That feels almost like a form of psychological torment to me. I recognise the value of hellbanning as a way to trap griefers, but I do think it's overused on HackerNews.

   Do: email pg if you're hellbanned.
   Do: Be civil and respond politely.
   Don't: create a throwaway account and whine about being    hellbanned.
   Don't: create a new account without talking to pg first.
   Don't: take it personally.

This is a great article that explains very clearly why hellbanning is in 99.5% of the cases the absolute wrong choice as it's being used on HN: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...

In addition, the guidelines can say "don't take it personally" all they want, but when someone wastes my time for 150 days when there are so many perfectly reasonable ways of solving the problem in common usage on successful discussion forums all over the web, yeah I would probably be a little bit miffed, myself.

It's one of the main reasons I keep an eye on my karma score, if it sometimes doesn't go up for a few days, I get nervous and check if I can still see my own comments via a proxy. It's absolutely ridiculous that I have to do it that way, but I've seen people get hellbanned for such petty things that yes, I really couldn't say I never will be one of "those people" that catch the wrong mod's attention at the wrong time before their coffee hit.