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Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

The #1 story right now is "The Temple Operating System" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6308017

At least ReactOS isn't likely to incite a religious flamewar: LosethOS, the creator of TempleOS, pushes his religion on you. Ignore him: don't feed the trolls.

I _like_ it that operating system news is posted on HN. Operating systems take _forever_ to get anywhere, unless you're a multi-billion-dollar company with armies of grunts working on it.

Their goals actually are not that outdated: a non-trivial number of Fortune 500 companies continue to need Windows XP, but Microsoft is giving them the finger. Whether ReactOS can step up and fill in that need or not, wouldn't an entrepreneur want to know that this is possible?

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The fortune 500 companies also need the large multinational corporation that supports the well tested and widely deployed legacy systems with bugs and more especially security fixes.

Deploying a completely new codebase and opening yourself up to a frightening array of bugs is not really an acceptable risk, sadly.

I do enjoy the OS postings too. I hope to see more interesting info on the BeOS ports like Haiku on here too. I also loved that I could finally mess around with RiscOS and Plan9 on a raspberry pi.

Losethos has a mental illness. There was a great write up about the situation by someone who knew him, here: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html

But it's down now. I can't find a cache of it because I'm on mobile.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130116195743/http://qaa.ath.cx/...

Slightly off topic for this post, but since it is mentioned here: there is one part of that link which may appear slightly misleading without context. A twitter feed is mentioned, which ended up consisting of posts such as "and then God said", followed by some gibberish. This is actually a reference to a feature in one of his programs (a game I think) which allows one to "talk to God". When you press the button, it simply randomly spits out words. On Reddit, the author asks people repeatedly to tell him what God said to them. He's referring to this feature in his OS and obviously finds entertainment in hearing what words his program came up with for other people. This is reminiscent of fortune cookies. Strange behaviour perhaps, but not so nonsensical when placed in its context. As other people have pointed out, illness or not, this guy has managed to succeed at something highly nontrivial which most people will never do, at the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, namely "Pursue inner talent; creativity; fulfillment". And whether or not some of his writings may be unintelligible, his code certainly passes a strict syntactic check. I mention this here because I have met individuals with the same illness who have not managed to achieve even the bottom level of Maslow's pyramid. So it really is a credit to him that he has achieved so highly despite his illness.

FWIW, LosethOS pushes his religion on you as much as the crazy guy on the corner with a "the end is near" sign does. Half of his content seems to be generated by a Markov chain. I also suspect plenty of people here may be intrigued with the "brilliant but insane" aspect he seems to show.

Either that or he's just a troll.

He's not just trolling, that's for sure. Often he posts a mix of real content, with nonsensical God quotes in the middle of it. And he doesn't even bother about the hellban, he just keeps posting in the same accounts and has been for years.

Isn't that what a real troll would do? I mean , how do we know that the guy posting the weird comments is the same person who wrote the OS?

Did you look at his site? There is stuff on there just as crazy as the stuff he posts here. The simpler explanation is that he is genuinely not well, not that somebody is pretending to be him and faking it.

Maybe, or maybe he's just a guy with a strange sense of humour. One can never tell on the internet.

He himself has admitted he's schizophrenic. You'll also notice that he continues to post on Hacker News, despite being hellbanned, and seemingly knowing that he's hellbanned. if you read said comments, it's difficult to believe they stem from a strange sense of humour.

I believe he's actually been diagnosed with very serious mental illness.

its pretty common knowledge that he is schizophrenic

FWIW, LosethOS/TempleOS/whatever, which I had never heard of until this afternoon, has made me smile all day.

It makes me exceedingly happy to know that things like this exist in the world.

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