If someone makes a comment that sounds like they state a fact, I want to know who or what they are quoting. That's usually how it's being done in academia. I don't know why some people think that HN, or any other forum for that matter, isn't worth doing the same. You can't just throw something in and expect people to take it.
Merely referencing something written or said by somebody else, even if fancy academic titles and degrees are involved, in no way affects the validity of whatever is being claimed.
It's trivial to write something that's blatantly incorrect, to add some obscure references that sound good (they may not necessarily even be related, and if they're hard to access, nobody will bother to check them), and then to pretend that such claims have merit. Sometimes this happens unintentionally, when the referenced material is taken to be correct, when it actually isn't.
A lot of people here and in other online discussion forums are hostile to the "citations please" attitude because these people have experienced academia first hand, and know that references are often quite worthless. In many fields, they're more about adulating prominent members of the community than they are about making claims more robust. It ends up being a wasteful activity to engage in, for the most part.
