I'm sure you wrote this in good faith, but there weren't parens in the original comment. They only appeared in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19470714. The odd thing is that eli_gottlieb was making an unrelated point at the time (a strange and almost endearingly paranoid one, but that's another story).

This looks like a case of the internet snark trope where people use quotation marks to put nasty words in others' mouths, leading to misunderstanding and unfairness. That's why we've long asked users not to do that: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... It has never been in the official guidelines but it's been a bit of case law on this site for a long time.