from this limit.

Please consider extending the limit to 120 or 140 characters. 80 often forces me to produce a misleading condensation in my submissions.

In the alternative, add a "privileged comment" pinned to the top of the page which cannot be replied to, where an extended summary of the submission can be added by the submitter. But just changing the character limit of the title is probably a lot easier.