Pi-hole Dev here. The only domains added to the whitelist are the domains on which the source lists are themselves hosted. It's probably complete over-kill, but the reasoning behind it is just in case one list tried to blacklist another.
Looks like your comments were getting killed with [dead] automatically. Maybe because of a new HN account combined with linking to the same site a couple times cause it to flag some spam detector? I vouched for your comments so they appear. Thanks for the project!