Thank you for the summary. I hate when articles open with a teaser then bury the explanation.
This isn't a blog post or a new article. This is a short story. I thought it was interesting and I thought it was well written.
HN has a strong bias against anything artfully written (read: more than the bare minimum of words). I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering the crowd (mostly engineers, myself included) but it is sad to me when people do the 'TL;DR' thing.
You get the info on the subjects childhood, house, car, wife/husband, children, upbringing, college, style of dress, appearance, office, eccentricities, pets, etc, etc.
There's a lot of human interest element in these stories.
And of course the are paginated to increase page views for advertising.
Not that there aren't good articles occasionally in the publications you cited, but there is way too much "Sunday paper" in it.
HN has a strong bias toward allowing people to allocate their time based on their preferences. The tl;dr convention is tremendously useful because it allows people to make an informed decision as to whether or not to read the article, based on a summary which is (typically) more accurate than the headline.
In particular, if someone thought the article might have something new to say about the math of blackjack, the original comment would have dispelled them of that notion and therefore saved them some aggravation.
On the other hand, if someone was looking for a short story about the personality behind a famous gambler and didn't want to get bogged down in math, your comment may have enticed them to read. Thus, both comments are of value.
I would prefer people said "summary" or "precis" instead of "tl;dr".
In any case, it's only one of many conventions. Another convention is that "The Atlantic", "New Yorker", etc. write high-quality short stories and don't dive into technical details. It's sad that people feel that other readers here are ignorant enough of history to need additional clues about a 150+ year old magazine.