I've certainly thrown my fair share of insults around on Hacker News. Petty? Yes. Wrong? Yes. I'm a slave to my baser emotions from time to time, and I won't excuse that. The general technique for insulting someone on HN is to be subtle and imply that they're stupid, to provoke them into getting angry and saying something stupid, or to throw indirect insults by describing their comments as "garbage", "crap", or whatever. I hope one day that I'll grow out of it, it's an awful habit.

The saying, "It takes one to know one," seems appropriate here.

Coming out and saying that you "had to write a paragraph of crap to answer a BS premise" is a bit transparent, don't you think? It's a roundabout way of saying, "you're so stupid that I had some kind of moral duty to correct you, which is a waste of my time because I have better things to do." But... why would you call attention to the fact that you have better things to do than argue with me? Isn't that basically the same thing as admitting that you're bad at prioritizing your own time, that you feel compelled on some emotional level to debase yourself by talking with me?

Which brings me to an alternative strategy: if you think someone's wrong, ask questions. Maybe you'll learn something, maybe they'll learn something, and maybe it's just a misunderstanding.