Comment by tomhow

Please don't post like this on HN. The guidelines explicitly ask us not to sneer or be curmudgeonly - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

As for the basis of your objection, this smacks of intellectual gatekeeping. Plenty of good writing is by people who are not academically qualified or a recognized expert in the topic they're writing about. Indeed, very often, this kind of writing is better than writing by experts. Experts often write for other experts, and this can be exclusionary to lay readers. When a non-expert learns about a topic then writes about it for a general audience, they tend to be just a step ahead of the audience, and so the reader is able to learn about the topic by following the process of discovery and reasoning that the author just experienced. Sure, they often get some details or concepts wrong, but the discussion on a site like HN can draw other perspectives, and – very often – contributions from experts, which leads to further expansion in everyone's understanding of the topic.

HN's very ethos is to gratify intellectual curiosity, and this kind of writing is highly compatible with that.