Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

Is there a service that provides summaries of long-form articles like this? I get that some people enjoy reading prose, but I'd like to know what the article is actually about. So far, I'm 5 pages in and still not sure what the insight is.

I really don't care about the decoration of this guy's office, which drugs he prefers, how his voice sounds, the atmosphere in a horse racing venue, the outcome of a specific horse race, not even this guy's entire life story.

What was his key invention?

Edit: Skimmed the rest, and it sounds like he was simply good at statistical analysis.

Other key parts of the article seem to be (remember, I skimmed): It was a betting system where effectively people bet against each other, not a bookmaker with fixed odds, so he basically became a bookmaker.

The rest reads like many other "smart gambling" stories:

- others invested in his operation

- he first was treated as a good customer, getting an "API" to place the bets programmatically, then got that revoked as the organizers realized that other gamblers might not like that he was winning so much (from them, effectively)

Overall, I learned nothing new, and wasted my time reading ten pages of drivel. This is why I hate long-form journalism: You don't know whether the article contains any useful information until you've spent half an hour trying to find it in the description of people's looks, landscapes, weather, and similar chaff.

Computer aided statistical analysis to give a small but profitable edge. Place a huge number of "smart" bets where the statistically likely winnings exceed the cost of all the bets.

Hear, hear. Paragraphs like this to me have barely any more relevance to the real story as your grandmother's oatmeal cookie recipe:

>As the pack thundered around the final bend, two horses muscled ahead. “It’s Mascot Treasure a length in front, but Bobo Duck is gunning him down,” said the announcer, voice rising. “Bobo Duck in front. Mascot fighting back!” The crowd roared as the riders raced across the finish line. Bobo Duck edged Mascot Treasure, and Frat Rat came in third.

I already know what horse-racing is like. I don't need this cruft, the headline promised an explanation of a novel betting scheme and that's the only thing I'm interested in. If I'm feeling particularly crotchety I'm insulted that the author thinks I can't tell the difference between this fluff and actual content.

I too loathe long-form journalism. It seems like self-indulgence on the part of people who wanted to write creative fiction but aren't good enough to be successful at that.

This is like saying Moneyball is 200 pages too long because it talks about how baseball works when everyone already knows how baseball works.

It's not a research paper. The whole point is for it to take the reader to another place so they can imagine being there, not expounding on the square root of the hypotenuse which led to three commas of winnings.

I guess you hate novels as well? I enjoy long indepth character centered articles and I think many other people do as well. The point of reading doesn’t necessarily have to be about acquiring the most information in the densest representation.

Also if reading the article was a total waste of your valuable time, why are you commenting about it?

This is a poor comparison. I can understand the OP since a title like this generates interest as in "how did they do it", and I expect to learn something by reading the article. I won't be reading a novel with this same expectation; I read it for its entertainment value.

I just like separating information acquisition from entertainment, because things that try to fill both roles tend to be bad at both.

I'm also not proposing to make it illegal to write long-form articles, just asking whether there is a service that transforms them into a form that I personally prefer.

There are other ways of parsing text that are worthy of practice. Skimming or speed reading can be applied to all sorts of visual stimuli, including prose and code. Also reading bottom up is very handy, especially when reading say the economist.

You could listen to it while you do other stuff. There are apps that do text to speech.

There's this bot on Reddit which summarizes articles: https://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotld...

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