Reading a paper requires some effort. The more familiar you are with the topic, the less effort you invest, but the effort is there.
It's valuable then to apply some heuristics to decide if a paper is worth reading or even skimming. One such heuristic is if the paper makes it to the front page of HN, or, say, if it's published in Nature. Based on this, a lot of people could waste some time they better spend doing something else.
If someone comes and points out some red flags, that's a service to the community. That service comes at a risk to one's own karma, as it's threading the boundary of what the HN community thinks is good discourse (for example the charity principle). Pointing out red flags without pointing out actual errors in the papers can be easily equated with ad-hominem attacks (believe me, I thought ten times before deciding about quoting the second author's thoughts on God).
I still decided that this is a good case to put my karma at risk: the claim that some new information-entropy force can explain the missing mass in the Universe is too important to ignore.
That said, your more informed analysis obviously adds much more value than my superficial one, so thank you for that.
