Please don't do this, no matter how provocative another comment was. The proper response is to flag it and ignore it—then the provocation fizzles out, as it should. The site guidelines put it this way: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." That's our euphemistic recoding of "Please don't feed the trolls."

I realize this is not so easy when you belong to a group that's being put down, but we all need to build up our tolerance to that kind of thing, since the alternative is to have it dominate discussion and that would make everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html