If those tweets actually appeared in text somewhere on Hacker News, they are foolish regardless of the context they were taken from. Dropping down to node.js to get close to the metal? Come on!
IMO it is still pretty strange. I would feel a lot more comfortable if he said "close to the wire" (as in little abstraction above the basic TCP/HTTP layer).
Yeah, they are real tweets. Except that some of them are from the articles themselves, not the comments. Like this one "services like github and sourceforge are just fads, with very little (I think no) added value."
Love it.