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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

He is known as annoying Usenet troll by many. I don't classify him as pure troll, however. He don't troll for the sake of trolling and he can be helpful. He is very opinionated and argumentative and don't adjust his thinking very well.

He might have mood disorder. http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

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Yup. I suspect this is the core of his incompatibility with nominal employment in the tech space.

I agree with others that perhaps a documentation role on an open source project would be something that would be in demand, but having the tech writer telling the developers they are doing it wrong is not a good recipe for success (and that seems to be a real possibility here).

He was unemployed by choice, not incompatibility. I know he has written quite a bit of good emacs documentation and elisp code, and just that is worth donating for to me.

I second this. His emacs/elisp docs have been exceedingly helpful for me in the past, certainly helpful enough to warrant a donation, regardless of any reputation for being difficult to work with.

Like Erik Naggum, which is considered a troll by many, and also a great writer w/ deep knowledge of programming languagess if can get past the troll part.

Also Jon Harrop. There is no doubt he is trolling, but also no doubt he is a very accomplished programmer. (He may disagree he is trolling, but if audience thinks you are trolling, you are.)

Hah, indeed. I actually brought a copy of OCaml for Scientists and I was surprised when I received basically what looks like a a hand-bound copy. But the book is actually good, and I could recommend it.

"if [the] audience thinks you are trolling, you are"

Really? I thought the entire definition of trolling was based on intent. Trolling is trying to provoke a reaction from people.

By your definition a significant percentage of the world is trolling the anti-vax and truther communities for example. And many mentally ill people who comment online are trolls instead of just being mistaken for them?

This definition seems a lot less useful to me than the intent based one.

> a significant percentage of the world is trolling the anti-vax and truther communities for example

You don't go to an anti-vax or truther community to remind them how crazy they are. When we consider mental conditions, it may be that some people have compulsive troll disorder or something to that effect.

My point about anti-vax or truthers is that they often think people who disagree with them are trolling them, and under this definition that means they are. That seems ridiculous to me.

As for mental conditions, that's another definition that seems inconsistent. I thought trolling was trying to provoke a reaction by being obnoxious or acting stupid or acting mentally ill. I thought the whole point of trolling was that you mostly can't tell if you are being trolled or not. Similar to Poe's law.

A definition of trolling that labels anyone who provokes a negative reaction from a community for any reason, like actually being mentally ill or actually being very ignorant seems overly broad. You just put weev in the same category as someone extremely technically illiterate who asks a stupid question on yahoo answers.

Now you just have a synonym for "annoying" or "irritating".

Also some folks thought the disease he had (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulcerative_colitis) played a part in his usual "bad mood".

I remember this guy! Blast from the past! He used to make trouble around comp.lang.java.programmer, i think. He was clearly intelligent, but unhinged and emotional enough that he didn't really contribute anything useful. A sad case all round, really.

Indeed. I know a few people who have a (strong) mood disorder, and one characteristic they all share is that they tend to be more abrasive and 'rigid' in general, even when they're in a good mood.

When you're bipolar, you spend less time in the emotional midrange, where social skills are built, and develop a social deficit. (Some people recover in their 20s, because a 20% social deficit is catastrophic at 20 but not at 40-- being "socially 16" at 20 is devastating, but at 40, it means you're socially 32, which is not a big deal-- but some don't). You also spend more time than most people in intense states, which makes you more creative. So bipolar people have a paradoxical age-skew where they seem socially younger but, in some critical ways (creative maturity, ethical insight) tend to be substantially older and more experienced, because they've spent more time at extremes.

From this, there's a tendency (out of resentment?) for people with BP to discount the experiences and skills of normal people as trivial "small talk" and turn emotional and ethical extremity ("I've really experienced life") into a virtue.

Bipolar, I'm convinced, is a different thing from being manic-depressive (which would, in 2014, be called hypomanic-depressive if the term were still used; but to save keystrokes I'll use "manic" even though modern psychiatry only uses "mania" for extreme highs that even most bipolar people never get.) Manic-depressive is present pathology, a symptom profile that few bipolar people have all the time. On the other hand, bipolar (as I'd define it) is a type of mind (creative, judgmental, ethically rigid) that has advantages (if the manic-depressive symptoms are contained) and drawbacks, but that never goes away, even if the manic-depressive symptoms remit. Well-treated bipolar people tend (contrary to stereotype) to be unusually conscientious, loyal, and self-aware. The flip side of it is a sort of extreme moral mysophobia.

It actually makes sense. If you're bipolar, little things have gigantic consequences. A night of heavy drinking can have you suicidally depressed for a week. Simple excitement about an intellectual interest can become socially harmful (you don't realize that others don't share the interest). If you live in a world where you're punished (by internal and external causes) severely for small mistakes, you tend to become intolerant of others who get away with much more.

Thank you for that! The type of people I befriend tend to suffer from disorders, and while I've often come to understand much about how they function, this was something I was particularly curious about. It makes a lot more sense to me now, and I'm pretty sure it might solve some of the misunderstandings and conflicts now that I know this.

Heh. Spoken like someone that doesn't really feel anything.

I'd rather work with a cranky trolling yet competent and accomplished programmer, then a sweet talking dip tard. In my experience incompetence is directly proportional to the amount of pleasantries one uses in discourse.

He used to piss off a lot of people on rec.juggling by commenting rabidly on any videos that featured female jugglers. I liked him though - for some reason his webpage directly a lot of traffic my way, even though I wasn't female...

This guy doesn't deserve to have had Silicon Valley turn its collective back on him, and I definitely feel bad for what has happened to him, but I don't think his behavior can be attributed only to bipolar disorder or depression. I also don't see hypomanic grandiosity so much as defeat in his posturing, but that's just me.

Whatever makes you feel better.

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