People like apocryphal stories about successful people. Celebrities, billionaires, professors. imo the story serves as a way to connect the reader to the article. The HN crowd tends to care less about these kinds of things, which is fine, but the audience is much broader.

See for example: http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm or the umpteen versions of http://math.bme.hu/~petz/vnsumming.html