Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easier to call out the author on a nitpick than to thoughtfully refute his arguments for the sake of racking up more imaginary internet points.
And the imaginary internet points incentive system HN uses implicitly incentivizes those posts. One way to stop this would be to have people who post low-value high-expected-karma-yield posts get randomly banned. This would function as a variable punishment and should be quite effective at training HN users.
A better way to improve content quality would be to stop using karma altogether, but I understand that's deeply baked into the culture, and probably not likely. Removing the visibility of karma scores might be an adequate compromise. Upvoting, downvoting and sorting would work perfectly fine without the temptation of a score.
Hacker News has enough passive aggressive attempts at operant conditioning as it is - the fading of text posts to discourage "blogging" is one egregious example. If you don't want people to farm karma, get rid of karma. If you want to expect more quality and better engagement from users, treat them like people and not like mice in a Skinner box.