Here's the thing: Sometimes there are people who are exceptionally talented in a given field, yet suffer from a serious illness or disability. The symptoms can be apparent in their physique (such as Stephen Hawking), or in their mind (such as Terry Davis). I can understand why people who do not have direct experience with mental illness might have trouble separating the symptoms from the person, but I would encourage those who criticise Terry for the highly unfortunate way his illness manifests itself to try to find compassion for the man, not ridicule.

I'm willing to bet pretty good money that less than 1% of people on HN, and the software development industry in general, could achieve the technical feats on the level of what Terry has done. In fact it's probably considerably fewer than that. Here's a guy who's built an entire platform from scratch, including kernel, development tools, user interface, and applications. While there are obvious flaws (such as the visual appearance and lack of memory protection), some of the other design decisions like presentation of documentation and the way different parts of the system integrate with each other put mainstream operating systems to shame.

We should be emphasising Terry's technical work, not the symptoms of his debilitating illness.