Oh, I really hate these articles. Intriguing headline and then a horribly long story with all these pseudo-artistic details like "immediately noticed a tense quality in the ambulance driver’s voice" wich is just too bothersome to actually read it.
Seriously, I'm considering writing an HN filtering proxy that ignores these kinds of magazine pieces. I just don't have time to read them properly, even if they are interesting enough that I inevitably get drawn into some of them. That's just another factor in HN becoming a time-sink instead of a productive source of useful news. I suspect if we had the ability to downvote submissions as well as upvote, less of them would hit the front page in the first place, but I can't be certain.
As for this article, the writing is OK, but I honestly wonder sometimes if these authors are being paid by the word. Take the first paragraph for instance. Replace it entirely with, "It was a dark and stormy night". Did that make the article better, worse, or no different?
Had the same information been conveyed in far fewer words, I wouldn't have had to skim over parts and would have got a lot more out of it. There's definitely a place for articles like this, but I don't think HN is that place.
Sorry for wasting your time, I purposedly submitted this on Sunday, a slow news day.
I can agree though that sometimes it's hard to estimate time which you would spend on a story. I use a word-counting service (textalyser) for that, and this particular story is quite long even by longform standards: 7,800 words / 47,000 characters (with spaces).
Some TLDR, anyone?