I think HN is just generally interested in financial gain and doesn't mind bending ethical guidelines for that cause. I mean, they do have a high incidence of people working for tech companies.
Gamblers are making a personal choice to bet their money, other gamblers should not be made to bear responsibility if that gambler’s choice turns out to be a poor one. Gambling addicts obviously exist, but they are playing the same game everyone else is. If you want to protect addicts from harming their finances, change the rules to accommodate that goal (betting limits, credit/finance checks, outright banning of gambling) rather than expect other gamblers to follow undefined rules that may or may not protect other gamblers from themselves.
But you're right in that the vast majority of players in gambling (including the house) are either (a) being fleeced, or (b) fleecing others. When the majority of users/members of a particular system are either victims (in some sense), or profiting off victims, I question the amorality of that system. So traditional morality called gambling "immoral" for good reason, I think -- if only because of this emergent, victimizational behavior it encourages.
It seems to me that economic regulation exists primarily to--and functions ideally when it successfully does--protect the vulnerable and prevent victimization. So it seems right and good to me that gambling is outlawed in most of the US.
Hell, I’ll bite here and assert the same as my parent comment: the folks who dumped their life savings into crypto made a personal choice. I fail to see how the rest of the market bears responsibility to those who lost their “investment”. So long as everyone is playing by the same rules, there’s no way you should be ethically responsible from benefiting from other’s losses.
You signed up for the risk when you chose to play. Do you believe that if I dump my money in a stock and it tanks, investors who benefit from that are now responsible for the money I’ve lost?
In fact, if you're winning more than you're losing, you're decreasing the profit of the bookie. You are therefore making it a less worthy venture for them to hold these ethically-negative gambling events. If you were to win enough, the bookie would lose money from the venture, eventually resulting in them no longer hosting gambling events.
So actually, winning money off of bookies is an ethically good behavior, since it's negative feedback for them enabling other gamblers with "uncontrollable behavior" to lose their money.
Not if it's a parimutuel betting [1] system, as described in the story. The Hong Kong Jockey Club takes a flat 17% cut. The rest is exchanged between winners and losers. This is no different from playing poker at a casino, where the house collects a rake but otherwise the players only win money off one another.
Note how in the story, the Jockey Club contacts Benter and offers assistance rather than blacklisting him. If he were decreasing the profit margin of the bookie, as you call it, they would have ample reason to cut him off. In actuality, he was increasing their profits (but not their margin, which remained a flat 17%) simply by increasing betting activity. This is something poker sites have also hit upon, and as a result they've developed sophisticated rewards programs for their top players.
Or, to put it another way: any time you win a bet, you (and the bookie) are helping gambling addicts to take one step closer to "hitting bottom" and thus getting on to the first phase of recovery—acknowledging that you have a problem.
(This is the complement to the argument that charity for drug addicts is a bad thing, insofar as it delays the addict longer in the self-harming, not-prioritizing-getting-well phase of addiction. In the gambling addict case, charity would be, in effect, "giving them another pile of chips"—obviously a bad idea, no?)