Off topic, but speaking of hellbanning and auto-dead, I'm also not able to reply to any comments along Udo's thread (i.e. the thread starting with comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186917). Why is that?
Looking at your post time it would appear to be the cool off timer. To prevent deeply nested back and forth each level of nesting in a thread introduces a delay for replies. Come back latter, and it will probably come back.
