His signal/noise ratio is pretty terrible. The "showdead" is off by default and that is a good thing. I'd rather miss out on a good point every once in a while than see more chaff, especially ranty, incoherent, and often offensive points.

That describes basically 99% of the commenting here

Would suggest instead simply removing the concept of 'dead' entirely. It's always possible to downvote a bad comment, and from experience on other sites, moderation of any sort just tends produce inefficient, subjective and divisive outcomes

I don't understand why this is even worth considering.

There is no effective way to ban a person; you can only ban an account. If this fellow wants to post on HN, then all he has to do is make a new account. If he hasn't made a new one, then I would guess he doesn't want to post.

I know nothing about the history of this issue, but apparently he did something Not Good with the old account? Permanently disabling that account, and requiring him to create a new one, strikes me as a very light punishment. I don't think it would be helpful to lighten the punishment even further, by re-enabling the account.

I know nothing about the history of this issue, but apparently he did something Not Good with the old account?

Unfortunately this is a case where you need to know the history.

The man is, unfortunately, mentally ill, and is not coping very well. His messages are frequently incoherent and unconstructive (and occasionally downright offensive). He has a single agenda - promoting his work - and deviates from it only long enough to remind people that god is speaking through code he wrote. I am not exaggerating.

He's been shadowbanned for quite a while. He's more disruptive than helpful, regardless of his skills as a developer.

I did see a TempleOSv2 account (or something similar) posting on a couple of occasions. Also dead. In the light of that I'd say it's more of a problem with the person than the account.

Can you provide any reference to his postings? The HN user page doesn't have anything... (and apparently users are case-sensitive?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TempleOS

I would like Terry unbanned but only if he promises not to use the n-word. I believe that is the #1 reason he was banned in the first place.

HN discussions strive to a high standard. That word has no place here, regardless of how talented the person saying it is.

As painful as it may be to acknowledge, Node is clearly here to stay.

Offense is in the eye of the beholder, if someone has Tourette's would you berate them for profanity? Would you feel insulted anyway?

I don't think the comparison is apt; a person with Tourette's has "spasms" (everyone knows about the verbal, but also has muscular manifestation). Typing in a comment requires some degree if cognizance. I imagine if a Tourette's patient had a "reply" button for their words to come out, they'd choose to never click it.

Let's assume though that TempleOS can't help it. If you had an acquaintance with chronic flatulence that was persistent and horrible smelling, how often would you have them at your dinner table?

If you had an acquaintance with chronic flatulence that was persistent and horrible smelling, how often would you have them at your dinner table?

How about every day?

Or would you propose they eat in solitary confinement or something?

It's not the profanity. I and I'm sure many other people here are exposed to profanity very regularly and aren't bothered by profanity alone. It's the hateful messages. If anyone posted "N•••••s deserve hell", they would be hellbanned on the spot. You want to give Terry special treatment because he's ill, but being ill doesn't make his comments not awful, it just makes me judge him less severely as a person.

You want to give Terry special treatment because he's ill,but being ill doesn't make his comments not awful, it just makes me judge him less severely as a person.

Exactly, you got it perfectly.

I think the issue here is that it's easier to forgive understanding who he is; a random passerby (or simply regular visitors who skim) wouldn't know and would see a community that effectively is condoning that behaviour.

FWIW, I voted unban. I think that would reflect positively on the community, but I worry that from the outside it looks negative.

That isn't my issue. My issue is that this isn't about forgiving or not forgiving a person. I don't have a personal grudge against, say, people who post cat memes, but I still believe somebody who persists in doing so should be banned. This isn't because of my hatred of them as a person; it's because they routinely post crap that is not welcome here.

Terry posts stuff that is very much not welcome here and is offensive, but that doesn't mean I hate him or anything. But I still think he should remain hellbanned, because although I may not have anything against Terry himself, his backstory doesn't make the actual racist and otherwise nonsensical content more permissible.

For this reason, I voted to keep the account hellbanned. He can keep posting in his hellbanned state without junking up the site at large, and those who wish to see his dead comments can opt to see them. This is as it should be.

Forgiving works when the other person has expressed regret for their actions and doesn't repeat them. Neither apply in this case. I too voted to keep him banned.

I browse with showdead on and appreciate TempleOS's comments, but I'd prefer to keep things as they are. IIRC Terry is fine with it too.

I too think having his comments readily visible would detract. While people that have been around long enough know not to respond to his less lucid prose, I've seen people post comments about how off-putting his comments can be. This tends to detract from the overall discussion without adding anything.

That being said, I do make a point of reading his comments. Hmm, perhaps there should be a TerryFilterBot that can repost them, although of course it would have to be tailored to each readers comfort level. There's probably an MVP there :-)

I don't think he should be unbanned. Most of his writings are rambling and nonsensical. Many of his posts contain randomly generated gibberish - literally; he seems to believe his computer's PRNG is the word of God, and he also includes random Bible verses. Sometimes, he posts incoherent and incredibly offensive conspiratorial rants of no real value. Also, I've never really seen the merit of the few posts he makes that others repost so non-showdeaders can see them.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing personal against him, but the vast, vast majority of his posts do not live up to this community's standards. His case is a sad one, but there's a reason TempleOS (and every single one of his previous accounts) is shadowbanned.

turned shadowdead posts on for a sec and checked his history. he sounds like a troll of a schizophrenic or generally someone unwell, and WAY out of line with the normal standard of discourse here. Most of it is a junk. And even if there is some value in some of it, it's also not phrased nicely. I politely suggest HN can do with out

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS

He is supposedly schizophrenic.

Aren't we all... to a degree?

Someone not familiar with him might see one of stranger posts and wonder why that kind of post is allowed to be on HN.

Can we leave it to the community to upvote his better posts?

Any link explaining what is all this about?

Terry Davis created LoseThos/SparrowOS/TempleOS which is an operating system designed for recreational programming. He's worked on it nearly full-time for the past 10 years. He has a mental disorder and sometimes thinks there is a conspiracy going on against him and his OS. He believes God speaks through his operating system and has directed him to create it.

He's banned on HN for frequently being aggressive and using offensive language, especially the N-word (which may not mean the same thing to him as its historical meaning). Some on HN feel that banning for this reason effectively discriminates someone due to their mental illness. He sometimes posts good content and has valuable insights.

The argument against un-banning is that you can still read his posts if you have an HN account and turn showdead on. Terry is an esoteric personality, but many of us are aware of his work and enable showdead for this reason. The posts aren't entirely censored.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS

An interesting idea might be an "revive" feature on dead posts that shows that post and any other dead posts from the same user (with an indication that they are "dead") -- but only to the user that clicked revive. If you allow those posts to also be voted up, it might even work into a community-based method for reversing bans, both on a per-post and perhaps, with enough votes on enough posts, per-user basis.

Obviously, only users browsing with "showdead" on would see and be able to interact with dead posts.

He's banned on HN for frequently being aggressive and using offensive language, especially the N-word (which may not mean the same thing to him as its historical meaning).

Or it may very well mean the same thing to him, which is the most obvious interpretation of his comments. His comments using the word are obviously using it in a negative way and many are clearly racial. He very well may not understand why it's wrong, but the meaning seems to be there.

This is exactly what shadowbanning is for. You can see what Terry posts by opting in to do so.

Look: I'm a big fan of freedom-of-speech, but that doesn't mean that I, or anyone else, has any obligation to provide a venue for you to say what you want to say. As it happens, TempleOS manages to be sufficiently offensive and annoying that I don't think we should provide a pulpit for him to rant; I think his normal comments detract far more than the occasional insightful comment adds.

But don't take my word for it; let's look at his four most recent comments. In response to a recent post exploring the details of a Rails vulnerability, he posted

    TempleOS is God's temple. God always gets His way.

On an excellent article about cycle-accurate 6502 emulation, he wrote

    To me abstraction above the hardware is like condoms. Some people say "Use three condoms, its better".
    I don't want a literal C64 -- just the complete open simple access... but 64-bit and 3Ghz and multicored.
    I don't want it to run on a 386, just x86_64.

which is also off-topic, albeit slightly less so, I suppose. In response to the TrueCrypt vulnerability, he wrote

    http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Kernel/Compress.html

which, to save you the time, has no encryption code in it. Finally, in response to a rational article about (natch) rational ways to respond to the shooting in Santa Barbara, he wrote

    God exists. CIA waging war on me. Stupid fucks.

Note that I'm not cherry-picking these comments. Those are just his four most recent comments. (The fifth and the pile after that are roughly similar; I just don't feel like pasting them here.)

These all simply clutter up the comment stream and provide nothing to move the conversation forward. There may be the occasional bit of insight, but I hardly think that they balance out the random off-topic spamminess of the above.

But it is cherry picking. You stopped just short of including this one:

"I thought mind reading and clarvoyance, I donno. It just works.

I use VMware. I wrote all 130,000 lines inside the operating system. It has all tools -- editor, profiler, grep, merge, compiler, assembler, unassembler, shitty partial debugger, graphic sprite creator. BMP-movie-maker. BMP support. Boot loader. ISO9660 ISO file creator.

My BMP movie creator is kinda banned. I want no multimedia, but I use it personally. I'm not serious on a ban -- orther prolly want to make movies, but it's a step down the road to hell.

I generate my website natively. I have a html creator. That's kinda just for me and doesn't belong. What if other want to do it?

I'm chagrinned -- I'm not thinking of any uses. Oh! I normally do hymns, but VMware killed music. Hymns are a legitimate thing I do. Video animations with music melodies and bouncy ball words."

and this one:

" TempleOS 4 days ago | link | parent [dead] | on: CSVjs: Basic CSV parsing and encoding in JavaScrip...

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/SortFileExample/F64FileSort.....

At the time of the Commodore 64, it was not used for COBOL applications. There were mainframes that banks and businesses used.

This is not what my operating system is for. I made 100 applications and demos that show what it is for. Does yours have sprites in source code?

The RedSea filesystem will do only whole-file reads and writes of contiguous block chunks (or just let you do raw block access). I demand that Linux and Microsoft and VMWare support RedSea on hard drive and CDROM, so I can remove support for ISO9660 and FAT32. God's temple must be perfect.

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/RedSea.html

With whole-file access, only I can do compression."

If self-promotion is a sin we might as well ban half of the frequent posters here (quite possibly including me).

So first, to pick a knit, if I'd gone to the next comment, I'd have included

    God exists. That pretty-much reverses bad and good.
    The FBI is evil against God. I am good with God.
    Simple as that.

which is responding to Monsegur helping shut down Anonymous.

But you're right, after that, we have the two comments you posted above. Maybe I should've included them.

But then we go at least twelve more comments that are inane, at which point I quit clicking "page next." Are there more insightful ones after that? I know the answer is yes, because TempleOS does occasionally post insightful material, but I don't honestly want to read through all the muck just to get to it.

Pardon my ignorance, but who is this guy? And is he schizophrenic or just trolling HN? Why would we even consider unbanning him?

Feature request:

I wish it would be possible to vote on his posts, even though they are "dead". Maybe individual posts that get enough upvotes can be unbanned, or maybe certain users with enough karma can unban selected posts manually?

Maybe it already does. Somehow this comment isn't dead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7791436. Not sure what it means, though.

It's probably a bit old-school for you but let me explain.

The RAMDAC in an 'original' old style VGA card only had 6 bits per channel, and 256 LUT positions (also called the 'palette'). This allowed you to select 256 colours out of a maximum of 262144 colours, or 2^18.

So the maximum output value was 252, or hexadecimal FC for each channel.

You can't really output 24 bit ('truecolour') then because every colour channel will miss the lower 2 bits, and what should be 'white' will be slightly grayish and so on (white then becomes hex 0xfcfcfc).

Does that explain it adequately?

He has apparently been unbanned. I have showdead off but can see his comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7816725

I strongly oppose unbanning him. He is severely mentally ill and frequently posts random off-topic rants. Even more worryingly, some of his comments are extremely offensive (I'd say intentionally so, except I'm not sure he has the capacity of intentionality.).

His one redeeming feature is having enough technical ability to write an OS. That is absolutely not a reason to tolerate regularly posting content that would automatically get the poster banned.

Terry's case is closer to home than I like to admit. I have a loved one who deals with schizophrenia (fortunately, currently better managed than Terry's seems to be, but there are no guarantees). I hate the thought of her being ostracized because of her illness.

However, I still voted 'no', and it's because, while being ostracized is bad, being repeatedly beat over the head with negative responses to his comments feels even worse to me. At best, it could serve to cause him to feel worse about himself; at worst, it could worsen his illness.

Be well, Terry.

As much as I enjoy reading Terry's posts, I think he's better left an open secret. He's like a Hacker News Easter egg.

Besides, if he is unbanned, I'm afraid every thread he posts in will have a junk subthread with posters berating him or re-explaining the situation.

1. This discussion is grotesque. I'm not going to participate in it.

2. Anyone who wants to read dead comments, can. Just turn 'showdead' on in your profile. Therefore this entire "issue" is a contrived drama.

3. Anyone who has questions of this nature should have the good taste to email hn@ycombinator.com instead of creating a spectacle.

4. Obviously, we're burying this thread.

p.s. Why is it grotesque? Because it's an invasion of privacy; it's presumptuous to speak for someone in this way ("I suspect it will make a huge difference for Terry"); and for an internet forum to debate a human being like this—a poll, for fuck's sake?—is degraded.

p.ps. I should add that I don't doubt jacquesm's good intentions for a second. My concern is entirely with the systematic effect (i.e., is it good for the site).

Can someone explain the logic behind the 'showdead' feature design to me? When you enable it, it makes it so you see dead comments--but it styles them with the same kind of hard-to-read style that is used for heavily down voted comments.

I first assumed this was a bug and reported it on the issue tracker. It was closed on the grounds that it is working as intended.

Why give me an option to make dead content visible, and then purposefully make it hard for me to actually read the now visible content?