Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lkml.iu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 702 posts

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

#671

Post by DoreenMichele »

tzakrajs wrote: post #669
DoreenMichele wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I am reading indicates that: A. Linus doesn't do this very often. Most of the time, he is perfectly well mannered. But we don't hear about that. We only hear about these incidents. B. Most of his work conversations occur on the public record. So anyone can get hold of it when he gets riled. When a CEO gets riled, that is much more likely to occur privately and get covered up. C. He created Linux for free.…

I don't think Linus is wrong for how he interacts with people, but I do worry that people are so easily distracted by his display that the ensuing conversation about his behavior detracts from his message. Nearly every statement he makes like this devolves into musings on human psychology.

People tend to talk about that which is both trivial and emotional and will derail a discussion in that direction on the slightest opening. This is not peculiar to how Linus Torvalds gets treated. It is the default norm for human behavior. Talking about things with actual consequences is often decried as political and deemed not appropriate for civil, intellectual conversation.

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

#672

Post by treis »

nodja wrote: post #614
rtpg wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's just once a month... I think very few teams would be able to deal with a co-worker with such violent outbursts. Ok he's mad. We all get mad. I've never said someone should have been aborted, no matter how mad I get. He has, over a ... A diff. Perhaps he has some difficulties, like some of us do. Has he ever acknowledged his attitude in any way?

> Has he ever acknowledged his attitude in any way? Yes. > I don't know where you happen to be based, but this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US. > The same way we have developers and marketing people and legal people who speak different languages, I think we can have some developers who are used to—and prefer—a more confrontational style, and still also have people who don't, > Maybe it's just…

Calling people morons isn't being confrontational. It's being an asshole.

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

#673

Post by vlovich123 »

jedharris wrote: post #664
vlovich123 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note this is a hypothetical since it's quite possible it's not the case, in which case even by your logic the moron label is incorrect. So in your opinion engineers are unintelligent because they listen to the demands of people who can fire them or perhaps, god forbid, they're trying to balance technical solutions against revenue? That seems perfectly rational reasoning to me but that must be because I too am a moron…

Very reasonable objection. So the engineers should be called "moral morons" or "ethical morons" because they are willing to follow instructions that stick Intel customers with terrible security problems, to help Intel shore up their share price. Maybe Linus is being deliberately ambiguous about the type of moron he means. Is this better?

Or maybe read the thread beyond Linus' rant. You'll get a better appreciation for the context. My impression is that Linus probably just misunderstood what the context/purpose of the patch & he's frustrated by the whole process & venting (which is fine). One thing Linus chiming in did accomplish is that the Intel engineers did a much job better explaining the motivation for the patch. To be fair it would have probably helped if the Intel engineers called it out up-front & explained why that patch is there (although maybe they did - I didn't read too much of it). They explain they knew it would prompt some volatile discussion & was the one they weren't happy about (not that anyone is happy about these flaws) so they made it last so nothing else would depend on it. Once the context was explained other Linux engineers chimed in with a cleaner way to accomplish it. All of these are senior Intel SW engineers and AFAICT they seem extremely competent not just on the Linux part of it but also in terms of understanding all the security implications on the Intel chips (these are easy to hand-wave explain & very hard to fully understand & fix).

All these engineers are in impossible situations trying to fix years of chips while at the same time providing a path forward for chips without these issues. You can call them morons all you want but from the little bit I've read I'm very impressed with their professionalism & knowledge and 100% do not want to be in their shoes right now.

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

#674

Post by hutzlibu »

treis wrote: post #672
nodja wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has he ever acknowledged his attitude in any way? Yes. > I don't know where you happen to be based, but this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US. > The same way we have developers and marketing people and legal people who speak different languages, I think we can have some developers who are used to—and prefer—a more confrontational style, and still also have people who don't, > Maybe it's just…

Calling people morons isn't being confrontational. It's being an asshole.

Depends. If people are morons, you can call them like that and not be an asshole, just honest. Don't know about this case, though ...

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

#675

Post by [deleted] »

monktastic1 wrote: post #660
donatj wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vitriol is the most important part of the message. If they don’t feel bad about what they’ve done what reason do they have not to do it again? Without the vitriol you solve only the most immediate problem, when the true intention of calling something g garbage is to prevent many future problems. You learn nothing from being politely shoed off.

I'd consider rethinking this view. Being torn into and being called a moron, useless, pathetic, etc. leaves deep trauma that will bleed into other areas of your life. Even if you're tough and think you've brushed it off. The idea that we're duty-bound to inflict emotional cruelty on people when we think they've made a mistake is probably the cause of most of the suffering we see in the world. You can tell someone tha…

[deleted]

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

#676

Post by qu4z-2 »

cromwellian wrote: post #516

A lot of people trying to defend being a jerk as necessary in these circumstances. I think Google culture proves the opposite: Googley code and peer reviews, blameless postmortems, and a host of other mechanisms that de-escalate and de-personalize things. The Meltdown work at Google probably didn't begin with a rant about morons. It's possible to construct a culture where people can air grievances and criticize other…

For what it's worth, I would definitely rather work under Linus than at Google. Google seems, from speaking to people who work there, thoroughly unpleasant.

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

#677

Post by ggm »

A lot of comments feel like they are because Linus

I want to observe this is somebody who used to work at Transmeta. They were not a large company, and whilst I don't think he directly did VLSI, he very probably understood the interaction of instruction set, chip level behaviour and upper system (specifically operating system and compiler) implications of what a chip does.

I am interested in his response to Intel on that basis. I'd prefer he was less overtly rude and aggressive about it, but I think he manages to convey a real sense of anger and concern about things: How did Intel arrive at this fix. How did Intel discuss this fix with people who have to modify systems to work with it. Qui Bono.

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

#678

Post by bonuswavepilot »

donatj wrote: post #599
somestag wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a native English speaker in the world who reads the phrase " is garbage" and interprets that literally as "this is just a metaphor for deciding not to use something and thus throwing it out." No, there's always vitriol, and the writer knows that, which is why they say it like that--because they're feeling vitriolic. I'm sure you can imagine equally accurate ways to reject code contributions; it…

The vitriol is the most important part of the message. If they don’t feel bad about what they’ve done what reason do they have not to do it again? Without the vitriol you solve only the most immediate problem, when the true intention of calling something g garbage is to prevent many future problems. You learn nothing from being politely shoed off.

If the person you are criticising gives any kind of shit at all about doing a good job, they will supply their own 'feeling bad' when you demonstrate that they haven't done a good job. In this case, you adding vitriol is unnecessary.

If the person you are criticising doesn't give any kind of shit, then your vitriol will make them feel bad and dislike you, but it isn't going to improve their code quality, because they still don't care. (And if they answer to you directly, they are likely less motivated to do well next time now that you have acted like a prick)

If the person is not able to discern the difference between good and bad code, then it is useful to them if you can explain what it is that you are mad about when reviewing the code, but again in this case, vitriol without understanding just makes you seem like an arsehole to work with.

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

#679

Post by bonuswavepilot »

mrmondo wrote: post #151
ealexhudson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out. All Linus needs to do is say something like "I don't understand why this is here, and I'm not merging it until I do", rather than "They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense". The latter is not a technical argument, and it doesn't provide accuracy or clarity about next steps. "So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Som…

If you’re worried about ‘cursing’ and you seriously think that it’s something important in the scope of this discussion around security and the grand scale of negligence afoot, I believe you may need to re-evaluate your values. In fact, the idea that you’re even bringing up such minor language at such a time really disappoints me.

Yeah, it's weird... I get why people would want to call Torvalds out on acting abusively, but focussing on the 'bad words' is odd.

Would I be correct in assuming that the majority of commenters here are from the US? (Not trying to throw shade on you Americans, just that you do tend to get needlessly flustered about swearing)

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

#680

Post by Izkata »

vlovich123 wrote: post #670
hartator wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not hypotycal, it’s the part of hardware that made Intel CPU vulnerable to last week attack. Linus was right.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the thread beyond just Linus' complaint. This isn't about Meltdown but Spectre which impacts all CPUs with speculative execution. I believe these patches apply to AMD too even though Intel engineers are posting them as they appear to be generic x86 code. Not only is David brilliant at defusing that situation, he provides quite a bit of context to clarify confusion for external r…

> it didn't even move the conversation along in any way (angry responses rarely seem to).

From your other comment [0] it sounds like it worked perfectly. The angry response first got the Intel engineer to defend their work and explain it better than they originally had, then further got others interested enough to improve it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216289

Post reply on HN