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Comment by salgernon | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that losethos is quite obviously suffering from a severe mental disorder. His posts are not usually so racist, but almost always include a lot of religious, well, insanity. It's sad because a few lines of his posts are usually very much on topic, buried in a morass of debilitating drivel.

I don't know what he's like if/when he's on medication, but to me, it seems a shame that his posts end up not being seen. To that end, I appreciate someone having hoisted the salient portion.

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I'm not sure there's enough substance buried in the racist drivel to be worth bothering in this case. More than a few of us here are old enough to have spent afternoons typing in BASIC programs with lots of DATA sections from the back pages of computer magazines.

I'm struggling to understand how an anecdote about that brings much that is 'relevant' or 'salient' to a discussion of truly oddball languages like BANCStar.

I get that he's mentally ill (I read up on his OS the other day), but I do take exception to the repost of part of his comment. Because his comment is ridiculous. "Monkey" is meant as a racial slur. "American" is meant comparatively (where the smart people learn assembler!), not just incidentally. Taking it out of context like that doesn't make it salient just because it's not as obvious what it means.

So it's fine, I guess, not to judge him, but we ought to keep judging his comments, which are hellbanned for good reason.

I haven't seen anything written by this guy. Can someone explain why people on HN seem to conflate mental illness with writing an operating system? Is this just the HN attitude of having just learned js/ruby yesterday and being afraid of low level details?

I used to work on a small kernel just as a fun hobby project. I haven't had much time to do much with it lately but it was a lot of fun. I would think that this should be encouraged instead of mocked.

No, no, he really is mentally ill and he really did write an impressive-looking operating system [1]. Also the post quoted above really is packed with racist vitriol. Take all of that literally.

[1] http://www.templeos.org/

You're way off base here - consider turning on showdead and reading some of his posts, or even just googling the guy, before making wild assumptions. Nobody is snarking on losethos and designating him mentally ill because he wrote an OS. losethos is genuinely mentally ill.

I did google him. The impression I get from HN comments:

1. I see posts making fun of this guy's mental illness.

2. I see posts making fun of how he's working on an OS.

I don't think either one is particularly cool.

Did you turn on showdead and read his comments as you were advised to, or did you just decide to remain willfully ignorant while drawing absurd conclusions?

Can you please re-read what you're replying to? I do not feel that it went through.

I presume from your response that you are OK with:

1. Making fun of mental illness. (I hope that mental illness doesn't have to afflict your family before you realize what's wrong with that.)

2. Making fun of working on an OS. (Still uncool.)

To answer your question, yes, I read his comments.

I presume from your response that you're an arrogant, presumptuous asshole who can't conceive of the possibility that someone disagrees with your characterizations.

Ouch. I'll keep that in mind for next time I attempt a kind word for people with mental illness, that nknighthb has a problem with that.

Your very first post in this thread was a deliberate insult to the entire community dressed up as a request for "explanation".

On behalf of people with mental and neurological issues of all stripes, please shut up. We don't need your "kind words". Just the opposite. We need people who think they're "defending" us by being holier-than-thou assholes to stop talking.

> Your very first post in this thread was a deliberate insult to the entire community dressed up as a request for "explanation".

IMHO nobody's really made a convincing case that at least some small part of this community hasn't ostracized this guy for either his mental illness or for his interest in operating systems. Having looked at comments surrounding this guy I still see people doing both. I've gotten some nice replies from people who aren't trying to judge him but I still do see other users doing both. I wanted to speak my conscience about that.

> small part of this community

Reflect on that for a while, then compare it to the first comment you made.

From reading this thread I see the original post was clearly off the mark but everything else that asveikau wrote after that seems more than reasonable to me (and not inaccurate either: I have seen plenty of people on HN make fun of losethos for both being mentally ill and writing an OS - both of which I feel are very wrong). On the other hand, you are the one that comes across as a compete asshole here.

Presuming I'm "OK with" horrible things based on no evidence is "more than reasonable" to you? Then it must be "more than reasonable" for me to presume you're OK with victim blaming in other contexts?

Initially, you didn't give me a lot of context when you dismissed me as a pompous ass. You didn't give me any reason to think you had read and understood my original comment. My reading of it, without that context, was to assume you were OK with dismissing people based on their health problems. This especially bothered me because I have a family member with such problems. I've seen so many people be dismissive of this kind of thing seemingly because they have never experienced anything like it, and without a lot of context in your reply I put you in that bucket.

When I saw your reply to my reply I understood a bit better, and so please allow me to say right now: I am sorry. At the same time I did kind of feel that you went a little overboard in your reaction.

Thank you.

I feel like you're reading a different HN than I am. Can you link some concrete examples of someone 'making fun' of either losethos's mental illness, or his OS?

have you turned on showdead and seen some of his recent comments here on HN yet? seriously, you seem more interested in getting up on a soapbox and making wild generalizations about how the community 'makes fun of mental illness' - something I can't say I've seen much evidence of, quite the contrary in fact - than in actually familiarizing yourself with the guy in question.

I may have been tainted by the first thread I saw here making reference to this guy. Someone basically directly, flat out said you'd have to be crazy to write your own compiler and OS. I am searching on Google and using HN search and I can't find that thread. It was a few months back.

But in my searches I did find people making fun of the guy very directly, albeit a long time ago and in some cases downvoted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4466947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467278

And the more recent discussions, even in this thread... I do feel they have a bit of a subtext.

Who is making fun of his mental illness?

Could you link to one of the posts making fun of his mental illness or making fun of how he's working on an OS?

Here is the website for his OS: http://www.templeos.org/ (redirected from losethos.com)

It's common knowledge that losethos is a schizophrenic.

> Can someone explain why people on HN seem to conflate mental illness with writing an operating system?

Nobody here does. It's just that this specific guy happens to have written a simple graphical OS from scratch apparently without anyone else's help.

He also believes God speaks to him through random noise and posts random text created from mixing up Bible verses as being what God just said. He is, really, classic schizophrenic. There's no other way to say it. He hears voices nobody else can hear and he believes it is God talking to him.

> Is this just the HN attitude of having just learned js/ruby yesterday and being afraid of low level details?

Now you're just embarrassing yourself.

> Now you're just embarrassing yourself.

No actually, I am not embarrassed to point out that this problem exists on HN. Read any comment thread that deals with low-level anything. It's painful.

Edit: Prerequisite: to feel just how painful it is, you must understand the topic being discussed.

> to feel just how painful it is, you must understand the topic being discussed.

Of course I do, which is why your comments are so laughable.

LoseThos is a self-admitted schizophrenic who frequently posts racist and religious rants that are extremely diverged from reality. This has nothing to do with low level details of anything, and much more to do with the fact that LoseThos is genuinely mentally ill, yet also wrote a strange, beautiful, functional system.

A video of TempleOS (formerly known as losethos):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0MsDl39UL0

That's really weird stuff.

You read some threads on HN about low-level details and they annoyed you, and so now you get to imply that I "just learned js/ruby yesterday and [am] afraid of low level details" because I used the words "OS" and "mentally ill" in the same sentence, context notwithstanding? Knowing what you know now and rereading my comment and your reply, can I expect better of you in the future? Perhaps a bit of due diligence and more charitable interpretations of other people's comments is in order...

My original comment wasn't necessarily directed at you specifically, it was a sort of open question based on having seen threads here discussing mental illness and writing an OS.

That said, it's not so much of a stretch to take a literal read of this:

> I get that he's mentally ill (I read up on his OS the other day)

... and conclude that there may be a link between OS and mental illness in the author's mind. I did find it a puzzling juxtaposition.

Puzzling enough to spend 5 minutes checking out what I was talking about first?

edit: grammar

To be frank, the juxtaposition is still odd.

Turn on showdead and check his comments:

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

Downvotes continue. I have seen this story before. For a self-styled "hacker" community this place values orthodoxy an awful lot. And passive aggressiveness to boot. I think it must come from an excess of javascript and VC bullshit. ducks

Also they are unable to tell when I am joking or exaggerating.

It's also interesting that whenever the subject of losethos is brought up, the discussions take a strangely reliable turn. Someone (or several someones) makes a comment that includes the words "mental illness", racist/racism, religous/religion, medication.

Maybe someone can put together some sort of losethos filter bot to automate the hoisting.

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