I do wish the web link was on the index page instead of the comments page so it was faster/easier/more obvious to use it.
We could use it as a prompt. Maybe the comments could be a zone to talk about quants and wall street. That might be useful, but it'd have to be explicit.
EDIT: I've actually wished for prompts on HN, for what it's worth. Other sites typically have ways of starting conversations without articles, and Ask HN's usually die except for a few lucky ones. Usually you end up in a situation where you want to talk about X but have to wait until a tangentially related comment is posted, and then sort of shoehorn it in awkwardly. Being able to spin up a "Quant thread" would be nice without a specific topic or question.
As for using the headline as a prompt for discussion, I'm quite sure that's all that drives many commenters on HN :)
1) my friends and I write to each other every day with more nuanced, researched, investigative journalism/analysis than the WSJ could ever hope to put out. I frequently release anonymous pastebins of my (hopefully impartial, unlike WSJ) analysis for free as a public service and I hope someone promotes them
2) the amount you quoted, $400, is somewhere around 1-2 months worth of total income for easily a billion people in this world. $400 would be considered an excellent monthly salary in a variety of countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Ukraine.
So for likely the majority of the world, $400 would be almost unjustifiably high for words on a page that don't really offer any profitable or immediately actionable ideas