Given that the title was changed after my comment, I'd say that the comment was substantive, and contributed to the conversation.
Questioning that there's a homeless crisis when the data shown in the submission states that there's north of 500,000 homeless in the US is an absurd starting point for a conversation.
That is, _there is no conversation to be had about that question_. And any debate held by HN on that would be astoundingly privileged.
You posted your comment and I posted my reply before we changed the title. It was clearly a snarky and informationless comment, which you shouldn't have posted. A title change doesn't retroactively reverse that.
Of course, if you had posted a substantive comment about homelessness in response to specific things in the article, that would have been fine. That's very much not what you posted.
As for "there is no conversation to be had"—this is the sort of categorical putdown that tends to go along with unsubstantive posts in the first place. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? We're looking for curious conversation here, not position-hammering. There's a big difference between those, even if all of your views are 100% correct. Launching straight into a flamewar when the thread is brand new is definitely not the intended use of this site.
Questioning that there's a homeless crisis when the data shown in the submission states that there's north of 500,000 homeless in the US is an absurd starting point for a conversation.
That is, _there is no conversation to be had about that question_. And any debate held by HN on that would be astoundingly privileged.