I disagree about the first paragraph bit. In every case where showing something like that works, it's setup so the poster can add such a description. Examples would be Slashdot, which is often a long form summary, and Digg, which is short form. Here on HN there is no summary. This encourages short, accurate, descriptive subjects. The base argument I'm trying to express is that either model works well, as long as it's human edited. However, automatically grabbing a semi-random chunk of text and displaying that as the descriptive paragraph isn't useful and makes reading the headlines difficult.