Yes, here's the problem: anyone in the world can write an article about any subject and submit it to HN. In fact the author himself submitted this article to HN. But the author seems to have no particular expertise on the subject matter of the article. The author is a software engineer writing about friendship. And the author's own comments here have just made things worse and more muddled:
The subject matter, friendship, is of interest to many people, but what obligation do we have to take a non-expert screed seriously? Especially since the article itself seems to be problematic in several ways, at best extremely vague. It's amateur armchair philosophizing.
There should be a higher bar for these types of articles that espouse truisms about fundamental human relationships.