[alexsereno]

Hacker news is peak contrarian. If your stance was that this merger was incredible, your replies would be entirely about competition lol.

[adolph]

HN has a diverse set of viewpoints. For any assertion one might make, there will be someone with the opposite viewpoint.

In addition to out-and-out opposition or agreement that sounds vaguely oppositional, a comment might call for a pedantic annotation, a tangential aside or book recommendation.

[basil-rash]

Don’t forget the unconstructive meta-analysis.

[alexsereno]

This is a wonderful example

[TeMPOraL]

That's to be expected. A typical conversation starts with someone taking a high-dimensional problem, projecting it to their favorite dimension, and saying "the solution is obviously on my side on the number line". Of course you'll get multiple "contrarian" replies ranging from "hey, what about my preferred dimension" to "you know the problem has more than one of them?".