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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Note this is a hypothetical since it's quite possible it's not the case, in which case even by your logic the moron label is incorrect. So in your opinion engineers are unintelligent because they listen to the demands of people who can fire them or perhaps, god forbid, they're trying to balance technical solutions against revenue? That seems perfectly rational reasoning to me but that must be because I too am a moron.

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Very reasonable objection. So the engineers should be called "moral morons" or "ethical morons" because they are willing to follow instructions that stick Intel customers with terrible security problems, to help Intel shore up their share price.

Maybe Linus is being deliberately ambiguous about the type of moron he means.

Is this better?

Or maybe read the thread beyond Linus' rant. You'll get a better appreciation for the context. My impression is that Linus probably just misunderstood what the context/purpose of the patch & he's frustrated by the whole process & venting (which is fine). One thing Linus chiming in did accomplish is that the Intel engineers did a much job better explaining the motivation for the patch. To be fair it would have probably helped if the Intel engineers called it out up-front & explained why that patch is there (although maybe they did - I didn't read too much of it). They explain they knew it would prompt some volatile discussion & was the one they weren't happy about (not that anyone is happy about these flaws) so they made it last so nothing else would depend on it. Once the context was explained other Linux engineers chimed in with a cleaner way to accomplish it. All of these are senior Intel SW engineers and AFAICT they seem extremely competent not just on the Linux part of it but also in terms of understanding all the security implications on the Intel chips (these are easy to hand-wave explain & very hard to fully understand & fix).

All these engineers are in impossible situations trying to fix years of chips while at the same time providing a path forward for chips without these issues. You can call them morons all you want but from the little bit I've read I'm very impressed with their professionalism & knowledge and 100% do not want to be in their shoes right now.

Stop rattling about definitions.

If you had been working in a company that had been stopping you from doing your job then by definition the projection of the results of your work is "the results of my work show that I am a moron".

If you took the brightest person on earth and stopped him from communicating would that still make him "the brightest but unable to share" or would that make him "an idiot who has never learnt how to communcate his opinion"?

I am pretty sure you would pick different names for the same person depending on the situation, especially when it's more complex than a toilet conversation.

It's kind of weird you spin it that way. I've seen all sorts of places and in general people at them bottom eventually stop communicating because people in the middle don't want to hear it. Just now I came out of a small session commemorating the death of a fellow engineer in his late 40s. His problem? Obesity combined with caring too much about things.

That's in fact the big summary of it all. Some people actually have families to take care of. Losing your job for most people is not an option. I personally don't care calling out bullshit, but I also don't have a wife and 3 kids. By that logic losing the job is the stupid option.

I guarantee you that both at intel and at VW people called out the crap from management, were threatened and then decided they don't care enough to risk their livelihoods.

Calling intel stupid is imho entirely justified, but your logic to me sounds weird.

That... or completely misunderstand it...

It’s not hypotycal, it’s the part of hardware that made Intel CPU vulnerable to last week attack. Linus was right.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the thread beyond just Linus' complaint. This isn't about Meltdown but Spectre which impacts all CPUs with speculative execution. I believe these patches apply to AMD too even though Intel engineers are posting them as they appear to be generic x86 code. Not only is David brilliant at defusing that situation, he provides quite a bit of context to clarify confusion for external readers while correcting Linus' potential misunderstanding of the patch too. The "moronic" patch Linus is complaining about is to fix Skylake that still is impacted by a potential exploit even with the though the other less ugly fixes fix the majority of chips. David even agrees with the unfortunateness of the whole situation & says he's OK dropping that last patch if Linus wants because the Skylake vulnerability is less clearly exploitable. Ingo provides a follow-up suggestion about a potentially cleaner & simpler way to fix just the Skylake issue which is great & the whole point of how RFCs are supposed to work. So not only does it look like Linus' may have overreacted, it didn't even move the conversation along in any way (angry responses rarely seem to).

> it didn't even move the conversation along in any way (angry responses rarely seem to).

From your other comment [0] it sounds like it worked perfectly. The angry response first got the Intel engineer to defend their work and explain it better than they originally had, then further got others interested enough to improve it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216289

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