Certainly the parent post was provocative. That's why I moderated it and asked the user not to post like that again.

It doesn't change the fact that you also broke the site guidelines by taking the bait and responding with an outright flamewar post. People need to follow the rules regardless of how provocative another comment is. Otherwise we get a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

We don't think in terms of civility on HN; I haven't used that word in years except to tell people we don't use that word. We're going for kindness, which is something quite different.