"Of course, I have no real evidence for my views; if I had any good ideas for factoring, I'd be working on them instead of writing this. On the other hand, the people who talk about the great difficulty of factoring have equally little evidence. The net result is that it's reasonable to hope that factoring is difficult, but you should regard that as a provisional hypothesis rather than a certainty."
I see the article kindly submitted here is the equivalent of an amateur blog post, just a note posted to one personal webpage that happens to be served up by the MIT server. This is a case when the Hacker News protocol for displaying a domain for the submitted article was misleading rather than helpful. The author is gainfully employed and highly educated in related disciplines,
but he hasn't worked for a long time in this aspect of number theory, so the note is just thinking out loud, nothing more.