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Comment by dagenix | Hacker News Reader

Terry Davis was extremely talented. He also had his demons. I dunno if there was anything he could do about them. But let's not pretend he didn't have them. He said some terrible stuff: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Terry_Davis.

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"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19875516 and marked it off-topic.

I respectfully disagree that my comment was unrelated. I want the community of programmers and technology enthusiasts to be as diverse as possible. While maybe not his fault, Mr. Davis said some things that were very much not welcoming to a diverse audience. My fear is that venerating him with comments like "RIP brother" sends a negative message about what is acceptable in the community.

It's not only a tedious topic about which no one has anything new to say, but has been a distasteful one for years, using a suffering human being as a mascot in an internet cage match. If you care about welcoming diverse audiences, as opposed to scoring points on an obscure insider topic, this is the last thing you should be commenting about. Please don't do it on HN.

Nobody cares what he said.

We can differentiate between a talented person with some health issues, and what those health issues make them say -- and not consider them bad because of mere words under mental stress.

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