I'm not sure I agree, actually. There were definitely several questions here I couldn't answer, but I definitely feel as if I should be able to answer them if I were going to work exclusively on the front-end (I'm primarily a back-end developer and have been for most of my career).
I don't see anything here that seems absurdly trivia-esque. The coding questions were easy but I think coupled with the JS and even jQuery questions they do a good job of covering quite a lot of content without falling back to brainteasers (which have their own share of problems, as any HN reader probably has read about a hundred times). Again, I couldn't answer all of them myself as I rarely work in JavaScript, but they all seem like things that one should know if one is working exclusively in JavaScript.
I don't see anything here that seems absurdly trivia-esque. The coding questions were easy but I think coupled with the JS and even jQuery questions they do a good job of covering quite a lot of content without falling back to brainteasers (which have their own share of problems, as any HN reader probably has read about a hundred times). Again, I couldn't answer all of them myself as I rarely work in JavaScript, but they all seem like things that one should know if one is working exclusively in JavaScript.