Most Americans regard as immoral any substance or activity to which ordinary people become addicted at a significant rate.
Addiction breaks social ties. For example, when an addict starts to struggle to continue to pay for his addiction, he often starts to steal from friends and family members.
The average view on this on HN is quite different from the American average. Personality psychologists have observed that people who do well in software development and entrepreneurship tend to be high in a trait called "openness to experience". Maybe HNers are more tolerant of addictive substances and activities than the American average because addictive substances and activities tend to be interesting experiences.
(I am restricting my universe of discourse here to the US only because it is the country I know best.)
> Maybe HNers are more tolerant of addictive substances and activities than the American average because addictive substances and activities tend to be interesting experiences.
I think the more accurate lens would be that Hacker News likes money.
On the surface at least, it seems like running a gambling or sports betting company would be a dream job. You get to systemically rip off your customers through your house edge, you retain the right to back off skilled players that can bypass your house edge, your expenses go to infrastructure as opposed to creating anything of value, and you get to externalize the wider societal consequences by blaming nebulous mental illness.
"This guy wants to pay me for the privilege of gradually losing money to me, why should I stop him?"