Probably not the best venue, but if you read through the comments, kind of makes sense.

"Assume good faith", "Converse curiously" and "Eschew flamebait" are part of the guidelines for commenting, for good reasons.

I don't think they're shadowbanned, just a lot of the comments have been banned the old-fashioned way.

I’m not seeing it? They don’t appear to be shadowbanned from my account.

Lots of completely harmless comments are dead, the few that are not were vouched for by someone (like myself if we're talking about this thread specifically). I don't really care either way, but the guy should be aware that he's writing into /dev/null

dang seems to have outright banned him just over a fortnight ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42653007

On Hacker News, banned accounts can still comment, but those comments are immediately dead until vouched.