They've been writing their own operating system in assembly for the last few years: http://www.losethos.com/ and now http://sparrowos.com/
For more: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html
I posted a "Ask HN" question inquiring about this user and his comments, and my post was marked "dead" within a minute. Only thing I've ever had marked dead on here (that I'm aware of at least).
Thank you for your explanation; I would have never guessed it was something like schizophrenia.
The general consensus is that he deserves to be treated like a human. He may, sadfully, have a mental illness. That's why further inquiries are shut down.
If you pay attention you'll notice that the verse he quotes are relevant to the topic at hand - he's not just posting randomly.
In fact, it appears the nature of his posts has been discussed quite a bit on HN over the last few years. I'm still somewhat new here though, so I imagine as people continue to join HN questions about his postings will continue to be asked. And you can't really blame them for being asked (how was I supposed to know what that prose meant?). I suppose the best solution is that instead of downvotes and ridicule (as I found in many previous topics on here), linking to the same page I have above would eliminate a lot of contention and confusion.
EDIT: Yikes, I'm not sure I'm coming across like I meant to. I'm not implying being different is bad AT ALL. Sparrow, I really like your operating system and will download it tomorrow to learn about it.
I really liked the goal he started out with. Creating a 64bit C64 type environment for young programmers to mess around with and learn to build stuff.
We've got the opportunity to listen to this guy, whether we agree with him or not, or can parse out signal from noise or not, and we've instead said "Ah, fuck it!" and shadowbanned him instead of simply scrolling down.
There are enough difficulties making this forum work with relatively "normal" people and relatively ordinary social frictions. Trying to add into the mix the need to compassionately tolerate someone whose posts are so inflammatory would become a nightmare for everyone involved. I wish I could say otherwise because I am not personally comfortable with banning someone merely because they have a mental illness. However, pg and others already lament how the forum has lost quality, already are beating their head against a wall trying to address the issues which caused that, etc. They aren't qualified to help someone like losethos fit in and get along. It is a tricky thing to do under the best circumstances and a very large, very public forum only magnifies the challenges involved. The way mental illness expresses itself is partly influenced by social factors. The social factors here would almost certainly make him behave worse, not better. Most people have no idea how to constructively interact with someone who is genuinely mentally ill and it is all too common for group response to the situation to seriously compound the problem.
If it were a smaller forum and if I were one of the moderators, including him might be constructive. But here, I don't think so.
I don't feel I am being very clear. I have a medical condition and am not at my best today. So, sorry if that doesn't clarify anything for you.
I see no reason to suggest that subjecting losethos to a similar debacle would benefit anyone. I wish it weren't so, but the reality is that most "normal" people just aren't as nice as they would like to believe they are and they don't hesitate to do truly gruesome things as long as they can find a way to pretend it isn't really their fault (distinguishing between "IRL" and virtual interaction is a convenient way many people justify being assholes online).
An entire forum ganging up on one vulnerable individual and blaming the victim for it is an all too common testament to this ugly underbelly of humanity. The people in charge here are wise to not allow a situation which would actively foster such ugliness. In the abscence of a better answer, the current solution errs on the side of at least not sending the message that lynchmobs are welcome here. The ugliness would not stop with losethos. It would spread and soon no one would be safe here.
> (distinguishing between "IRL" and virtual interaction is a convenient way many people justify being assholes online).
Yes x 1000000.
Have a good evening.
[1] Some of the comments are noise. The pretty harsh language would be challenging for some people to not respond to.
My intent is not gawking. My intent is to confront everyone with the reality that they're indirectly shunning one of their own (if anyone fits Hacker News, it's someone who wrote his own entire OS/language/demos/etc) due to mental illness. Due to the way that hellbanning works, he continues to reach out to us, and we ignore him.
I consider this to be one of the great failures of this community.
Furthermore, as you can see by some of my sibling replies, many people are _not_ actually aware of Terry or his accomplishments. SparrowOS is actually pretty amazing, for a number of reasons, and so I wanted to draw attention to them in a time when it's conversationally appropriate.
I am not religious in any way, but since Terry quotes the word of God so often,
> “Then the King will answer,
> ‘I tell you the truth, anything you did for even the least of my people here,
> you also did for me.’
>
> Matthew 25:40
I'm not saying the right answer is to un-shadow ban him either. I don't know what the right answer is. But I can tell you that I think about him and it a lot. I wish more people would. Frankly, I saw http://i.imgur.com/USsN6.png this morning and almost cried.
But I don't agree in practice that HN is the best place to find discussion of things like a hobbyist OS written in ASM, because it is so strongly oriented toward the business end of the startup scene. It is very typical to see posts about how engineers are arrogant and socially inept, or how annoying it is that there is so much technical stuff on HN, or how RMS is dangerous and revolting, etc. So frequently the yardstick for judging things is popularity and money and ability to manipulate perceptions, rather than knowledge or playfulness or building things which are really high quality for its own sake.
So while (say) Zuckerberg's "Hacker" concept might go down well here, I don't think that old school "Hacker" values really have much place here.
I would like to see it more and more away from Zuckerberg and more and more towards old school, so I'm attempting to be the change I want to see in the world. ;)
Would love him to read a (short) autobiography some day, he does seem incredibly interesting, smart, intense and of course somewhat unstable.
For anyone interested, here's a video in which he introduces his OS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAr-xYtBFbY
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-london/plain/A694523)
Responses to him ranged from people interested in him as a person, and in his treatment (or lack of); through to hostility at his very many posts and his attempts to evade filters; to really unpleasant baiting of a person with a mental illness or nasty mocking.
Anyway, schizophrenia is a very complex illness, with five major subtypes and many related disorders. I am not a doctor, and I'm not privy to his medical history, but what I can tell you is that it affects individuals in different ways. It's entirely possible that Terry is only lucid when he's talking about CS stuff; I don't know if that's true or not.
For more, I'd start here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001925/
> They've been writing their own operating system...
Not criticizing, just pointing it out. I read it and wasn't sure why you had used "they".
I actually used 'they' because I generally don't try to gender someone unless I know what pronoun they wish me to use. It's just default speech for me. You'll note that I replaced it with 'someone with schizophrenia' and tend to use "Terry" rather than 'he' even; "Terry" can certainly be a woman's name.
That said, something about the above sentence tripped my othering-detector, so I had a moment of 'ugh,' but as I said, it went away. I don't think it was incorrect/wrong usage, I was just sharing a strange moment that happened in my own head. I don't know why my brain parsed it as "those people can't have a normal conversation" instead of my usual genderless usage.
The OP does have an interesting question because a characteristic symptom of schizophrenia is a loss in train of thought. This seems apparent in his posts because they seem, in a lot if ways, to diverge away from the actual topic (such as meeting God, which also demonstrates delusional thinking).
It's interesting because such losses would make it hard to sit down and focus on writing something coherent, which seems like it'd apply to programming just as much as writing and speech. Though, if he becomes very lucid when discussing CS stuff, perhaps programming as an activity itself provides that lucidity.
Programming may be his therapy. Occupational therapy is often pushed in mental hospitals (I speak from experience).
Either way, it's not even a good idea to try and approach, even it with the best intentions, for you don't know of the damage you may be causing. It's hard to believe but you have to be very, very careful of what you say or you risk furthering his mental health problems. It sounds cruel but the best thing would be to let them be, or at most focus 100% on CS.
I speak from my experiences as a mental health patient and becoming very close friends with a schizophrenic.