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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

In Germany we have the term "Empöreria" for people who have nothing better to do than complain about "bad culture" just for the sake of complaining.

In the case of the Linux kernel, well, the culture seems to work out just fine - the kernel is pretty much a solid piece of technology and used in literally billions, if not trillions, of devices. So why change if it is not needed?

edit: Downvotes, just because I'm not following the radfem ideology? Please either explain your downvotes or fuck off, thank you very much...

edit 2: oh, more downvotes? Looks like I hit an uncomfortable core of truth, huh? <3

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Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>In Germany we have the term "Empöreria" for people who have nothing better to do than complain about "bad culture" just for the sake of complaining.

Not really. Only some Germans use the term. And as far as I understand Sarah Sharp didn't "complain for the sake of complaining", she tried for several years to improve things.

P.S: There is no "radfem ideology". Radical feminism is as diverse as any other strand of feminism. Also this is not about feminism, but about treating other humans with a minimum of respect.

> she tried for several years to improve things.

Why did you decide to use the biased word "improve" instead of the neutral word "change"? She tried to change things. Whether it would have improved things or not is pure conjecture.

How is "improve" biased? Are you questioning her motivation to improve the situation? Whether you agree with her goals or not, improve is the correct word to use.

You're being downvoted because it's not "just fine" to verbally abuse and harass people. This has nothing to do with complaining for the sake of complaining, this is about not wanting to work in a hostile environment.

Well, Linus succeeds in keeping off crap code because he is not afraid calling crap crap.

Might be it appears hostile, but it forces people to submit quality code.

And forces otherwise useful people to leave, and intimidates first-time contributors who might not be completely up to snuff yet. Is the rudeness worth the trade-off? It's an open question.

Well, it's known for decades that the culture on LKML isn't exactly newbie-friendly.

I believe that keeping newbies (which most often have no idea about how much security is required in kernel code) off is actually valuable in the kernel - just imagine what sloppy coding can cause on millions of devices, or actually, see it happening right now on routers and Samsung smartphones.

There's a reason why lots of Android driver stuff is not in mainline Linux, and the biggest reason is that most of the code shipped by the manufacturers is utter crap which Linus would tear apart in seconds, not to mention security experts or actual blackhats using said crap code to own devices.

No one is arguing for accepting lower quality code.

Pushing out "not up to snuff" code on the kernel layer to potentially millions of people is unacceptable.

But isn't that also the point? A combative culture would intimidate people who aren't up to snuff yet. The people contributing are more likely to be those who are confident enough in their abilities to know they don't deserve any of the community's scorn.

from what I understand she complains about the rudeness of the comments. comments that she wouldnt have gotten if her work was perfect.

I would LOVE to have such comments from competent and knowledgeable people about my work. I don't care about them being rude if they are right. work is not like disneyland.

Some people can put up with constantly being called an idiot/retard/moron/whatever. Others don't want to or can't. Should we exclude the latter?

Linus only calls people idiots and morons when they submit code with issues, so yes, we should exclude those who fail to live up to coding standards.

Do you mean those who fail to <perfectly live up to coding standards, every single time>?

Or is there a tolerance level for imperfectly meeting standards, below which it is not necessary to exclude?

I mean, you could, I suppose, require that submissions all include a coq proof of correctness (and of meeting standards), and then you wouldn't have to respond to submissions not meeting standards at all; any that didn't just wouldn't go through.

(Angle brackets meant to reduce ambiguity)

You must be a joy to work with.

We're not talking about a mobile app running in layers of sandboxes. We're talking about kernel space code, the most sensitive area in computing. And it's shipped to literally billions of devices, many of them not updated even once in their lifetime.

If it takes a couple devs leaving in order to maintain security for the inarguably most shipped piece of software, be it.

I know I'm by no means a perfect coder, so I leave my fingers off kernel code. With kernel code, I carry responsibility, and part of acting responsibly is leaving my hands off stuff I don't understand!

Have you ever seen a work that is perfect?

Do you feel the Linux kernel is perfect by any metric?

Perfect sure not - but I highly doubt Linux would be as widespread as it is if code quality hadn't been priority even above the "Never break userspace" doctrine.

So it's not "perfect", it's just "high quality".

And what made you think that the code written by Sharp wasn't high quality?

<3 to you because an upvote alone is not enough.

You are causing cognitive dissonance in people that have bought into "diversity/inclusiveness/feeling safe is the best thing in the world" ideology and language by showing them that they are optional and not that important. They feel discomforted, so express their frustration by downvoting you.

Edit: Got a downvote brigade that trawled my old posts. Thank you people.

We all see how well "feeling safe is the best thing in the world" turned out in the end.

Helicopter parents raising kids which go on whining to the cops for teachers giving bad grades instead of sitting on their asses and learning... kids which are not able to deal with frustration or roadblocks because they never learned to...

I'd just disagree with the "diversity/inclusiveness" part - for me, I don't care if you're straight, bi, homo, trans or whatever, the only thing I care about is the quality of your code. And I won't refrain from calling bullshit when I see bullshit - and I don't expect that people restrict themselves from judging my code based on my skin color or whatever.

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