I know the GP contained a provocation, but that's no reason to single it out, pour fuel on it, and light it on fire. When you do that, you seriously damage this place.

The intended spirit of HN is curiosity (specifically intellectual curiosity), and that implies a completely different way of behaving: overlooking provocations and focusing on something else that's interesting. Please do that instead.

Flamewars, especially on classic flamewar topics, have nothing interesting in them because they're so tediously repetitive, and of course inevitably turn nasty as well (perhaps as a way of making them less boring [1]). So they do multiple kinds of damage here. That's not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...