[tptacek]

You could have just emailed him and asked.

You seem to be having difficulty with the concept that what you know not to be sockpuppetry would, to the part-time admins of this site, seem like sockpuppetry.

HN makes banning mistakes with some regularity. Get over it or go somewhere else. It's ungracious to spit venom ("unacceptable", "blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable", "HN as just a shill for YCombinator") at the site admins, all of whom have better things to do than resolve individual disputes like this.

I'm as cynical as anyone about YC, 'pg, and the valley culture, but I can see when someone's doing me a favor. Like, every f'ing day for one thousand four hundred fifty two days. I too would run a site like HN differently, but that is irrelevant, because I didn't build a site like HN and so my opinion doesn't matter.