Perhaps I’m overly optimistic. I’m also optimistic enough to believe that the comment I responded to wasn’t aiming to be condescending; the phrasing was the kind of thing that could very well have sounded jovial in speech among friends. I tend to think that’s the more common failing here: people type the way they’d speak if they were having a chat at the pub after work, and a lot of nuance burns off in the speech-to-text conversion.

In any case, the site guidelines ask us to counteract this by assuming good faith, and responding to the strongest interpretation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html