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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Then you probably shouldn't click through to anything published by The Atlantic. (Or for that matter, the New Yorker, the New York Times, etc).

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.

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> "it is sad to me when people do the 'TL;DR' thing"

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.

The premise of "tl" - "too long" - is a negative. While a convention, it's also dismissive, and that's what makes me sad. It reminds me of Emperor Joseph II telling Mozart there are "too many notes" in The Marriage of Figaro.

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.

Sadly, I think this is an increasingly recent phenomenon (get off my lawn). It's kind of funny given the style and length of HN favorites like pg and Steve Yegge.

Steve Yegge and pg are more on-topic for HN.

I love the TL;DRs just as much as I love the artfully-written short stories. I find they both serve a useful purpose for me.

Why is it sad? I too am curious about what happened but I'm not interested in reading a long, drawn-out abridged biography of the characters right now. A TL;DR saves me from that pain, and everybody who WANTS to read the full glorious article is more than welcome to. I don't usually find this style of writing to be artful (instead I frequently find it tedious and boring), but neither raldi nor I are asking for the authors to change their style. We both simply appreciate that there's a way to skip the drama and get to the crux of the matter. Thanks OP. (For what it's worth, I really enjoyed "The Eudaemonic Pie", dealing with the same topic of beating the house. That was well written.)

The problem is these articles are low signal to noise.

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.

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