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

Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

youtu.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 147 posts

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#101

Post by DanBC »

vacri wrote: post #100
DanBC wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? Really? Moderation has been a feature of complaint across every web forum (and many non-web forums) I've ever been a part of. See, for example, the comments here (and even there) about StackExchange; 4chan; suicidegirls (NSFW) "spring cleaning"; the HUGE amount of meta / drama on Wikipedia (ANI alone is gigabytes of guff stretching over years about moderating that community. The holy books of millennia ol…

I'm not part of the 4chan nor suicidegirls communities, and the meta in wikipedia is not forum-style moderation. The places I've been that have moderation issues don't have people wondering why they've been hit. I'm not saying that other forums don't have issues, but that there is a constant sussurus about the problems of moderation here that I don't have in other places. No insight and no accountability = bad modera…

Okay, I make a clear distinction between community up / down voting, and owner moderation. I should have been clearer.

Don't worry about the down votes. They are frustrating, but anyone on HN knows that you occasionally get a random down vote. By themselves they're usually meaningless. Yes, people should really either engage in the debate and not down vote, or not engage, and down vote, and explain if needed. (Personally, reasons for down voting should be restricted to "this comment does not belong here; it adds nothing to the discussion".)

I think there's general agreement about voting on HN - up vote things that are well written, even if you disagree. Don't down vote just because you disagree. Down vote things that add nothing to the discussion. Flag spam or other blatantly harmful stuff.

But all of that is separate from the issue of trusted people within HN locking threads, deleting threads, deleting posts, changing titles, banning users, etc.

> No insight and no accountability = bad moderation practices.

I honestly truly disagree with this. Strongly.

It's really simple to say "Here are a list of rules. Don't break them or we mod your posts". But when Bob starts skirting the rules there can be huge flamewars. Bob says he clearly wasn't breaking any rules, mods say he was, other people jump in saying that he wasn't and the mod is dumb and has made a bunch of similar stupid decisions, then other people jump in and say that maybe Bob was a bit close but he does so much good that we can make an exception for him, then other people leap in and say it's a stupid rule anyway. Meanwhile, this thread is getting so much attention that the real stuff of the forum is being ignored. New users are not interested in that stuff. The thread creates an unpleasant atmosphere which is noticed by other people. Now whenever Bob replies to someone who's a mod there's suspicion that Bob is just flame-baiting.

Anyway, I'm doing what I hate, so I apologies to everyone on HN. I'm setting my noprocrast settings for 48 hours. This is my lost post on this thread!

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#103

Post by exDM69 »

batista wrote: post #97
twelvechairs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so. Not to disagree with your point (which is right), but It becomes in NVidia's financial interests when they have negative press coverage because someone like Linus says bad things about them. I hope you understand what I am saying. Linus isn't just talking in an abstract-intellectual environment, his voice is strongly publicise…

This is correct in abstract, but not in real terms. I don't think Linus sayings have any significant effect on NVidia's bottom line (if they have any effect at all). It's not like more than 0.01% potential buyers will read this Linus quote and choose a competing product. Especially if NVidia's product is the best for their use case in the first place.

Linux is quite popular with scientific computing people doing GPGPU math.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#104

Post by exDM69 »

simonbrown wrote: post #19
flabbergasted wrote: post #7

From "If you like subversion, you are ugly and stupid" and now this. I always enjoy this man's talks.

It was CVS.

Well, it was targeted at both, CVS and Subversion and centralized version control in general. He commented on the "SVN is CVS done right" that you can't do it right since it's the wrong thing to do in the first place.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#105

Post by exDM69 »

jofer wrote: post #41
tikhonj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that this would have been the right venue to go into an in-depth rant about Nvidia's lack of cooperation. That's certainly not what the audience was looking for and probably not what Linus wanted to go into; moreover, I doubt anybody from Nvidia was there or would even have heard the talk. The last point is somewhat ironic: if Linus had been reasonable and talked about Nvidia at length, Nvidia would pro…

Actually, there at least one Nvidia employee in the room. Have a look at the last question (asked by an Nvidia employee).

There were several Nvidia employees in the room, I wasn't one of them because I missed the sign-up for the event. But my co-workers were there and they got the message, and I hope the message propagates upwards to the people who make the big decisions on this.

But Linus' message was a bit disheartening. Most of our crew would really like to open source everything we write. But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware. And the fact that Nvidia is a hardware company with a strong Windows background, so open source software is quite a strange thing in comparison. It kinda feels like being between a rock and a hard place.

When it comes to mobile software, Nvidia has been doing more open source work and upstreaming quite a lot of our changes. A lot of work has been done in the kernel internals and arm stuff. Not a lot of customer facing stuff but very valuable work if you're trying to build ARM-based system on chips.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#106

Post by exDM69 »

fmoralesc wrote: post #54
paol wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true, nvidia's closed-source drivers do have the virtue of actually working . (ok, this is slightly unfair to intel's video drivers, they work fine as long as you don't need 3D acceleration)

I must have hallucinated playing 3d games on my intel-based systems. (Of course, performance isn't great, but it doesn't work bad at all, at least in my experience).

Intel has really stepped up in the past few years. But it's not too long ago when their h/w was pretty much unusable in Linux so their track record isn't very good.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#108

Post by zerostar07 »

_delirium wrote: post #10

I'm behind the times here, but it took me a second to realize this was really Linus in the video. I still think of him as looking like the now-10-year-old photo gracing his Wikipedia article ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus_Torvalds.jpeg ), but he looks a lot older here, possibly accentuated by the business attire.

really? i think he ages very gracefully, even looks younger than 43

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#109

Post by batista »

exDM69 wrote: post #103
batista wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct in abstract, but not in real terms. I don't think Linus sayings have any significant effect on NVidia's bottom line (if they have any effect at all). It's not like more than 0.01% potential buyers will read this Linus quote and choose a competing product. Especially if NVidia's product is the best for their use case in the first place.

Linux is quite popular with scientific computing people doing GPGPU math.

All 10 of them?

Less fun edition: I'm sure it is. As it is with Linux based 3D render farms. Do both of those represent a large portion of Nvidia's income or an insignificant one?

I presume it's the latter: there are billions of desktops/laptops but only several thousands of scientific computing / 3D rendering installations. The fact that Nvidia doesn't seem to go out of its way to help people using Linux seems to corroborate that.

Re: Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds

#110

Post by rmk2 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #68
SkyMarshal wrote: post #4

TLDR: Linus at a Q&A, a woman asks why Nvidia still isn't providing any support for Optimus on Linux, Linus responds that Nvidia is being really difficult about that without good reason and "Fuck You Nvidia!" (flicks off the camera). Her question actually starts a minute earlier than the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=48m14s PS - Bravo Linus. This is issue is a real PITA, and a bit incongruent con…

I've always harbored the hope that nVidia is working behind the scenes on a release that supports KMS/Wayland, and that the release of Optimus support will be released simultaneously. It makes sense when you consider that Optimus support is probably a pretty big change and putting that investment in the legacy X11 non-KMS driver would be a waste when KMS will be a requirement for all new distros in 2 years' time. It'…

> It's worth noting that just last night they released a stable driver that (finally) supports RandR 1.2

The XRandR support in the driver is not yet stable [1]. The 302.xx line is currently in beta, but will support both XRandR 1.2 & 1.3 at the same time. That part also works flawlessly, however, your mileage may vary in regards to suspend/hibernate, since both I and multiple others on the nvidia forums experience serious problems with resume from either, i.e. the computer hard locks (and doesn't even respond to ssh etc.), which requires you to powercycle it. So while the XRandR is a huge step forward, it is not without problems yet.

[1]: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/latest.txt shows you the latest stable driver, which is 295.59

Post reply on HN