You’re talking about the “you’re posting too fast, please slow down” message? IME it’s not a rate limit but a passive-aggressive way of banning someone from a conversation for some amount of time.
Not the OP but I think that's what the OP had in mind, yeah.
It's interesting because that limit has made me even more "radical" (by the unwritten standards of HN), i.e. when I know that I only have a limited amount of comments per day to make my point I use those comments in a more "push-y" manner by responding to the most provocative replies to what I had previously said, while also ignoring replying to comments that are too bland. Which means that I go by the logic of "why should I reply to this reasonable comment when there's this other more radical comment that's a lot more thorough and violent when trying to debunk what I had just written? I should use my limited number of comments by answering to the latter, not the former".
One of the many paradoxes of confrontation ("war") at work, that is if you regard many of the discussions in here as confrontation (even "war") of ideas.
