"Why the down votes?"
But since you're asking, and it seems with more sincerity than your initial comment, I can offer my view.
First, though, I need to point out something about HN karma that's a bit different than reddit or elsewhere. I include this because it was a shock to me at first, and your account is new enough you may not have gotten used to it yet, either. And it's that nobody cares about how much karma anyone has. It's used as a basic filter for allowing downvotes and it's visible in someone's profile, but what I mean is that there isn't a lot of farming going on. At least, in general. Partly because it's so much work with little pay-off, I think. You can't get easy karma from a quick laugh or posting something controversial. You can't even be sure that a news item you post will get enough attention to try and get easy comment points from. The kinds of comments that would get easy karma on Reddit are more likely to get downvoted here, and maybe it's reactionary but I am pretty sure it's not personal. I like how you can't downvote any responding comments, even if you can downvote. Anyway, it's not a perfect system but I can say I stopped going to reddit when I came to appreciate the better parts of HN commentary.
One of the things that can trigger a lot of downvotes is criticism without substance. Even if it's a valid commentary on the society or politics involved. And, if it's a little off topic, that can trigger some downvotes too. It takes a real gem of a comment and good timing to get more than a few upvotes, and you never really know how many upvotes someone else's comment got unless they tell you. tbh some of my comments that I put a decent amount of time and thought into never got an upvote, but I'm rarely surprised at getting too many upvotes for a comment.
The audience here tends to favor original thought, and are easily dismissive of comments that are overly dismissive of the news post it is commenting on.
Tying this all back to the fine article, which I'll admit to not having read, but whose topic I can claim some of my own opinions on, because I've been fortunate enough to work with a range of talent there. I think one of the hallmarks of a great engineer is to have partitioned off the creation from the creator enough that they never take personal offense to any criticism of their design or their plan. Assuming mutual respect and fair communication (both which also are requirements, IMO). There's also all the actual technical bits but I think it's fair to say that a lot of what makes a great anything involves a mastery over communication and enough confidence in themselves not to take things personally.
And, maybe, you know, that also connects with your original comment. But I don't know if that has anything to do with your intention when posting it.
I like negative feedback.
I'm surprised you wrote all this. You, too, should like negative feedback. How else are you going to get gritty and competitive?
To be clear, some of my commentary was in response to a sibling comment of yours where you seemed to take the downvotes personally. I can't speak for all the cases, obviously, but my observation of HN is that the downvotes are usually a signal of "this comment doesn't apply to the topic or follow-up debate" and less so a signal of "bad idea" or "bad author.". Disagreement with an idea usually results in a thoughtful comment response, not a downvote.
I think the karma threshold for downvoting rights is useful here in that it gives everyone enough exposure to the guidelines before taking action on their own personal ranking objectives (and the HN guidelines are worth reading if you haven't yet -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). My best guess is that your downvoters considered your comment a dismissal of TFA, without any explanation for your flippancy.
I may have read to the bottom of too many HN posts but,, fortunately, no one is keeping score and they really don't get that long or too toxic. (thanks largely to the efforts of dang and the rest of the mods, I'm sure)