Coming from a C background, I found PHP easy to step into as many of of the underlying libraries and common functions are wrapped and available in PHP (with similar names).
In general I would never bring them up on this site. It's just not worth my time or effort. I've even gone so far as to ask people who have posted my blog posts here to take them down. Hacker News has one of the worst groupthink cases in tech, where if you speak against various core beliefs you get absolutely hammered with trolls both on the site and off of it. Having a reasonable discussion about the pros and cons of PHP is just not something this site is capable of supporting.
Aside from PHP, can you think of any other topics that can be problematic in this regard? So far i haven't personally run into any that would get me disproportionate amounts of negative votes, however i find myself curious about it. The only i could personally think of would be Perl and the discussions surrounding its history.
Perhaps i've just been lucky so far, or maybe you can tackle some of those topics by phrasing your points as questions or just pointing out that those are subjective views, instead of absolute truths, thus stimulating a discussion, rather a clash of opinions.
Personally, i think that sites like Habr or some Reddit communities could be more biased as far as discussions about topics go, due to the specialization present (e.g. a blockchain centric subreddit might not be receptive of criticism, even if constructive), however i've also heard similar things about Team Blind, whereas my HN experience has generally been fairly pleasant.
Just some hivemind topics-
* Free Speech. This community tends to be extremist about this, which in turn means anything that can be construed as limiting free speech will, somewhat ironically, not result in a productive conversation.
* Corporate Libertarianism. This community also tends to be extremely pro-corporate, and there's a lot of "if you don't like it work somewhere else". That being said I've seen some push back against this lately.
* Meritocracy. If you challenge the idea that silicon valley is a meritocracy people seem to get really upset.
I would definitely say that there are reddit communities that are worse, and some that are better.
That said, in regards to freedom of speech, i feel like some of Bryan Lunduke's (just as an example) arguments wouldn't necessarily invite hostility, despite their delicateness - such as the idea of de-anonymizing the internet and what implications that could have and what it'd look like.
Of course, it might invite prolonged discussions with no clear conclusion, because there are just societally complex topics with layered tradeoffs where no one can definitively cover all of them, but in my eyes that's not necessarily bad, as long as everyone remains civil.
I know I've certainly been wrong about a lot of things, though thankfully people so far have corrected me and let me better myself.
For bonus points, do state one provable and visible fact: that Signal (the program that's always recommended as a replacement for Telegram in HN) is not completely open source either, and then suddenly even more people appear to explain to you how that's somehow okay for Signal but not for Telegram. Even more puzzling.
Another one: mention Rust, no matter how. Somehow you're suddenly a zealot, you work with a "flavor of the week" language apparently (nevermind that it's at least 10 years old), and you also feel the need to tell everyone about it everywhere you go, and let's also not forget that C++ can do everything that Rust can and you're a bad programmer for not realizing it. I learn so many new things about myself every time I mention Rust around here! (warning: this was sarcasm)
HN isn't as neutral and factual as you might be imagining it. I've seen ugly and shameless appeals to authority by very prominent and high-profile members of this community.
Also, same as many other open source languages, there seems to be a tendency to pick up every language extension someone proposes hoping that it might win over some developers, but I'm not really convinced. Does PHP really need a "match" control structure (https://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.match.php) when it already has good ol' "switch" and "if/else"? Of course, I also like the more flexible (Pascal/)Go-style switch statement better than the "classic" C-style one, but maybe they should have given it some more thought years ago instead of slavishly following C/C++ then and inconveniencing thousands of developers by introducing a new keyword now?