>What I got from the post was mostly that the author thinks very highly of their own cleverness.

Well, this is Hacker News. Ever read a PG essay? Besides, 90% of us think very highly of our own cleverness anyway.

The author just doesn't assume readers need his post feed to them, and goes on as if talking to his peers.

>The actual point was not really clear.

Don't know, it was quite clear to me -- even though it's the first time I've chanced on the guy, and he seems to have a specific set of references, inside jokes and prior posts on similar issues...

Well, perhaps you share his cultural context, then; I clearly do not, since he begins with statements which simply are not compatible with my experience of life and builds on them in ways which do not make any sense from my perspective on the world. I gave up halfway in, because he had gone so far off into his own self-referential argument that I could no longer even parse what he was trying to say.