If you don't feel confident defending your opinions in such a space The point of HN is to be a search for the truth among colleagues, not a verbal barfight. Th

If you don't feel confident defending your opinions in such a space The point of HN is to be a search for the truth among colleagues, not a verbal barfight. The fact that you wanted to get into one immediately says a lot about both sides of the conversation. your comment did not do enough to distance whatever you were talking about from them You didn't even briefly pause to question whether I might be associated with them. Why should I need to distance myself from them when I'm merely talking about them? The causal linkage is backwards here. Maybe you feel bad about reacting so harshly and are now backpedaling. Either way, you shouldn't get to force the conversation into a private message: If you want to have a conversation about such a thing, I'm happy to engage over private message. But you bringing it up was so tangental, so unrelated, and so odd that I could not resist calling you out on it. If I bring up a topic substantively, honestly, and in a way that's a search for the truth, it shouldn't matter whether it's done in public or in private.