Sure—not every comment that breaks the site guidelines is equally bad, although if you take the context into account the GP comment was pretty vicious.
As it happens, I banned both of those accounts elsewhere:
If there's an assumption in your comment that moderation ought to be consistent, this is not possible because we can't moderate what we don't see, and we don't come close to seeing everything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40314730.