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

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

#591

Post by wpietri » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:43 AM UTC

dragonsky67 wrote: post #467

DoreenMichele wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it needs to be acknowledged that many people don't get subtle feedback. If you give me subtle feedback, either positive or negative, chances are I will miss it all together. I need feedback that is clear and obvious, what others could categorises as being blunt or abusive otherwise I will walk away scratching my head wondering if I've done well or otherwise. Reminds me of advise that was given to my Wife by a…

Sure. But clear is different than brutal. If you say the truth and people get too mad to listen, you might as well not have spoken at all.

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

#592

Post by chris_wot » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:43 AM UTC

zeroname wrote: post #206

chris_wot wrote: post #21

I wish he had recognised this six years ago: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 This email alone set the tone for what was acceptable. It was discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5107495

> This email alone set the tone for what was acceptable. Did it really? Did other contributors adopt his "style"? Linus gets a pass because he's Linus, I'm not so sure about other contributors, who presumably have their own reputation to maintain.

For what was acceptable from Linus, sure.

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

#593

Post by ponyfleisch » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:47 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #495

microcolonel wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that the "Collaborating" sector is the wrong goal for the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds is uniquely qualified to be concerned about matters concerning the kernel; if his interlocutors "win" too much on their side of the "win/win", every user loses. The public embarrassment of lazy and dishonest actors, especially those who are paid to collaborate, is an effective tool for maintaining order and stan…

The public embarrassment of lazy and dishonest actors, especially those who are paid to collaborate, is an effective tool for maintaining order and standards on behalf of the quality of the product, and provided nobody gets hurt permanently at the end of the day, it is easily justified. Can you explain why you feel rants and insults are necessary to maintain high technical standards? Literally nobody is asking Linus…

I suppose the theory is that fear of embarrassment makes people put in extra effort before submitting anything. This would reduce the time spent politely rejecting submissions.

Intuitively, in my opinion this sounds plausible.

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

#594

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #476

jakeinspace wrote: post #257

Linus is stubborn, persistent, and unyielding to what he sees as bullshit. These I believe are all very valuable qualities for the head of a massive software project, and may be part of the reason as to why Linux is where it is today. However, Linus is also a bit of an asshole, turning technical criticism into personal seemingly personal attacks. I believe those 2 sets of qualities are separable, but I would guess it…

I'd bet people tend to cluster onto the line separating "agreeable and lax" and "rude but firm" (as a sweeping generality) Consider this: A third category of people who are able to accomplish their goals by rallying others to their cause. They are essentially imposing their will on others, but are able to do it in a way that is not "rude." This is called charisma. - "Agreeable and lax"... you allow them to paint the…

You may enjoy a book called The Power Paradox.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312367/the-power-pa...

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

#595

Post by nyberg » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

damnyou wrote: post #544

mingee wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we 'we' as the collective whole tweak things?

Get more women into positions of power.

They would have to get themselves in such positions thus this is yet another place where it sounds nice to say but in practice it doesn't seem to be working. Atrificially placing them would harm the work force yet them making their own way seems to be also rather difficult thus we're stuck in a wonderful situation were it's not exactly clear how to get there.

There's also the change that this is not the solution as certain positions do require some form of aggression unless you're willing to persuade the other companies in different countries from the one you propose the change in to do the same. Otherwise it may prove to be a disadvantage even to have a more "argeeable" person in such a position.

I would love for the solution to be as simple "get more women into power" but as it currently stands from my perspective, we have deeper issues to deal with where it doesn't matter if it's a woman or a man. I'm open to be proven wrong though.

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

#596

Post by KenoFischer » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #519

tptacek wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not just stubborn, persistent, and unyielding: he's performatively so. In his most notorious attacks, he's clearly playing to an audience. That could be the problem. He clearly can separate the blunt stubbornness ("we do not break userland, period") from the performative rudeness ("SHUT THE FUCK UP MAURO"). (I mean, to be clear: what the fuck do I know? I've never been in the position Linus is in.)

> He clearly can separate the blunt stubbornness ("we do not break userland, period") For what it's worth, he doesn't even avoid breaking userland. Off the top of my head, we had a problem at work a few months back where kernel 4.3 and below rounded up listen(fd, 0) to something nonzero, kernel 4.4 didn't, and a piece of commercial software was (inexplicably) using listen(fd, 0). https://ldpreload.com/blog/git-bisect…

There's a bit back story there, so as a fun historical note, let me recount it here. In 2016, there was the Dirty CoW exploit (CVE-2016-5195), which got fixed by Linus in 19be0eaff [1]. Unfortunately, in that patch he forgot about transparent huge pages (they're easy to forget ;), which caused processes to lock up if you were using FOLL_FORCE on a memory range that happened to be backed by thp. That patch was widely backported to stable kernels, so I soon noticed my processes randomly freezing on various Linux machines. With a bit of debugging, I sent in a patch to fix that (https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/748110/), though I'm not sure that Linus ever saw it (or I guess he could have assumed we were using ptrace). Nevertheless, I assume that this being a common exploit vector for DirtyCoW made him want to remove it. As a result that was of course the second time within the course of six months that this stopped working (plus Linus' fault both times), so that email was written from a bit of a "you've got to be kidding me" mindset.

As an addendum in writing this comment, I became aware that my patch to fix FOLL_FORCE with thp actually re-introduced a version of the original DirtyCoW exploit apparently known as HugeDirtyCoW (CVE-2017–1000405) [2] - or rather my patch interacted badly with a pre-existing mistake in the thp code and caused this. Oops.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/19be0eaff [2] https://medium.com/bindecy/huge-dirty-cow-cve-2017-1000405-1...

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

#597

Post by PinkMilkshake » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #537

idontpost wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modernism is Descartes` "I will find a single indisputable axiom and can prove everything knowable from there." His axiom? "Cogito ergo sum." Postmodernism is rooted in the notion that there is no indisputable base axiom from which we can build our understanding of the world. It's unprovable assumptions all the way down. The consequences for this, if you accept it (you don't have to, but you're going to have a hell o…

Apparently I'm a postmodernist. Interesting.

Or you might be a pragmatist.

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

#598

Post by pcunite » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

forapurpose wrote: post #392

onurcel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when the heat of "the moment" lasts 20 years, the least we can say is it's about time.

'The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.'

Beatiful comment

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

#599

Post by iherbig » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:52 AM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #202

iherbig wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit difficult to explain, but I'll try. In the current political climate, the left and the right have been divided by the public consciousness into the following dichotomy: The left is overly sensitive and looks for things to be offended by. The right is concerned with maturity and personal responsibility and anti-political correctness, where those things are defined primarily in contrast to the left's perceiv…

> The left is overly sensitive and looks for things to be offended by. This is total nonsense. In the modern political climate everyone is looking for things to be offended by. (It just happens that the “left” is offended by people getting beat up, sexually harassed, prevented from exercising their basic rights, etc., whereas the “right” is offended by the phrase “happy holidays”, by trans-gender people using one bat…

I'd like to point out that the only assertion I was making was that these are the common beliefs that the public consciousness holds as truisms, irrespective of reality.

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

#600

Post by ggreer » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 2:53 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…

I totally agree with this. I actually quit my job at Red Hat because of the culture of non-criticism. I kept getting in trouble for pushing back against stupid decisions, even though I never insulted a single person.

For example: When the design team added 10MB of web fonts to the app, I said something like, "Users don't care whether the font is Open Sans or Arial. They care whether things load quickly and don't re-flow. This is a bad decision." I got nothing but condemnation for pointing this out. Today, every user downloads several megabytes of web fonts which have broken kerning and hinting on some platforms.[1]

It was a similar story when people wanted to change our build artifact to be based on RHEL instead of Alpine Linux.[2] This would have bloated the build artifact from 11MB to 200MB, introduced a host of security concerns, and drastically increased CI build times. In a meeting I said, "This decision seems totally braindead." I was immediately taken aside and given a stern talking-to by my manager. If that's not a braindead decision, then I don't know what is.

I also got in trouble for this comment[3] pointing out flaws in PatternFly. I was told that some of my coworkers felt insulted by my comment, and that I should be more civil and tactful. Who was insulted? What parts of the comment were insulting? I never got answers to those questions.

Encouraging civility sounds like a good thing, but in my experience the people leading the charge are doing it to suppress criticism.

1. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 My bullet point about reducing the build artifact from 11.3MB to 7.6MB was incorrect. It actually reduced the build artifact from 40MB to 7.6MB.

2. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/12

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163740