It's hard to believe this came from a place of humor after reading the otherwise dry article.

It's your prerogative to follow trends to determine what you find worthy of your time or not, but it's not a good thing to suggest that anyone that tolerates that type of language better than you do or even enjoys it, lacks self respect.

A lot of people find that cockiness funny and find the informality welcoming. And many of those tend to find cold formality, fake humility or lack of self-confidence as signs of something being boring, uninteresting or outright creepy.

EDIT: Comment was edited, original:

  It's hard to believe this came from a place of humor after reading the otherwise dry article. The article was otherwise fairly interesting, but that certainly left a sour taste in my mouth. He's lucky I read past the first paragraph, if it wasn't so prominent on HN I probably wouldn't have bothered listening to anything he had to say.

That's fair. I'll admit that he may be writing to an audience very different than myself.

The edit was because I only ended up scanning what I intended on reading and felt the second part of my criticism overly harsh.

I guarantee you would not find it funny if I called you a cunt. Remember none of the rest of the article even remotely matches the tone of the sentences in question, and the content larges comes from a place of ignorance.

Actually there have been a couple of times when people called me a cunt and it was funny in context. Now granted, whether this article is that kind of context, is a different question.