I disagree. Imho a little infantile humor in places where it "doesn't belong" can be quite refreshing - as long as it remains the exception rather than the rule.

People tend to have pretty stiff sticks up their arses in such discussions.

Humor, even toilet humor, can remove fear and remind everyone that a debate over a semicolon is not necessarily a life/death situation.

No, it's just noise.

It's like someone yelling and acting up when other people are talking about something important to them, just because that person is bored and doesn't care about the topic.

If you are bored, go somewhere else.

And the net result _every_ single time is that the bug gets locked so no one can post to it. Sometimes they unlock it again after the reddit idiots have left.

I said something same-ish, but it seems HN is full of true professionals, with no place for humor in their work --or internet procrastination time--, that never read MAD magazine as kids...

How do you know it was Redditors?

I subscribe to quite a few programming related subreddits and while the comments there are more informal (people can make a joke without getting downvoted, for instance) the level of the discussion you're referring to is not very representative of programming subreddits either.