qaa

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.

A schizophrenic (and arguably brilliant) programmer who posts on HN, among other places, from time to time: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html

> Brilliant, but crazy. See above, and read some of his comments. He seems to be some sort of fundamentalist christian, and IIRC his comments were about saving everyone though Jesus or some such thing. This isn't the whole picture. He's, unfortunately, schizophrenic. Read [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642308] and [http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html].

Alright, I did some reading on SparrowOS/LoseThos. See this page (http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html) to learn a bit about him and the amazing work he's done on his personal operating system. In fact, it appears the nature of his posts has been discussed quite a bit on HN over the last few years. I'm still somewhat new here though, so I imagine as people continue to join HN questions about his postings will continue to be asked. And you can't really blame them for being asked (how was I supposed to know what that prose meant?). I suppose the best solution is that instead of downvotes and ridicule (as I found in many previous topics on here), linking to the same page I have above would eliminate a lot of contention and confusion. EDIT: Yikes, I'm not sure I'm coming across like I meant to. I'm not implying being different is bad AT ALL. Sparrow, I really like your operating system and will download it tomorrow to learn about it.

oh man, is my face red :(. I'm still your new watcher on github though ... :) I just moved back to the 2.6.0 tag. works. This looks like a scalable database. I don't know if it was a for-profit company that you just open-sourced at the end or what. All I know is that I don't see what I'm using. This is about a day worth of authorship on your part. Literally. 1. Write something to help a noob like me find out what I'm doing. 2. Give some (it can be silly and contrived) but useful example to bootstrap the user. In programming you are fundamentally building something abstract that lacks concrete reality. The key to success, I've found, is giving it that concrete reality through coherent narratives, consistent verbiage, probably more. Silly marketing can make or break your product. Example time (I don't have many) I have this dumb little library called TickTick. When I linked people directly to the github is flopped (https://github.com/kristopolous/TickTick) ... so what I made was this http://qaa.ath.cx/TheEmperorsNewClothes.html. I made it very carefully; being light hearted, poking fun at myself, trying to balance what people would think of it, being overall positive. I was trying to strike a really delicate balance in basically an advertising-to-geeks campaign. Well, I think it worked pretty well. The project has 203 followers, which is my most successful by far. I've found that this stuff matters a lot. Man does it ever. Backbone, underscore, and socket.io…

What you refer to as "Jesus-Spam" is the tragic rambling (and randomly generated "messages from God") of a talented software developer with schizophrenia. http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html https://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=losethos https://www.hnsearch.com/search?q=sparrowos

To amplify/correct what's been said: The parts of his post that look like Bayesian poisoning are what he believes to be God speaking to him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html

So what is special about losethos? I see it's 64-bit multi-tasking real-mode, and I see he's apparently posted some unpopular opinions on various forums (not sure what his posts are, they've all been deleted), causing him to become banned. Doesn't seem like any big deal to me. According to http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html the author is often ridiculed for his work. I don't think the G-WAN author is in a comparable situation.

Here's a reasonable and compassionate explanation of the author: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html Be nice and try to empathize. We're all people, some just don't use the vernacular of our times. MusicOS, I'm very much into computer music. See my homepage for my creative projects at http://charstr.com . If you'd like to collaborate on audio software, please get in touch with me there.

Man, seeing how talented you are and at the same time out of this world and rejected makes me incredibly sad. [1] http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html -- for some background

I think I need to alert one thing - particularly on a page like this. If in your settings you have 'showDead' set to on, then you will see a incoherent comment at the bottom of this page from losethos. Some of you folks might remember a discussion involving Losethos sometime back on HN. I can't find the discussion but here is the article which was discussed: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html . In that article, one kind person had taken some effort to understand the reasons behind such incoherent comments. I am not sure that people who marked the comment as dead, are aware of that discussion. Perhaps we need a policy at HN to handle such situations better. PS: I got the above link by doing this search 'site:news.ycombinator.com losethos' on google. You can also see some more comments on the same here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4189669. But can't find that original discussion

Um, I ventured on over to the bulletin board on her website, and she's basically the only poster on it, with loads and loads of posts in various discussion threads. Which are incidentally all about conspiracy theories. For some reason, the tone and structure of the wife's writing reminds me of the LoseThos situation. [1] [1] http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html

There was a seemingly related hacker news page on the top page along side with this one http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html , about the 64 bit OS LoseThos and the mental insanity of its author. It was a very interesting read and I wanted to see the comments, but now it appears gone. Was this flagged and if so why?

There is a person with schizophrenia who posts to HN, who is shadowbanned due to the comments they leave, which are nonsensical due to their illness. Turn 'showdead' on in your profile, then hit http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos and now http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS . They've been writing their own operating system in assembly for the last few years: http://www.losethos.com/ and now http://sparrowos.com/ For more: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html