He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
your priors.
I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
When someone writes something that goes against what most people
think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
think about changing your mind on this topic.
It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).
Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.
As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior experience that being mugged has a very high probability. Let's say 50% because it's easier.
Let's also say your friend points out that you've left your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.
Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that belief (such as what public policies you support).