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25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

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Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#101

Post by nkrisc »

jaabe wrote: post #77
ben165 wrote: post #3

>Bob: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students? >Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all. This i…

I don’t think stackoverflow is a problem at all, I think it’s much better to have people ask stupid questions than to call them stupid. That being said, I do think people owe it to themselves to read the documentation first. I’m extremely rarely in a situation where the official documentation isn’t monumentally better than every other option. There are a few exceptions of course, when the official documentation flat…

I don't think it's as much about stupid questions or reading docs, stupid questions can be OK and sometimes people just haven't learned there are loads of docs yet. Instead, when you read SO questions, for example, there some you can tell are coming from a place of, "just tell me what to do" and not "how can I do this?"

I work in UX design and I see similar things on site related to that field. It's becoming popular so you can tell when some people think, "If I do X and Y then I am now magically a UX designer (or programmer)." Sometimes they literally ask, "how do I become a UX designer?" You can spot the smart beginners because they ask, "what is UX design?" The former is only interested in the destination while the latter is interested in the journey.

They're not interested in learning out even in the field itself, they just want to style themselves as such and simply ask others how to do the magical rituals required that they have no actual understanding of.

It's a fine line, because by no means am I lumping all beginners into this category. These people happen to look a lot like beginners, but even the real beginners are more knowledgeable.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#102

Post by nkrisc »

golergka wrote: post #67
Stratoscope wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can see how stupid people are when you just read the questions on Stackoverflow today. Nobody seems to figure things out by themselves anymore. I resemble that remark! It was just yesterday that I was looking up a bit of JavaScript trivia, how to format a number rounded to some number of decimal places. Yeah, I'm supposed to be some kind of JavaScript expert, so I could have done the obvious "mdn tofixed", righ…

I don't think that you're and author of parent comment are talking about the same thing. Most of low-quality questions on SO that make you think that author is lazy and unqualified are not about trivia or API bits like that. They're about a medium-level task that could be decomposed into more elementary subtasks without the need to know anything specific about the language or framework - but the author didn't even do…

Agreed. This is a thinking problem not even a programming problem. That question could be answered without a single line of code. Of course what the asked was probably looking for was all the code necessary, written for them.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#103

Post by r_smart »

S_A_P wrote: post #84
ben165 wrote: post #3

>Bob: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students? >Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all. This i…

I get where you are coming from here, but calling someone stupid for looking to get past a sticking point isnt stupid. spinning your wheels when an answer exists is stupid. I think stack overflow proves that there is most likely no problem you are solving that hasnt been solved before, and given the pace of change of things, nobody can know everything. Heck I still google SQL 101 questions on occasion and I write sql…

The productivity gains from SO awesome. That site has provided me with more value than maybe anything else on the web. To me it represents some of the best of what the internet has to offer: Not only are you not alone with your problems, but there's help available.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#104

Post by Nr7 »

Ardon wrote: post #98
Nr7 wrote: post #33

Btw. ice hockey is _not_ the national sport of Finland (it's not even the national sport of Canada!). The Finnish national sport is pesäpallo (Finnish baseball).

Hockey is the national sport of Canada. But so is lacrosse.

Looks like you're right. Ice hockey is the national _winter_ sport of Canada while lacrosse is the _summer_ sport.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#105

Post by forgottenpass »

alkonaut wrote: post #21
oraphalous wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While I wish such leader can speak for values like democracy or human rights... Or maybe people who have no particular expertise in political matters should stop opining so much about them? And maybe we should stop politicising all aspects of culture and existence. There is so much more to life.

There is no feasible way to separate politics from everyday life, and leaving "politics to those who knows about it" isn't really viable. Anyone with a platform whether it is sports, tech, culture should consider what message they are sending. Because there is a message, even from quiet people. "Not politicising" is a political act and statement as well. There is no dodging politics. Saying "I just play football, I l…

>If you have listeners you have a responsibility for what you are saying whether you like it or not.

It's this line of thinking that leads to people with minor platforms telling me to do things I already agree with, but in the most self-defeating and insultingly paternalistic ways possible that I wind up questioning my own positions because they advocated for them so goddamn poorly.

>Saying nothing even remotely political is better than completely screwing up

I think we don't understand just how badly the well-intentioned idiots are screwing it all up. See also: every Twitter fight between team We Know Best, and team Go Fuck Yourself.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#106

Post by simion314 »

eartheaterrr wrote: post #20

>As to C, nothing better has come around. >The kind of languages people see under active development aren't for low-level system programming. I found it interesting that he didn't mention Rust. Or is Rust not suitable for kernel development?

Rust fans should contribute to Rust kernels and stop suggesting porting existing ones like Linux, rewriting existing working code without introducing new bugs and changing behavior is hard and expensive as in developer hours, it is faster to do it from scratch in your favorite language with your favorite patterns and drop legacy stuff(even this means you will have less possible users then Linux).

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#107

Post by matz1 »

leesec wrote: post #93
ben165 wrote: post #3

>Bob: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students? >Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all. This i…

Ever been a novice at something hard but still wanted to do it? Like really, if you were to try to learn Korean (assuming you don't know it) right now, you think you'd have any simple questions that someone who'd been speaking Korean all their life would find absurdly easy? Everyone starts from somewhere, this sort of ego-ist stuff is toxic. It is okay to be bad at things and it is okay to ask dumb questions.

The point is you don't ask this question to the korean people, just like you don't ask those kind of question to linus. It won't be effective because they are the wrong person to ask.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#108

Post by sah2ed »

Nr7 wrote: post #104
Ardon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hockey is the national sport of Canada. But so is lacrosse.

Looks like you're right. Ice hockey is the national _winter_ sport of Canada while lacrosse is the _summer_ sport.

OT: you could fix the intended italics in your comment by using '' instead of '_'.

> Looks like you're right. Ice hockey is the national winter sport of Canada while lacrosse is the summer sport.

See here for the formatting options supported: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#109

Post by leesec »

matz1 wrote: post #107
leesec wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever been a novice at something hard but still wanted to do it? Like really, if you were to try to learn Korean (assuming you don't know it) right now, you think you'd have any simple questions that someone who'd been speaking Korean all their life would find absurdly easy? Everyone starts from somewhere, this sort of ego-ist stuff is toxic. It is okay to be bad at things and it is okay to ask dumb questions.

The point is you don't ask this question to the korean people, just like you don't ask those kind of question to linus. It won't be effective because they are the wrong person to ask.

I'm pretty sure the point was OP calling people stupid for trying to learn something.

Re: 25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds

#110

Post by neovive »

mattkevan wrote: post #91
groundCode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it goes both ways. Yes the student has to expend effort to understand, but teachers can make a huge difference. With Stackoverflow, I think often the simple questions point to a possibility that technical documentation isn’t all that beginner friendly. That and a lack of good examples in many tech docs. Good questions answered by good teachers can be an amazing shortcut to better understanding. > But it’s mor…

Technical documentation can be unhelpful as it sometimes leaves out a lot of surrounding context. So even if you’ve got the docs it can be unclear how to apply what they say as so much other knowledge is assumed by the authors. This is understandable as they tend to be written by people who know the thing inside out and backwards, but there can be a gulf between the beginner getting started guides (if any) and the pr…

Very true. I think Stackoverflow questions provide context that tends to be missing in most technical documentation. Many times starting in SO and ending in the docs is more practical than just starting in the docs.
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