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Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

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Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#241

Post by c3534l »

mrmondo wrote: post #195

I wish people in this thread would stop turning the discussion into a straw-man argument about Linus’s language and focus their attention to the technical and security problems at hand. Some people are easily offended, some people easily offend, some people are direct, some people are indirect - get over it. What matters here is the quality of the code / workarounds that are being presented, by whom and what alternat…

> I wish people in this thread would stop turning the discussion into a straw-man argument about Linus’s language and focus their attention to the technical and security problems at hand.

There wasn't much of a technical and security discussion in what was posted. Linus spent his time writing about his feelings and how hurt they were that someone did something he didn't like. Very little of substance or merit was communicated. If you consistently behave like a petulant child in a leadership role, expect people to gawk at it.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#242

Post by icelancer »

piyush_soni wrote: post #236
icelancer wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>No amount of gifted skill is a threshold for crossing that behavior barrier. Sure there is. You would rather have Linus in your life who yells at people than not. Linus being an asshole is something you have to deal with to get access to his intelligence. I suggest you make peace with this understanding, as it applies to far more people than Linus.

Having a Linus who doesn't yell at people will be any day better than having one who abuses others at will. He needs to take anger management classes. We could seriously do with a little less high-headedness in the world.

>> Having a Linus who doesn't yell at people

And having my cake and eating it too in every scenario would be great. That's not how things work all the time. It's up to you to deal with it, not Linus to change. He's the scarce resource. He has the leverage. You're just someone on the Internet mad.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#243

Post by dagurp »

dang wrote: post #75
chrisper wrote: post #29

Whoever changed the title managed to make it less clear. With "Linus" in the title it was clear that it was Linux.

I did that. We've observed over the years that celebrity names in titles tend to make for poorer discussion. HN is better when the focus is on content rather than personalities. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... Edit: ok, you guys have convinced me that this is a special case and we've put Linus back in the title above.

Too bad it didn't work

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#244

Post by yoz-y »

c12 wrote: post #136
StudentStuff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root question is what else is Intel trying to cover up with these garbage patches? Are they afraid of power leakage across gates allowing an attacker to gain a higher level of privilege in certain generations of silicon, and trying to cover it up with these patches (hence some of the seemingly crazy things they do)?

I could be very wrong but I read it as Intel trying to cover the fact that there are huge performance penalties with the patch enabled. Therefore Intel will continue to market chip performance sans patch while pushing down the responsibility of enabling them to OS vendors.

Aren’t most independant benchmarks run on OSes that are already patched?

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#245

Post by sgc »

kakarot wrote: post #218

So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense. That makes all your arguments questionable and suspicious. The patches do things that are not sane. Is Linus suggesting these patches are so bad that there co…

He certainly doesn't think it is a mistake. And that would fall within the spectrum of possibilities, but I would doubt anyone considers that as a probable reason, since it would be stupid to push something like that right now. Like future-destroying stupid.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#246

Post by icelancer »

mrweasel wrote: post #171
teekert wrote: post #28

Why doesn't Intel just go to Linus and ask politely: "Ok, we f-ed up, here is a million dollars (or whatever, 10x his normal salary or something) can you please work with us tightly for some time? Thank you." I would really respect Intel if they would.

Intel knows how to fix the problem, they don't really need Linus. What they do need is to accept a slowdown for some of their processors, but they are absolutely terrified to look bad compared to AMD in the benchmarks.

Linus is also not actually qualified to solve this problem. He's the guy we need to call bullshit, but as you said, Intel already knows what the problem - and the solution - is. Linus is simply pointing that out (which is certainly good).

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#247

Post by tomhoward »

jnordwick wrote: post #82
jnordwick wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as we know, there has never been a single attack using either of specter or meltdown issues. No code had been found, nothing. It appears to be very difficult to take advantage of, and the initial idea of a JavaScript exploit seems to not be possible. Part of the reason for all of this might be that the attacker needs to run code on the target machine, and one the attacker can do that, there are far easier ways…

Why does HN not allow people to question things like this? Any attempt to bring some non hyperbolic view to the topic is continually voted into the ground. I think it is useful to know that these exploits just might not be as bad as they are being made out to be. Ice talked to a number of people that don't seem to understand that there are limits on these: somebody cant just start reading data from random programs.

I know what you mean, and I've felt your frustration before.

But as I've learned more about how this community works, I understand that "Why does HN [do this thing I don't like]?" is not a valid question.

HN is a vast community of many different people who think and behave differently.

Sometimes a few more people will downvote your comment than will upvote it, either because they disagree with your point or they dislike the way you expressed it.

But when you complain about downvotes, you lose multiple times over: you fail to contemplate and reflect on how your answer could have been better, you come across like a bad sport, and you break the site guidelines [1].

In this case, it seems like people just disagree with your claim and have explained why in replies.

No big deal, all you need to do is reply politely to demonstrate the correctness of your point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#248

Post by icelancer »

dang wrote: post #75
chrisper wrote: post #29

Whoever changed the title managed to make it less clear. With "Linus" in the title it was clear that it was Linux.

I did that. We've observed over the years that celebrity names in titles tend to make for poorer discussion. HN is better when the focus is on content rather than personalities. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... Edit: ok, you guys have convinced me that this is a special case and we've put Linus back in the title above.

That's a good blanket rule, but Linus' comments are uniquely important. He is a subject matter expert and context is important regarding who is doing the yelling. This isn't some celebrity who is famous for something irrelevant.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#249

Post by draugadrotten »

yAnonymous wrote: post #212

Could this whole disaster and the shitty patches have something to do with the remote kill switch (Anti Theft) Intel have in their CPUs? If someone could enable and trigger that remotely, it would make for fun times.

It may interest you that a virus which kills its host won't spread as well as viruses which co-exist. This is basic from epidemics transmission rate. The longer an infected host keeps spreading the infection on, the more individuals will be infected. If the host is killed it will no longer spread the infection and therefore the infection may infect fewer hosts and this reduction in transmission rate alone may prevent a major outbreak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infe...

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#250

Post by icelancer »

kijin wrote: post #142
sclangdon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds originaly said: "All of this is pure garbage. Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane? Please, any Intel engineers here - talk to your managers." David Woodhouse replied with: If the alternative was a two-decade product recall and giving everyone free CPUs, I'm not sure it was entirely insane." The rest is written by L…

Even if one were confused as to who said what, the combination of "shit" and "f*cking insane" should have cleared it right up.

Very true. One could always hope someone took that tone with Linus. That'd be funny.
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