You can start by un-hellbanning him if you want to treat him like a human being.

It is failing to treat someone as a human being. You are ignoring them because you perceive their mental illness to be dangerous. You're failing to make eye contact with him, because you think he is an animal.

The admins on this site need to do a lot of soul searching if they are ok with this. And now I'm hellbanned for speaking up for terry. Fuck you hackernews.

Lots of human beings are hellbanned. Anyone else who posted the way he does would, almost certainly, be hellbanned.

Hellbanning is not failing to treat him like a human being.

If you want to make the argument that there is a good reason consistent with the purpose of the community to excuse conduct in his case that would otherwise merit hellbanning, that might be an argument with merit -- without the argument being made, I don't see it, but it might be there. But, in any case, that's not am argument you've made.

Agree. Hellbanning is a step too far. If you're going to ban someone, just kill their account honestly, not let them toil away posting.

The moderators' time and effort is valuable too. If someone reacts to a normal ban by creating new accounts and continuing their previous behaviour, what use is there in telling them that their behaviour is not acceptable if they refuse to listen?

That's the price of running a community on the internet.

Bear in mind I've run forums with 50,000+ subscribers and was an EFnet and Quakenet IRC op.