If you actually look at the images they are not very impressive especially if you know about retinotopy in the visual cortex. This means that there is a mapping

If you actually look at the images they are not very impressive especially if you know about retinotopy in the visual cortex. This means that there is a mapping between coordinates on the retina and coordinates in visual cortex. I'm not convinced this is doing much other than picking up on this long established fact to produce very vaguely similar images. Seriously look at how different the input image and the generated image are! I guess it makes sense that HN is skeptical about results more closely related to the community's expertise but it's a pretty crazy leap from being able to reconstruct something vaguely similar to what a person is currently seeing vs. trying to read someone's mind. I still have seen very little evidence that such a thing could at all be possible with FMRI. The spatial and temporal resolution are just far too low. The more everyone is impressed with results like this the more we delay the hard work of developing tools that actually have a shot at doing something like that.