First of all, you view the article in a very narrow view. You just see someone complaining about ethics committees. I see an article that is well-written (on par with PG's essays), and is talking about stuff that I wouldn't usually notice on my regular path on the Internet. Mice brain tumors? Academic research?

Second of all, an average "CS hacker" out there, back in high school/college, could take multiple paths - physics, math, bio, acting (yes, acting), painting, music, etc. - in fact, many of them during really bad coding moments (such as when you need to refactor a 1000-line java method) wish many times over that they stuck to biology, or music, or acting, or anything else back in college.

This article appeals to both wanting to read something well-written, and also to gratifying someone's intellectual curiosity about something that they could've ended up doing, but didn't; and, it explains in great detail what problems they would've encountered if they had actually gone down that route.

HN needs more of exactly this kind of content.