Look: I'm a big fan of freedom-of-speech, but that doesn't mean that I, or anyone else, has any obligation to provide a venue for you to say what you want to say. As it happens, TempleOS manages to be sufficiently offensive and annoying that I don't think we should provide a pulpit for him to rant; I think his normal comments detract far more than the occasional insightful comment adds.

But don't take my word for it; let's look at his four most recent comments. In response to a recent post exploring the details of a Rails vulnerability, he posted

    TempleOS is God's temple. God always gets His way.

On an excellent article about cycle-accurate 6502 emulation, he wrote

    To me abstraction above the hardware is like condoms. Some people say "Use three condoms, its better".
    I don't want a literal C64 -- just the complete open simple access... but 64-bit and 3Ghz and multicored.
    I don't want it to run on a 386, just x86_64.

which is also off-topic, albeit slightly less so, I suppose. In response to the TrueCrypt vulnerability, he wrote

    http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Kernel/Compress.html

which, to save you the time, has no encryption code in it. Finally, in response to a rational article about (natch) rational ways to respond to the shooting in Santa Barbara, he wrote

    God exists. CIA waging war on me. Stupid fucks.

Note that I'm not cherry-picking these comments. Those are just his four most recent comments. (The fifth and the pile after that are roughly similar; I just don't feel like pasting them here.)

These all simply clutter up the comment stream and provide nothing to move the conversation forward. There may be the occasional bit of insight, but I hardly think that they balance out the random off-topic spamminess of the above.

1. This discussion is grotesque. I'm not going to participate in it.

2. Anyone who wants to read dead comments, can. Just turn 'showdead' on in your profile. Therefore this entire "issue" is a contrived drama.

3. Anyone who has questions of this nature should have the good taste to email hn@ycombinator.com instead of creating a spectacle.

4. Obviously, we're burying this thread.

p.s. Why is it grotesque? Because it's an invasion of privacy; it's presumptuous to speak for someone in this way ("I suspect it will make a huge difference for Terry"); and for an internet forum to debate a human being like this—a poll, for fuck's sake?—is degraded.

p.ps. I should add that I don't doubt jacquesm's good intentions for a second. My concern is entirely with the systematic effect (i.e., is it good for the site).

I don't think he should be unbanned. Most of his writings are rambling and nonsensical. Many of his posts contain randomly generated gibberish - literally; he seems to believe his computer's PRNG is the word of God, and he also includes random Bible verses. Sometimes, he posts incoherent and incredibly offensive conspiratorial rants of no real value. Also, I've never really seen the merit of the few posts he makes that others repost so non-showdeaders can see them.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing personal against him, but the vast, vast majority of his posts do not live up to this community's standards. His case is a sad one, but there's a reason TempleOS (and every single one of his previous accounts) is shadowbanned.

I browse with showdead on and appreciate TempleOS's comments, but I'd prefer to keep things as they are. IIRC Terry is fine with it too.

I would like Terry unbanned but only if he promises not to use the n-word. I believe that is the #1 reason he was banned in the first place.

HN discussions strive to a high standard. That word has no place here, regardless of how talented the person saying it is.

Feature request:

I wish it would be possible to vote on his posts, even though they are "dead". Maybe individual posts that get enough upvotes can be unbanned, or maybe certain users with enough karma can unban selected posts manually?

Terry's case is closer to home than I like to admit. I have a loved one who deals with schizophrenia (fortunately, currently better managed than Terry's seems to be, but there are no guarantees). I hate the thought of her being ostracized because of her illness.

However, I still voted 'no', and it's because, while being ostracized is bad, being repeatedly beat over the head with negative responses to his comments feels even worse to me. At best, it could serve to cause him to feel worse about himself; at worst, it could worsen his illness.

Be well, Terry.

turned shadowdead posts on for a sec and checked his history. he sounds like a troll of a schizophrenic or generally someone unwell, and WAY out of line with the normal standard of discourse here. Most of it is a junk. And even if there is some value in some of it, it's also not phrased nicely. I politely suggest HN can do with out

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

The problem is that he constantly intersperses incoherent ramblings and paranoid delusions with whatever valid and on-topic points he makes.

I think that's the primary reason, not the use of the word "nigger". Actually, his use of it is directly related to the delusional rambling, rather than be a stand-alone point.

In response to this post, TempleOS wrote:

"When you know you're banned, you are very slightly less inhibited than when not banned, LOL."

Which is a fair observation.

I like to see TempleOS's posts but I think the system works quite well as it is.

He posts with the knowledge that he is banned (rather than creating a clean account), so I would take this as a deliberate policy of his choice. I also don't think he would remain un-banned without being treated as an extreme special case.

Poll wording is significantly biased towards the author's preference, i.e. 'please do this' vs 'definitely do this'. I fall on the latter side but not enough to agree with 'definitely'.

Edited to add: I agree that some option to reanimate valuable comments would be good; this applies particularly to TempleOS but also to other banned users.

I don't understand why this is even worth considering.

There is no effective way to ban a person; you can only ban an account. If this fellow wants to post on HN, then all he has to do is make a new account. If he hasn't made a new one, then I would guess he doesn't want to post.

I know nothing about the history of this issue, but apparently he did something Not Good with the old account? Permanently disabling that account, and requiring him to create a new one, strikes me as a very light punishment. I don't think it would be helpful to lighten the punishment even further, by re-enabling the account.

Thanks for the notice, just switched 'undead' on. I hate those censorship filters, I can't stand it when some system decides what's interesting for me to read and what's not.

This is exactly what shadowbanning is for. You can see what Terry posts by opting in to do so.

As much as I enjoy reading Terry's posts, I think he's better left an open secret. He's like a Hacker News Easter egg.

Besides, if he is unbanned, I'm afraid every thread he posts in will have a junk subthread with posters berating him or re-explaining the situation.

He has apparently been unbanned. I have showdead off but can see his comment here: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=7816725

I strongly oppose unbanning him. He is severely mentally ill and frequently posts random off-topic rants. Even more worryingly, some of his comments are extremely offensive (I'd say intentionally so, except I'm not sure he has the capacity of intentionality.).

His one redeeming feature is having enough technical ability to write an OS. That is absolutely not a reason to tolerate regularly posting content that would automatically get the poster banned.

He posted in this thread "When you know you're banned, you are very slightly less inhibited than when not banned, LOL."

So why unban him? He knows that his comments still get viewed, so he continues to comment. He can use the guise of being banned to feel more free to speak his mind, which sounds good.

I am not saying I approve of what he is saying, but we are allowing him to have an outlet to feel free to say anything, without being worried about being banned again.

Isn't that the basis of free speech?

I have a lot of respect for Terry Davis' work, I tend to prefer associating with outcasts and underdogs in general, and I've had family with mental issues so I'm sympathetic. I wish that he wasn't being treated the way he is here.

That said, I also don't think active participation from him would be anything other than a disruption here unfortunately. And, his behavior isn't completely excusable; he is intelligent enough to rationalize, at least somewhat, about his behavior.

There's the additional problem that HN isn't really a "community" anymore, so much as some of you oldtimers might think. There are going to be a lot of people who would see his comments, and not know who he is, and I think that would draw a lot more abuse.

It sucks, it's a bad situation, I wish it weren't this way, but I don't think HN is the right place to host someone with his problems -- and that has as much to do with HN's flaws as Terry's.

I am in favor of having to up/down vote the occasional post, with the benefit of giving someone with mental issues a reasonable outlet to express himself.

In the case of all out trolls, they won't do harmful things to themselves and others if they get hell banned. Mental issues are unpredictable.

Can you provide any reference to his postings? The HN user page doesn't have anything... (and apparently users are case-sensitive?)

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

Accounts and people are not the same thing. Here's a suggestion about how HN might handle this:

  - Mods ban TempleOS (offensive, no redeeming value) and similar accounts.
  - We set showdead = true if we do not agree with mods on "no redeeming value."
  - We all try not to pass judgement on the people behind those accounts.
  - We let people with banned accounts make new accounts and try again.

I voted no in the poll. I want to keep TempleOS banned, because it's an account with racist and generally meaningless content. But that's very different from keeping Terry out, which I don't think should be our goal.

He isn't banned, he's hellbanned, and he knows he's hellbanned. I leave on showdead too, and I'm glad it's an option. I don't want to remove the option of people to avoid markov chains of racial slurs and religious manias when they're reading their tech discussions, though.

If you really want more Davis, email him. I'm sure you'll get an interesting response. If you can't ban him, though, you can't have any grounds for banning anything.

edit: Everybody knows who he is, everybody knows he is pretty awesome, and everybody knows how to read his writing if they want to. Isn't that good enough?

Can someone explain the logic behind the 'showdead' feature design to me? When you enable it, it makes it so you see dead comments--but it styles them with the same kind of hard-to-read style that is used for heavily down voted comments.

I first assumed this was a bug and reported it on the issue tracker. It was closed on the grounds that it is working as intended.

Why give me an option to make dead content visible, and then purposefully make it hard for me to actually read the now visible content?

I was around here a good long while with shadowdead visible and saw his comments before I read anyone talk about him. Which is to say that as much of a part of the community and it's history as he is, I would expect most of his posts would derail into repeated arguments by relative newcomers and lurkers about whether the account should be banned or not.

But maybe it's worth the repeated explanations to be able to support him (if he wishes it).

Pardon my ignorance, but who is this guy? And is he schizophrenic or just trolling HN? Why would we even consider unbanning him?

You might mention that he was originally banned for repeated trolling and hate speech. It's unfortunate that he's getting so much press as of late as it will only serve to feed his ego and illness.

Someone not familiar with him might see one of stranger posts and wonder why that kind of post is allowed to be on HN.

Can we leave it to the community to upvote his better posts?

Can there be a third option? Is it possible we could get someone to manually review his comments and approve the good ones?

Bikeshedding at it's finest.

Obsessive people are worth the effort to maintain a distance away from.

Any link explaining what is all this about?

His signal/noise ratio is pretty terrible. The "showdead" is off by default and that is a good thing. I'd rather miss out on a good point every once in a while than see more chaff, especially ranty, incoherent, and often offensive points.

When you know you're banned, you are very slightly less inhibited than when not banned, LOL.