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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person who finds this extremely difficult to read? The top says "David wrote" and then it looks like he's replying to a message from Linus Torvalds. So any quoted text is by Linus, right? But then....the letter is signed by Linus? So who wrote it? I know this is some ancient technology but Jesus, the user interface is horrendous.

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Probably depends on how old you are. To me it was completely obvious and much, much clearer than most 'modern' user interfaces. Every person replying prefixes each line with > . Proper email clients do this automatically. This way you can tell from the number of >'s how far back on the 'stack' you have to go to know who wrote it. You start reading from the top, mentally associating an indent level (nr of >'s) with a person/email address. It's easy to follow any mail with up to say 3 or 4 different people; after that it takes some thinking sometimes, in long emails.

I'm actually surprised at the number of people here complaining about the legibility. This is absolutely basic knowledge; or maybe I'm just even older than I imagine myself to be. How can someone who can't even figure this out write software? (I realize that not everybody on this site is a programmer nowadays, but still)

I don't know, I'm 27 and a C++ programmer and found it difficult to figure out who's talking at the time. I'm just more used to more modern forums where each "block" is wrapped in quote tags with signature on top.

> I'm 27 and a C++ programmer

Don’t tell Linus!

People live in Slack and github today. The last time I had an actual conversation via email was probably 2 years ago.

It's rather refreshing to see the Linux kernel keeping the tradition of using mailing lists. Every company I've worked at has felt the need to gather a bunch of people in a room (or teleconference) and "knock things out" in real-time. Then, everyone leaves and develops a severe case of amnesia. Never mind that for technical debates you really need some time to think and reply in detail. Which Slack is not good at, but... surprise, email is. But alas, it's "too old."

Google Docs is surprisingly good for some of this kind of deliberation. (We used it at Google.)

Especially when you use the 'suggesting' feature. It's a bit like a mini-PR for your docs.

Google Wave was supposed to be really good for this---better than email.

There isn't a week that passes where I don't miss Google Wave. It was a bit bloated, and javascript engines weren't quite up to speed for it (it was practically unusable on FireFox), but I still believe it was the best chance at an email evolution that we'll see in our lifetimes.

I find people to be completely befuddled when I use bottom posting, with interleaved posting faring only a tad better.

The worst part being Exchange/Outlook users whose quoting system is braindead and has the uncanny power to routinely throw off any form of automated top-posting quote folding detection, making for a terrible reading experience in MUAs that support threading properly, as well as said users making heavy use of a Word-afflicted form of interleaved posting that consists of using colors and sizes to reply inline within the quoted part. On the same line no less.

Please for the love of all that is holy could someone in vicinity of the Outlook team add support for "quote-this-selected-text" and "{in,de}crease-quote-level" as well as prefixing the full-quote with a proper marker instead of going full-on Z̭͕͕͘a͠l̛̬̮͇g̪̩͜o͏̹͚̯͖̜ͅ.

[0]: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/top-post.html

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

The issue I have with most mailing list interfaces like this is how difficult it is to find context. This post is a perfect example, it's pretty easy to find David's email by clicking the "In reply to:" link but I've been searching for a good 10 minutes and I still can't find Linus' original email. Going to "Messages sorted by: [ thread ]" doesn't show it, going to "Messages sorted by: [ date ]" and looking for emails sent around 2018-01-21 11:34 doesn't show it, and short of searching through every single one of Linus' emails I don't really know how to find it.

The email you're searching wasn't posted to the list. You won't find it - no matter the interface.

It's easier to read in a proper email agent, which usually color-code quotation levels, allows quotation collapse, and similar things. But that means you're an old fart reading their email in an actual, dedicated application instead of some webmail :)

Well, "modern" technology does this too; Markdown quoting on many sites works exactly like that - the only difference is that mailing lists prefer not prettifying messages. This email would look like this if copied directly to Reddit (and GitHub):

https://i.imgur.com/eXODVHb.png

(which also reminds me of how Tumblr's reblogs look: https://i.imgur.com/e6UR8bn.png)

Linus Torvalds originaly said:

"All of this is pure garbage. Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane? Please, any Intel engineers here - talk to your managers."

David Woodhouse replied with:

If the alternative was a two-decade product recall and giving everyone free CPUs, I'm not sure it was entirely insane."

The rest is written by Linus, with all further quoted segments being something David Woodhouse wrote.

> "the user interface is horrendous"

The user interface is perfectly clear if you know how to read it.

Even if one were confused as to who said what, the combination of "shit" and "f*cking insane" should have cleared it right up.

Very true. One could always hope someone took that tone with Linus. That'd be funny.

Someone did take that tone with him. Granted, it was Linus himself, but still, he is someone and he did it.

"In fact, it seems to be such a fundamental bug that I suspect I'm entirely wrong, and full of shit. So it's an interesting and not _obviously_ incorrect theory, but I suspect I must be missing something." [1]

And it is funny. And I respect that he is equally blunt when speaking of himself.

[1] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/02302.html

My favorite quote:

"I'm an egotistical bastard, so I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git." [1]

[1] https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/129776/after_controve...

> Am I the only person who finds this extremely difficult to read?

I found it clear in this case.

I'm often confused by mailing lists and nobody in the HN thread mentions anything, but this time it was 100% clear to me on the first read and I see lots of complaints.

The first reading I had the same trouble, but you should watch the >> (Linus's previous post) and > (David's post) to figure out who said what. And this post is by Linus replying to David.

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