I've been fairly critical of Apple on HN and seem to avoid the dreaded hellban. Plenty of upvotes. Also critical of HN and avoid hellbans. Plenty of upvotes. It's possible the criticism is a secondary attribute to the thing that leads to bans/downvotes/obscurity.
That's good. Perhaps the users are not as biased as the mods, or the commenters as much as the voters.
By the way, for that Rails development question, you can set up a Linux VM with file sharing and SSH access from the host Windows machine. Then you can develop with Linux but as if you were in Windows, opening and editing files in Windows and using a Windows SSH client. Instead of using localhost to view your site in the browser, just use the local IP address of your VM. See this post: http://www.chetane.com/2012/09/11/hybrid-windows-linux-vm-ra...
And once you know what you are doing, you can even set up a lightweight headless Linux VM that will take hardly any power or CPU, just unobtrusively running in the background.
