[_exec]

I've stumbled upon Terry's work a long time ago...and suffice to say he's been a major inspiration. It's a shame the majority of netizens (Yes, HN and Reddit included) can't look beyond his eccentricity and mental health issues (then again, it takes some digging and google-fu to find out the full story / context behind the man...his posts don't exactly come with a disclaimer).

Going down the rabbit hole of Googling, Redditing, finding out more about him and his story ("a one-man novel, modern x64 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-retro OS?" type of thing is catnip to my synapses), I've also come to understand a friend's schizophrenic relative a bit better. I've read accounts of schizophrenia and art intersecting, but did not understand what it is, what it's like, *, until I witnessed schizophrenia intersecting with IT, at which point the gates of empathy, admiration and fascination were flung wide open.

[/r/programming's 637 comments thread from 2010] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/e5d8e/demo_vide...

[another /r/programming thread] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lhefd/losethos_...

His username on HN is / has been some variation on "TempleOS", "LoseThos", "SparrowOS", "TempleOSv2", etc. AFAIK all hellbanned due to un-PC comments posted in his, for lack of better phrasing, "Moments of Un-Clarity".

The irony (perhaps using the wrong word) of being hellbanned when the story of of your life's work..your magnum opus (especially in this case, an objective article that places it in context and with some background) is featured on HN's front page, makes me sad.

I consider his work to be a prime example of ["Outsider Art"] {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art} in our field.

I wish to collaborate with him one day.

Edit: Formatting, more caffeine.

[alexbecker]

While regrettable, his hellban is entirely necessary. Almost every comment he makes refers to "f------- n------" (censorship mine). To quote one from his page of most recent comments: "I spend my days clubbing r----d-n------. CLUB! CLUB! DIE N-----! CLUB! R----D! N------! DIE!! CLUB! N-----!"

That's not really something we can have on HN.

(edit: right, asterisks are formatting here)

[anigbrowl]

Inc ase people weren't aware, there's a 'showdead' option in your HN profile that lets you see dead comments and submissions, eg those from hellbanned accounts. I don't think terry's comments are so consistently offensive as suggested above but he does post a lot of stuff that is bizarre or offensive to the casual reader, so the hellban makes sense.

Other times he posts lucid informative comments on technical topics and usually someone with Showdead enabled will copy them into the thread so everyone else can see them. It's not an ideal system but it's an acceptable compromise between keeping the site usable for as many as possible without completely barring access to someone like Terry.

[ecdavis]

It would be neat if a sufficient number of upvotes could cause a comment from a hellbanned account to show up as normal. I guess this could be gamed to circumvent bans, but in Terry's case it could lead to his informative/worthwhile comments being visible to more people.

[MertsA]

Make it a perk for high karma users like downvoting.

[guscost]

Also I've made a bookmarklet for anyone who wants it, which re-colors the faded comments with shades of red. In my opinion this is a much better user experience, as these comments are appropriately flagged but still readable without much effort:

https://github.com/guscost/bookmarklets/

Load the bookmarklets.html in a browser and then drag "Re-Color HN" to your bookmarks.

The faded down-voted comments are my least favorite part of the UI here (it's like "this comment is now 75% censored").

[josteink]

Inc ase people weren't aware, there's a 'showdead' option in your HN profile

Thank you. I wasn't aware of this, and I'm glad I can sidestep what has (in my opinion) at times been a too narrow moderation of these forums.

[peterwwillis]

If you deal with the mentally ill you begin to see the differences between intentionally abusive behavior and behavior that's just highly erratic or unusual. Sometimes the mentally ill are dicks. But also, sometimes they just say or do things that are culturally insensitive without intending to hurt anyone's feelings, or understanding how they could do so.

While I think the above comment is offensive, it also appears to not be directed at any one person, and seems to be a facet of his mental illness. I therefore reason that this person is not trying to be abusive or racist, but is in fact suffering from a disease, and this is a symptom of it. So I don't think he should be held to the same standard everyone else is.

For example, we have flagkilling for comments in addition to downvotes that can be used to remove offensive remarks. Why wouldn't we merely let the crowd downvote his negative comments, and upvote the good ones? Positive reinforcement would actually be a useful to instruct him how to behave in a social environment such as this.

Or we could just hellban all the mentally challenged users.

[seabee]

Internet eugenics^W^W Hellbanning is a lot easier to justify when pseudonymity makes it easy to pretend everyone is a healthy WASP male like you are.

That said, signal-to-noise still needs to be maintained. I think the ability to resurrect a comment from the dead when the quality is verified by others would help people like Terry Davis feel less ostracized by hellbans.

[Steko]

"So I don't think he should be held to the same standard everyone else is."

I think you're misunderstanding how standards work. It doesn't matter if he believes it or means it to be abusive or if it's just trolling/performance art or if it's because of mental illness. Racist speech is offensive to the community and the people who repeatedly use it will be moderated.

There are people with mental illness that expose themselves or defocate in public. There nothing inherently wrong with nudity or defocation (hygiene yes but we're ok with dog poop as long as you clean it up) but these acts cross a line society has drawn. And most people will insist that such behavior not be permitted in things they take part in.

[peterwwillis]

In the cases you cite, the way to deal with problem behavior usually involves medication, treatment, care, etc, but they still get to be participatory members of society.

The solution you're proposing would just lock them up in a high tower where the public could remain blissfully unaware that the mentally ill even exist, and never have to deal with them. I'd rather have to deal with somebody shitting on a bus once in a while than ostracize them and force them into a minimum security prison.

Standards are a guideline for how something should normally be. If someone is, by no fault of their own, radically outside this standard, they may require a separate standard to determine how they can be 'normal', and then find and receive treatment in order to live as close to normal as possible. Using the same standard for everyone would result in people being thrown into insane asylums for everything from anxiety to stress-induced nervous breakdown, bipolar disorder, OCD, schizophrenia, etc.

In 2012, there were an estimated 9.6 million adults aged 18 or older in the U.S. with a serious mental illness in the past year. This represented 4.1 percent of all U.S. adults. There were an estimated 43.7 million adults with any mental illness ; 18.6 percent of all U.S. adults. So yeah, I still don't think everyone should be held to the same standard, and I think treatment options should exist other than "hiding or banning from society".

[kenrikm]

When I was a kid I used to have a councilor that had Tourette's Syndrome, he was one of the nicest people and really helpful and good at his job. However every now and then he would have an attack a spitoff nearly the same vitriol F$%# N%^$#er, C$%k S%#$er etc.. after a few seconds he would recover and apologize. There really are mental illnesses out there that will make you say and do things that you don't actually believe when you're not under it's influence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette_syndrome

[krapp]

>That's not really something we can have on HN.

Arguably, we do have it on HN, by design. The effect of his ban, and his reputation as a programmer have turned him into a weird sort of mascot. It's possible that simply banning him outright would have driven him off the site by now. It certainly wouldn't have been more effort than hellbanning his accounts. But the system as it is encourages him to stay.

[thisGuysAccount]

Everyone's talking about Terry like he's not able to see this...

Not aiming this message at you, krapp, or anyone, I just realized this while reading your message that Terry's probably read through this thread a few times. Wonder what his thoughts are on the article.

[krapp]

He could post his thoughts on whatever he likes, but of course, we're not meant to know what they are, or to care.

Terry is the price this community pays for its pretense at intellectual purity.

[nyolfen]

the dude is straight up racist and just because he's eccentric and mentally ill doesn't mean it should be tolerated

[MrBra]

If you're referring to him saying "nigger" multiple times, then I think that that to him is more like a a kind of a generic bad-word to go with, and that he's not actually using it in a true "racist" sense.

Of course I agree that just using that word to insult someone classifies as racist, but so far I've never seen anywhere in his comments or rants that he actually argumented something against black people.

[jmduke]

Quoting from the first page of @TempleOS's comments (censorship mine, of course):

I spend my days clubbing retard-ns. CLUB! CLUB! DIE N! CLUB! RETARD! N! DIE!! CLUB! N!

Regardless of his mental state, this is not content that I want in any of my online communities.

[pluma]

So that's what the "r---d" censor meant. I've never seen that word bleeped out before.

[MrBra]

Right, and the sense of my comment is that this does not necessarily imply that he would not actually work and then fit nice in team with a black guy, for example. That's just how I perceive that..

[jmduke]

I don't think he would work and fit in with any person who objects to the casual use of that term, which is hopefully the overwhelming majority of the industry.

[MrBra]

Maybe there would be no reason to discuss about that once started working and that habit would probably sink in front of more interesting/important stuff.

[mtrimpe]

One of the features of schizophrenia is creating new words for concepts without realizing how little they match up with other people's definition of those words.

For all we know Terry means nigger as referring to the religious concept of darkness and would insist it has nothing to do with skin colour.

I'm not saying that is the case here, but it very likely could be and I am saying that we're for more clueless when it comes to empathizing with people like Terry than we think we are.

[_exec]

Is he actually racist, or are his moments of unclarity racist?

[drivingmenuts]

To determine that might require face-to-face contact and since he is a diagnosed schizophrenic, it might still be unclear.

Even if the racism only comes out during manic periods, it would be difficult to parse that in an online medium. Since very few of us are trained to deal with that sort of episode, it is probably best to avoid the issue entirely.

[fallat]

Why not just ask?

[anigbrowl]

Terry's God is only as coherent as Terry's offerings of executable code on any given day, and He mediates all of Terry's social communication.

The best way to satisfy your vuriosity is to read his internal monologue stuff, which he documents religiously: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Accts/TS/Wb2/Rants/TAD/TADRants.h...

[nyolfen]

there's no material difference for the purposes of fostering social spaces devoid of racism

[emodendroket]

Just about all Americans exhibit some racism, although most of it manifests itself in the form of less-obvious, but still insidious, biases and so on, rather than calling people the n-word on Hacker News.

[nyolfen]

i totally agree but i don't think it serves as any kind of counterpoint to excluding people who use the n-word from participating in discussions

[frik]

Yes, there was a guy named TempleOS here on HN, his comments are frequently down-voted, maybe he is even hell-banned. He had some weird views and his comments were a bit off-topic.