I liked the linkbait - it got me interested enough to click the link (on fivethirtyeight.com), and then I enjoyed the article. Agree that the article title does not match the main theme of the piece--the piece is too long for that anyways. The title for this post is probably too general to get many people interested. There's new "research" on startups written about almost every day.

Can you describe what the current policy on titles is? Are you pro-anodyne?

I meant "anodyne" not as a good thing but as "the best we can come up with for now", i.e. at least it wouldn't provoke a big argument about linkbait. That's why I asked readers to suggest something better. Nobody did, so maybe it was just hard.

What the HN guidelines say about titles has been the same for years:

  Please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait.

We deliberately avoid having detailed policies, but in this case we can derive a few corollaries. What we want is the opposite of what we don't want:

  1a. A good title is accurate and netural.

The reason for preferring the original title is to let the text speak for itself, so:

  1b. When changing a title, try to find representative language 
      from the article, rather than making something up.

And since one big reason for the guideline is to minimize bikeshed-style complaining about titles:

  1c. The best way to comment that a title is bad is to suggest a better one.