Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off • Hacker News Board

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#481

Post by fouc » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:04 AM UTC

pishpash wrote: post #460

eric_h wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton was an asshole in an era when men being assholes was, in essence, acceptable. There is no evidence that being an asshole is a requirement for being a successful innovator or leader.

It takes effort to be not be an asshole because you have to expend energy to model and simulate the feelings of others outside of you. That's an objective fact. Being a genius may require not expending such energy. Of course there are other geniuses that find things easy and they behave very nicely, but then they may not be reaching their "true" potential, heh.

It's really quite surprising how much energy/effort can be required to wind back that lizard brain in all of us when we're particularly agitated.

It's really hard to respond effectively when someone is doing the WRONG thing or they completely misunderstand your stance & modus operandi.

It takes a lot of effort to mentally model the other parties in the conversation and generate the empathetic response that hopefully is interpreted by the others in exactly the way you intended, so that everyone is back on the same page. An impossible endeavour.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#482

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:04 AM UTC

ci5er wrote: post #341

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, many thanks and congratulations to the folks who finally changed his mind.

I may be odd-man out here, but I really didn't see any part of his mind that needed to be changed. What did you disagree with?

Do you think it's acceptable to send a public email saying someone is fucking retarded, or that they should be retroactively aborted?

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#483

Post by senectus1 » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

serf wrote: post #142

I'm probably going to be alone in saying so, but I always enjoyed Linus and his attitude. (to me) it made him appear honest and dedicated to (his own) goals, and I always felt like that was respectable. (mostly) whenever he was proven technically wrong about how to do something he would concede to the technically better solution, and if he didn't do so he gave reasons for his conclusion. in other words : his technica…

he's almost always right... so yeah I enjoy his rants.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#484

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:07 AM UTC

hoosieree wrote: post #260

cowmoo728 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of Linus's more colorful rants: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

This is somewhat ironic considering Linux is written in C, which is the most stubbornly "one thing at a time" language in widespread use today.

For example?

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#485

Post by l8again » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:08 AM UTC

I would never work for this asshole. I have not granted any one the privilege of being disrespectful to me. No, no one has my permission to be unprofessional and/or disrespectful towards me, no matter the cost. Everything else is fair game. To be clear, I have had a fair amount of criticism on my work by all kinds of people (and most of them I deeply respect and consider my mentors).

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#486

Post by fouc » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

I wonder if the negative behaviour was essentially knee-jerk lizard-brain reactions against other developers that wasted his time because they don't share his values for Linux.

If he maintained a manifesto of values for linux's kernel, always kept it up to date with the new technological choices and so on, maybe that would've kept the bike shedding away.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#487

Post by jancsika » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #450

grzm wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”I'll take an asshole over a pushover any day“ This is a false dichotomy. There’s no need to be an asshole to not be a pushover.

Actually, it isn't. For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. So instead you walk it back and say things diplomatically (which is a tiny form of a white lie). Then people reply to your diplomatic statement with another diplomatic statement, and pretty soon nobody is saying the thing t…

> For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings.

What is no longer acceptable is to personally insult a developer for breaking things, poorly designing an API/implementation, etc. By "personally insult" I mean call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics.

Judging from Linus' post, he agrees that stuff like that is unprofessional.

And there are plenty of examples of Linus' posts where he clearly called particular developer stupid, as opposed to calling their ideas stupid. I can provide examples if you've never read one of them.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#488

Post by hnzix » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

LaGrange wrote: post #457

lgleason wrote: post #438

Linus's revelation kind of looks like he has been infected with "feels over reals" postmodernism. Not a good omen for engineering where reality needs to come first.

That's pretty much the opposite of postmodernism actually is.

I was forced to take a unit of postmodernism as part of my studies and came away no wiser as to what postmodernism actually is.

There was a bunch of dense, impenetrable academic word games that seemed to be asserting that all truth is culturally relative.

I don't find gravity or physics to be culturally relative.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#489

Post by doctorless » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #313

blazespin wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key, I find, is to be extremely direct and brutal in one on ones. Don't hold back, but be very supportive and positive when more than two people present. I try to explain this to be people I work with, but I don't think everyone appreciates it. Horrible people, in my opinion, are those that do the opposite.

That's actually the very definition of abuse. I am much more comfortable with people being publicly blunt. At least there is no gaslighting involved where the victim wonders if they imagined it because everyone keeps telling them "he would never do that" or whatever. If you are on excellent terms with someone and they trust you, etc, it can work to be more blunt in private. But most people doing that are just hiding…

> That’s actually the very definition of abuse.

No it isn’t. From Merriam-Webster:

Definition of abuse

1 : a corrupt practice or custom — the buying of votes and other election abuses 2 : improper or excessive use or treatment : misuse — drug abuse 3 : language that condemns or vilifies usually unjustly, intemperately, and angrily — verbal abuse a term of abuse 4 : physical maltreatment —child abuse sexual abuse 5 obsolete : a deceitful act : deception

They explicitly said they were upfront with their peers about how criticism is delivered. Whether that is true is beyond the scope of discussion; what has been said is nowhere near gaslighting or other forms of abuse. I don’t understand what has happened as of late, but the western world has taken a very strange turn in redefining terms to make the smallest of infraction or abrasiveness a great harm. Criticism does not need to be laced with praise to be useful, and justified critique does not equal abuse. That’s complete nonsense. Delivering it in private rather than publicly, if anything, seems more in consideration of the recipient’s feelings anyway.

With respect to the topic of this discussion, I will refrain from passing a judgment on Torvalds’ change of heart until we see quantitative data on how this has impacted the kernel.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#490

Post by ricardobeat » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:11 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #106

The other huge news here, both for Linux and for numerous other communities trying to make similar changes: The most recent commit, right before the release, deletes Linux's "Code of Conflict" and replaces it with a real Code of Conduct, the Contributor Covenant. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-condu... Quoting the commit message:…

Was there a public discussion that led to this change? The 'Contributor Covenant' contains this line:

> Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

which is essentially a carte blanche for any actions based on 'violation of the code of conduct', especially with the inclusion of public spaces in it's scope. We've seen it being (ab)used many times recently in open-source projects.

Most recently it's been considered legally binding, and the wide net it casts seems to be a huge liability for contributors (not a lawyer, so feel free to school me on this one).