Peter was notable for maintaining a lot of the audio output backends for Winamp. People who had problems with their Creative Labs sound cards (read: basically anyone who owned one) causing playback glitches in Winamp would post about it on the Winamp forums and peter would get really cranky and eventually figure out how to fix it. (:

You have to enable a setting to see [dead] posts, and you can't reply to them. That's why people post as siblings, hoping that the banned person will come back to the thread and see their name.

It's to let him know that he triggered hell banning somehow. it's super annoying, because you don't know if you are hell banned.

HN has an amusingly childish policy of hellbanning individuals it deems inappropriate or otherwise objectionable--hellbanning hides the banned account's comments to everyone unless you set "showdead" to true in your account preferences.

Some users have started kindly informing the hellbanned posters that, for whatever reasons, don't seem to notice that no one ever responds or upvotes their comments.

If I may get on my soapbox (if I wasn't already), I find the whole thing symptomatic of Silicon Valley's culture of networking hell and reputation management. It's a policy of elitism; a policy that disenfranchises in the name of some fictional notion of quality; a policy that demonstrates just how rotten the tech industry is at heart.

Why do I go that far? Because community culture is indicative of so many things. This is the community and atmosphere that pg set up, that pg creates, moderates, and maintains.

pg may not be formally 'responsible,' but he's certainly at the head.

Because I'm an asshole, but not enough of one to get hellbanned (at least on this account), I am in some state of suspension: an artificial delay imposed on every request.

(That's what I don't get about HN's moderation: what, did you think I wouldn't notice that you're essentially trying to herd me like chattel? I stubbornly keep this account kicking out of simple contrariness.)

Heh, I'm listening to the album in their first screenshot. Gotta be a good sign.