The ratio of comments to votes in this thread is a perfect example of the "chilling effect" surrounding this topic and the limits it creates on free speech.
the same really. I don't think anyone will know for sure. The poor guy might just have not caught the issues back then. Or maybe it was malicious and still is.
It's hard to say. In these cases, the wisest option is "innocent until proved guilty". False positives are worse than false negatives.
That's probably more attributable to knowledge of HN's algorithms basing article ranking on the upvote/comment ratio than on any sort of "chilling effect".