I don't know HN enough to guess, I was surprised too since it's dead but not removed so it asks for replies but (at least) I can't do that. I upvoted it in case it just needed to be in the positive, with no visible effect. Maybe he trolled on another thread and was punished ...

anyway @chrissmeuk I understand pentium 100 are nice little cpus, I used a p2 350 for a loooong time, and I miss it a great deal since it was a real workhorse. And to clarify my first comment, I wish more people were programming on old machines, it's a good thing to avoid bloat.

Indeed, working on a slow machine is the best thing one can do to produce optimized code.

At the moment I'm using a macbookair3.1 with 4 gigs of ram- and it might even be too fast IMHO to add good constaints.

this would be adequate specs to run dev VMs though

chrissmeuk has a pretty innocuous (and short) comment history (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chrissmeuk). The only visible clue is that someone accused them of being a Microsoft shill, and maybe someone pulled out the hellban hammer in response. There's clearly something fishy going on, on one side or another.

I've been browsing with showdead on for a while now and more and more I see quite reasonable-looking posts that have become [dead].

My hypothesis is a little more charitable: people just get caught by some semi-automatic filter and get accidentally hellbanned. Which is still a problem.

Then I post and hardly ever get responses or upvotes, which makes me wonder if:

a) I'm hellbanned myself

b) I'm a victim of my timezone

c) My writing is not as useful as I think

a) you're alive in my world (or maybe we're both hellbanned and it's hidden from us) b,c) combination of both. Internet is chaotic, I submitted nice links that had <10 votes and no comments, while a trivial one about a cute css button got 500+ ...