That account was not banned.
All: please follow the HN guidelines and email us ([email protected]) rather than posting in the threads. There are two reasons: (a) it's the only reliable way to get things like this fixed, and (b) these meta-subthreads add noise.
triangleman, I'm not sure why I was hellbanned. After 100+ days of lurking and a handful posts/comments, I decided today to start trying to start participating again. My comment history is pretty vanilla, with one random link that I don't remember even posting on the Uber article and didn't even make any sense in the context of the article.
Also, there was never a deleted offensive comment on my account, so I'm not sure why I would be hell-banned. Is there anything I can do to reverse this?