Huh. I don't think I've ever before offended someone else on the internet enough to make them find and wave the shared last name in my face.
All: when you see a comment that is truly bad for Hacker News, you can flag it by clicking 'link' to go to that comment's page and then clicking 'flag'. We monitor these flags and take action based on them, and over the last few months have slowly introduced a system where enough user flags will kill comments. In such cases you should see "[flagkilled]" if you have showdead turned on in your profile.