Did he struck a nerve? All I'm seeing here are attacks on his person rather than discussing his post, which is not even that controversial, just some common sense stuff.
As someone who actually used to IRC with him back in the day... (man... I'm starting to feel old lol) he's kind of arrogant in his demeanor. He embodies the true spirit of a hacker in the sense of "Hacker" as in Hacker News, but he gets under everyone's skin over the years. This eventually takes a toll on people, and it mounts up.
GeoHot could cure cancer, not put it in the blog post title, somewhere near the bottom, and all of HN would miss it and nobody would ever get the life saving treatment they could have gotten because of blind hatred.
As much as I disliked my interactions with him, I would rather always take someone on a per-event basis, I see his new blog post for what it is and go from there. If it's trash, its trash, otherwise, I'll acknowledge it.
I don't want HN to be another reddit where we blindly attack people.
I haven't yet read what the post submitted here is about, and personally I already have the same opinion as the comment you replied to. So I suspect they just wanted to comment about that rather than caring about this specific post, to remind people not to make the mistake of assuming that someone being well known doesn't automatically mean they always know what they're talking about.