I won't claim TempleOS is useful, but as far as I know it's pretty interesting technically, especially as a one-man project. There's no shortage of personal side projects out there which are completely useless, but interesting to look at just the same. The only difference here is a much larger scope and a weirder motivation. I'm definitely not going to feel ashamed for being interested in the technical aspects of such a project, just because the author happens to be delusional.
In any case, either discuss the actual stuff at hand, or if you think it doesn't belong here then flag it and move on. Filling up the whole comments section with discussion of the guy's mental health, ground which has been so thoroughly trodden that it's in danger of breaking through to the magma, is just ridiculous.
It doesn't look like garbage code to me. And even if it were, a custom multitasking kernel, compiler, filesystem, and more written by a single guy is still technically interesting even if it's not well written.
On what basis do you claim sockpuppets? I don't believe it. Terry has a pretty distinctive writing style that I've never seen from any account besides his own.
Shadowbanning the guy and having very occasional discussions about his work which center almost entirely around his schizophrenia doesn't seem like "indulging" to me. It certainly gets much less indulgence than the usual march of "I built a PaaS using node.js.ruby and WebGL to create Uber for Dachsunds with only $20 million in VC funding" that's on the front page pretty much non-stop.
He's written an entire 64 bit operating system by himself. He is also mentally ill. Does the second fact make the first fact untrue, or not worth talking about?
The fact that it's garbage which is totally unusable makes it not worth talking about. Someone investing a lot of effort in something doesn't make it good or worthy of discussion. There's lots and lots of stuff out there that mentally ill people have spent an incredible amount of effort on. This just happens to be one that keeps getting submitted to HN and that the HN admins have stupidly chosen to indulge.
As you can probably guess, I strongly disagree with this decision. TempleOS articles have been appearing regularly on HN because the dude behind it has realized it's a safe haven for his nonsense. There is nothing to be learned from it, it's the ravings of someone with mental illness. Indulging him and giving him this "safe haven" where he gets the impression that professional programmers are treating his garbage seriously is doing no one any favors. Nor is the minority of developers on HN who actually do take it seriously doing anyone any favors.
It certainly isn't helping the quality of content on HN, if that's all you care about.
It pretty much is all I care about. And I respect that you disagree. Such moderation calls are far from obvious even to me, and must seem obviously wrong from many angles.
But you're in the minority in thinking that TempleOS doesn't belong on HN at all. Terry and his work are something that a lot of HN users care about, sympathize with, etc. No doubt some of the interest is just gawking and the pseudo-debates we invariably get about it are a scourge, but I don't think it would be fair to just ban the subject completely. Certainly many legit HN users would be upset if we did. So it's likely to remain one of those uncomfortable grey areas with no agreement and no clear solution.
Could you please stop calling this code "garbage"? Virtually everything else you have to say about this situation is colorable, but "garbage" is pure distilled meanness. I cringe at TempleOS threads too, but I'm discovering that comments like yours make me even more uncomfortable.
