Hacker News Reader

"You god damned idiot, how could you write something so full of logic errors, you should have been aborted".

vs

"I disagree. In paragraph 3 you state X, but in paragraph 4 you contradict yourself with Y...."

The latter is direct, but not personal, and fully communicates the point. It is also shorter, and thus less of a time waste than typing out insults.

There is absolutely nothing stopping the Linux community from being direct, for evaluating technical solutions. You can do all of that without being vicious and being personal.

> "You god damned idiot, how could you write something so full of logic errors, you should have been aborted".

It's funny that you need to embellish a quote so much to push your political narrative.

What political narrative is being pushed here?

The narrative that a large segment of society consists of abusers (racist, misogynists, sexists, etc) and that it's a serious problem that needs to be dealt with, when the reality is that these people make up a very small percentage of society.

Part of being free is having the freedom to make bad decisions.

The other part is the good sense of not taking them (I mean, they are "bad decision", they should be avoided by definition).

I mean, it's a pretty accurate paraphrasing (https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/7/80):

> Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it > was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system > calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck 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?

No, it's not accurate at all. It's embellished to make it sound much worse than it is. It's inaccurate and might as well be slander. If this is what you have to resort to to get people on your side, what does that say about your side?

You're crazy if you think the paraphrasing was less offensive than the actual quote.

I actually support Linus' (and the entire kernel team's) decision to be the way they are. You're discrediting his wit by saying the OPs paraphrase was more insulting.

His term was aimed generically, the paraphrasing made it seem directed at a specific person at the other end of the exchange.

So far the only times i have seen an email where Torvalds direct it at an individual, it is because he already tried the calm and detailed approach and the person still didn't see the problem.

You're right, he didn't say aborted. He said retroactively aborted, which would be murdered if I'm not mistaken.

Please show me the technical benefits that arise from calling for someone to be put in front of a firing squad for daring to waste the code maintainers precious time, or just walk away with whatever shred of dignity you have left.

I think "retroactively aborted" would refer to causing them to have been "aborted" while in the womb, retroactively.

Which, could be considered to be murder, if it was possible (I think there is probably only one timeline, but that is beside the point).

But it's not "killing the person now, with e.g. a firing squad".

Not that that makes it better, just a distinction to be made.

Fair. But the takeaway I think would be that these people seem to think making an error in software (which I think sets a new bar for FirstWorldProblems) is grounds for someone to be removed from life, which is kind of amazing since even people who drive drunk are allowed to continue living.

More like the mistake is so grave, that whoever may well be considered clinically brain dead.

No, I think in this (being a situation of slang language on an email list), the Urban Dictionary can be of help: "a legal medical procedure for the taking of ones life regardless of their age."

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=retroactive+a...

Huh.

I think the term would make more sense if it meant what I said, but I guess it means however people use it to mean.

Shouldn't it have a word that means "after the fact/event" instead of like "affecting something that happened before"?

Or like, "(age *4 +3)rd trimester"?

Oh well, the way slang meanings arise is strange and inscrutable. Or not really inscrutable, but not understood by me personally.

>It is also shorter, and thus less of a time waste than typing out insults.

It's fewer words, but more work. If you read a patch/pull-request and it's generally no good it is going to take a while to formulate a detailed response on why you're wrong and a possible fix. At this point you might as well fix the code yourself.

Sure you solution is more polite, helpful, and over all more productive. On the other hand random Linux develop X never promised to teach you kernel programming and given that just wasted his time with your bad code he/she might but be all that motivated to help you out.

Honestly I don't care how the Linux developers communicate, that's their business. There's of cause an issue with developers hired to do commercial Linux development, but that's something those companies need to work out, they aren't forced to use or develop on the Linux kernel.

> "You god damned idiot, how could you write something so full of logic errors, you should have been aborted".

vs.

> I'm sorry, I can't accept this patch because it's full of logic errors. Please fix them and resubmit.

Same approximate character count, same message, no coddling or doing someone else's work for them. But also no insults.

I don't have much experience with the Linux community, but it seems there should be a difference between telling someone their idea or implementation is terrible and telling them that they are terrible.

It is possible to give honest, direct feedback without personally attacking someone, and I don't see why it would be necessary or desirable to include personal attacks in a technical discussion.

If an idea is technically bad, it should be sufficient to point out the technical flaws without defaming the character of the contributor.

Yes, I don't argue with that. But, saying "this dual locking implementation we're looking at is definitely written by a retard"* is still 99% more about the quality of the implementation than about the person who did it.

*) quote made up

No its not. There is no constructive criticism in that comment, it was 100% abusive. And what did you gain by calling someone a "retard"?

The entire reason for saying that was to make the commenter look good by making someone else look bad.

Torvalds, ironically, doesn't encourage this sort of thing. Unfortunately, he is also an offender - the "shut the fuck up Mauro" incident comes to mind.

I'd say this made up quote started with constructive criticism and what ever came after that could be ignored. Was it necessary? No.

What specifically could I action from that one sentence? All it told me was it was a double-locking implementation. But if I was the original developer, I'd know that.

Sure, but it's also extremely unhelpful. I'm sure it makes the person writing it feel superior, but it doesn't actually convey any useful information.

"this dual locking implementation creates a race condition under circumstances X, Y, and Z" would be more accurate and probably more successful in achieving the purported goal of having a working dual locking implementation.

Still direct, but addresses the technical problem without insulting the contributor.

It's a false dichotomy. You can give honest reviews and tell people they're wasting their time without resorting to "Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously."

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

Wow seeing a clear example yourself really just gets the picture across. I was giving some credence to the fact that these people were just blunt to each other, but this is just toxic and hostile. If it were just blunt honesty their excuses might be far more credible.

Don't read that one email, read the whole exchange.

Also, one rule Torvalds holds kernel development to is "do not break user space". If a kernel patch exposes an API, the behavior of said API is fixed from that point onwards.

If a subsequent patch change the behavior, thus causing something in user space to error out, said patch is broken.

All this should be known to the person Torvalds is talking to, having doing this for some time. Yet when the issue is pointed out, he tries to pass the blame to user space.

I read it, and I see that Linus was right as usual: The patch in question did break userspace and did behave in ways POSIX says the kernel shouldn't ever do.

It's a pity that some others have adopted Linus' loudness without also adopting his habits of grasping the issue and being right. Linus says "don't break the posix rules%@#$!$@#$", never "do as I prefer$#@$@#$!@#$". There's a big, big difference.

This

What would be the general level of frustration if something fundamental was broken?

More importantly, how frustrating it is to get back to the same kinds of problems?

(I remember a similar issue with ACPI where the kernel got into a 'fix/break/fix' loop until they decided to change the approach and not accept breakages anymore)

But he was correct. You should never be called out for "resorting" to the truth. He, personally, fucked up.

If that's how you react to other people making mistakes, I hope I never have to work with you :-/

A senior developer making a rookie mistake, and trying to pass the blame to someone else.

> The Linux kernel development culture has always been like this, so it is a bit strange that foul language using bunch of developers turning out to be foul language using bunch of developers is a shock for someone. It suits for some and sure will annoy/scare some. As far as I know bashing is not about the person, but it is about the quality of idea or implementation.

I'm not sure where this is coming from. Sarah's grievance is explicitly about people-bashing, not blunt technical criticism. And there's no hint of surprise here... She's been around quite a while, she saw what the community was like and tried to make things better, and eventually found it to be futile and draining, so she's leaving.

Changing the behavior of a community to your liking, that existed long before you came in, is usually deemed to fail.

Can you expand on that? Nobody would argue that it isn't hard to change the status quo, so I assume that's not all you're saying. You seem to be hinting that you think what she was trying to do was wrong, but I'd rather you explain why (or if) you feel that way than have me put words in your mouth.

I was actually just stating the obvious.

You're describing how to maintain the status quo (which is simpler than any other option, indeed). Changing the behaviour of communities is instead how progress works (well, also regression, but I hope you got the point).

This is totally not about 'shock' and 'hurt feelings'. This is about active contributors to core kernel functionality being continually alienated and harassed by their colleagues.