[tmarthal]

And yet, the original author doesn't have any data to say how the various headlines are doing. A nice writeup would be if someone at HN posted the CTRs and applications (i.e. conversions) for the various job descriptions w/ headlines. Not sure if there would be enough data to make it statistically meaningful, however.

In my limited analysis of a situation (which is just a summary of the above comments?), you may get a higher CTR rate on the more general headlines but a lower conversion rate. You may get a lower CTR on the more detailed headlines, but a higher application conversion rate.

Deciding which headline is better most likely really depends on the underlying content, and an author using their opinion on what constitues a good job description may not always be correct.