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Comment by RogerL | Hacker News Reader

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

"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.

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>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.

> "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.

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