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Comment by ANTSANTS | Hacker News Reader

The author of this committed suicide a few years ago. To the people making fun of the site for not being able to handle HN's traffic, it's kinda hard to improve your software when you're dead.

http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Uriel/index.html

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.plan9/xEb4wY...

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That is terrible news and not something I was aware of when I posted this. However, I would not have posted the OP had I not thought the site wasn't being actively updated.

The link you post says the OP committed suicide in 2012. According to the OP's update page, the site has been updated throughout December of 2013:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VmDU1T1...

Edit: for example, there was a page added recently on Node:

`2013/12/05: Added ‘harmful’ page about Node.js.`

(which unfortunately is down)

Edit 2: I think cat-v is now a series of sites, and each domain may be maintained by a separate person (the one under discussion is harmful.cat-v.org), so it may not all be the work and opinion of Uriel: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JL12jkr...

cat-v originally created by Uriel.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140208043848/http://cat-v.org/...

  Thanks
    Uriel for creating and building the site.

The page linked is part of a community wiki hosted on the site; while it has accumulated changes since then, I'm pretty sure the original "considered harmful" list was his creation.

EDIT: khm, you've apparently been hellbanned, for some reason.

To piggyback: thanks for the context khm and sorry for giving you server maintenance issues on a Saturday morning...I've come across cat-v entries in random Google searches (today I was looking for UNIX books) and I figured it was a site that had been used to getting Slashdotted.

I don't know what "hellbanned" means, but I'm unsurprised I got banned for posting about malloc() in a web programming forum.

You definitely weren't banned for posting about malloc. Posts about malloc are good! But yes, the account was banned, and I just looked through the log and I can't figure out why. The IP was banned as well, which suggests to me that your account might have gotten caught by a spam filter that had previously tagged that IP. I'm sorry. We've unbanned the account, obviously.

(If it was a spam filter, I have an idea about how to fix the problem which I haven't yet had time to get to.)

Could it be the link to the, um, somewhat incendiary blog?

Definitely not. It has been posted 88 times here in 6 years.

thanks for your intervention.

cat-v.org is operated by stanley lieber and hosted by myself; sl is very very careful to limit modifications to things that were either expressly in uriel's todo list or else so obviously uriel-like that their omission would be glaring.

>I don't know what "hellbanned" means, but I'm unsurprised I got banned for posting about malloc() in a web programming forum.

A hellban is a more insidious kind of ban, where the user is allowed to log on and post as if everything is normal, but in reality most users can't see their posts, and no one can reply directly to them. There's also something called a slowban, where the site purposefully communicates extremely slowly and randomly drops connections, just for a certain user.

>I'm unsurprised I got banned for posting about malloc() in a web programming forum.

Hey, not all of us are web programmers! No idea what was hellban-worthy about your post though.

cat-v.org is a fun site. I had no idea the author passed on. Thanks for letting us know.

cat-v.org, the Plan9 crowd, and Uriel specially have always been utter jokes.

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