If you read through his posts, he is absolutely not a newb. It's someone from the Bitcoin community that studied and exploited the vulnerability. His trolling about Ethereum's lack of immutability makes it obvious.

To be honest, I stopped trusting the Parity wallet months ago due to their history of bad testing and buggy code. Trusting their multi-sig contract would have been crazy; anyone using it didn't do their due diligence.

It seems like the number of users affected is likely low, although a couple ICOs will be crushed by this. I don't think we can expect a hard fork in this case. I hope that this experience teaches people to stop trusting smart contracts in these early stages. The core protocol is sound, but it's simply too easy at this point to publish bad contracts where major losses will occur.