It does show how out of touch tech workers are that they are shocked someone is able to live off 1k a month. It sometimes feels like hn posters were born on college campuses and shielded from normal society until their twenties, after which they move to the Bay Area with the upmost confidence that they know everything there is to know about the world.
Especially if you are doing it voluntarily, 1k a month can provide you more then enough for a comfortable life in many part of the country. More so if you can avoid car ownership/insurance and health insurance (Which gwern seems to do).
There's a bit in The West Wing where one of the characters finds out the US poverty thresholds are calculated based on work done in the 1950s by a woman named Mollie Orshansky, and that they can't be updated because then US would then have millions more poor people, and that's bad politics. According to your link that's still mostly true 25 years later.
It's not uncommon, but hopefully it offers some perspective to those commenters who say things like "this-or-that subscription fee should be trivial pocket change to the sorts of people who comment on HN".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
"Among individuals living alone: 19.1% lived in poverty."
Poverty line (max yearly income) for single households: $14,580