I'm still not certain if it's intentional trolling, or high levels of lacking self-awareness and a lack of imagination in parsing their own sentence.

It was a shit-show of a thread of the worst kind on HN. I know you didn't start it, and I agree the commenter you were replying to started things with a generic ideological tangent. But we need everyone here to have enough restraint and poise to refrain from escalating and perpetuating flamewars.

It doesn't matter who starts something, everyone who plays a role in continuing it has some responsibility for it, and some of your comments were needlessly abusive. Commenting like that doesn't make things better on HN, and indeed they make things much worse.

When you see comments on HN that seem harmful to the health of the community, the first thing to do is flag them and if they're particularly bad, you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. We can very easily address such issues quickly, well before they turn into hellish flamewars like this.

>It was a shit-show of a thread of the worst kind on HN.

I agree. I was purposely very clear in my initial post in the hope that we could avoid any misunderstanding, but that clearly didn’t work out the way I’d have liked. While I tried to stick to discussing one specific thing I did let my replies get a bit loosey-goosey in response to what felt like somewhat confusing hostility.

I won’t be interacting with that user again, and I’ll email you guys next time I run into an interaction like that.