Comment by oscilloscope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oscilloscope | Hacker News Reader

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Terry Davis created LoseThos/SparrowOS/TempleOS which is an operating system designed for recreational programming. He's worked on it nearly full-time for the past 10 years. He has a mental disorder and sometimes thinks there is a conspiracy going on against him and his OS. He believes God speaks through his operating system and has directed him to create it.

He's banned on HN for frequently being aggressive and using offensive language, especially the N-word (which may not mean the same thing to him as its historical meaning). Some on HN feel that banning for this reason effectively discriminates someone due to their mental illness. He sometimes posts good content and has valuable insights.

The argument against un-banning is that you can still read his posts if you have an HN account and turn showdead on. Terry is an esoteric personality, but many of us are aware of his work and enable showdead for this reason. The posts aren't entirely censored.

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

An interesting idea might be an "revive" feature on dead posts that shows that post and any other dead posts from the same user (with an indication that they are "dead") -- but only to the user that clicked revive. If you allow those posts to also be voted up, it might even work into a community-based method for reversing bans, both on a per-post and perhaps, with enough votes on enough posts, per-user basis.

Obviously, only users browsing with "showdead" on would see and be able to interact with dead posts.

That's a super good idea.

I suspect such a mechanism already exists, it just isn't public because the comment that inspired the poll (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817137) is now no longer dead.

Now what about this one :) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7819070

It's 'on topic', has a sense of humor and no profanity.

> He's banned on HN for frequently being aggressive and using offensive language, especially the N-word (which may not mean the same thing to him as its historical meaning).

Or it may very well mean the same thing to him, which is the most obvious interpretation of his comments. His comments using the word are obviously using it in a negative way and many are clearly racial. He very well may not understand why it's wrong, but the meaning seems to be there.

Agreed. Intent isn't magic; "what you meant to say" needs to be balanced with "what you said."

Well, thank you very much for the explanation. I had seen http://terry.davis.usesthis.com/ the other day and didn't understand anything.

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