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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this is true.

Another thing I'm sure of is how little time most people spend thinking about other people. Even the people in my life I don't care for, I rarely spend more than a passing moment thinking about them, even if they're in the same room.

The ones I do think about a lot are the ones I love (wife, children, closest friends).

Despite knowing this, though, I'll admit that I can spend a lot of time thinking about That One Dumb Thing I Said at Dinner Around My Friends - again, though, I'm 99% sure most people don't remember the dumb or embarrassing things others say or do.

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This reminds me of a fortune cookie I once had, that I first thought was aggressive, and then I found liberating:

"You'd care less about what people think about you if you realized how little they do"

Another related quote: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Another great one: “I am not what I think I am. I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.”

How do you interpret this quote, especially the last line. The first line is how I see myself, the second how you see me, then from who's perspective is the last line?

Shared social perspective. The same thing - what we think other people think - is what most affects our behaviour about most of social reality.

Here's a more detailed and illustrates article on what that means: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/04/08/the-essence-of-peoplin...

Similarly, about what people think of you: "Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bernard_Baruch

"Most people are too worried about what you think of them to have to time to worry about what to think about you".

When some one said, "Most people laugh at you," his reply was, "And so very likely do the asses at them; but as they don't care for the asses, so neither do I care for them."

- Diogenes

I'd like to mention how much truer this is in today's world. Specifically, if you live in an urban city. Today, everyone is constantly bombarded with information from multiple sources that they often forget much about past interactions with people they aren't close with. Even if you are close with someone, they are very much likely to only remember significant memories or memories which you remind them of.

That's the spirit that got Linus Torvalds where he is now —

"Be abrasive, don't pull punches, be a 'git'. People don't care about you, so you can't really hurt them anyway"

>where he is now

A celebrated 100x programmer at the top of the software engineering hierarchy, whose work helped span a trillion dollar industry?

He might have regretted being so abrasive as of late, but let's not paint things as if he failed to accomplish much because of that. In fact it might have helped solidify a more cautious approach around kernel development and keep possible detractors at bay, in the early days, compared to him being too polite and accommodating.

Well, we're all saddled with git's total disregard for the user experience.

We'd still be struggling with the positive and negative aspects of open source software if Linus hadn't existed, just as the first world war would probably have happened anyway if Gavrilo Princip hadn't precipitated it. Bear in mind that however good a coder Linus might be, RMS is still an influential figure for political reasons despite checking out of the coding business years ago. Politics, charisma of one sort or another, celebrity...

I quite like gits user experience, personally. If you don't like it, there are lots of tools built on top of it that make it easier to use. Not sure what the issue is.

Git could be a showcase of inconsistent and confusing UX. If you like it, and you don't see any issue with it, then you know nothing about good UX.

This is unnecessarily cruel. Design is subjective: someone liking git's UX design doesn't mean they "know nothing", just that they have very different opinions from you.

And please don't respond to this telling me all the ways git's design is bad; I'm not disagreeing with that.

I never said it was good UX in general, just that it is good UX for me. And with tools like git one you learn the commands the UX doesn't matter. For a developer tool I think that is fine.

He might have regretted being so abrasive as of late, but let's not paint things as if he failed to accomplish much because of that.

Like Stack Overflow. They got to where they are though encouraging ruthless curation and moderation via earning points and badges. And having won the Q&A industry, now they want to shed that image.

He started to change a while back and now even more. I am sure you missed this that happened recently.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CA+55aFy+Hv9O5citAawS+mVZO+ywCK...

Have you seen that his statement was a reaction to a New Yorker investigation about how his attitude had discouraged women from contributing to the kernel?

"Torvalds’s decision to step aside came after The New Yorker asked him a series of questions about his conduct for a story on complaints about his abusive behavior discouraging women from working as Linux-kernel programmers."

He is in disgrace.

The New Yorker article didn't reveal anything that wasn't well-known in the technical community for years, nor did it turn up any instances of misogyny or sexual harassment. They even mentioned that there's no evidence that he's been more abusive to women than men. It wasn't clear to me why they even ran the story - seems like they were trying for another #MeToo moment, but just ended up restating the obvious: obsessive male geeks can be a pain to work with (regardless of gender).

Undoubtedly Linus is going to need to moderate his temper in the future, but I'd hardly call this "in disgrace", and I don't really see this as something he'll have trouble bouncing back from.

but just ended up restating the obvious: obsessive male geeks can be a pain to work with (regardless of gender)

I wish we could get this message out there. If more women are interested in programming, great, but all I care about is making software development less of a toxic, alpha-geek hellhole for the people already in it.

Linus has stated many times that he wants less beginners contributing to the kernel, especially the scheduler, which has nothing to do with gender.

Be thankful Linux is willing to be the BFDL, otherwise corporate interests will undo 20 years of progress.

Linus seems to care these days. This does not translate well across different cultures. I've lived in two cultures and still have a hard time practising "not caring" about other people.

When you're young, you worry a lot about what others think of you.

When you're middle-aged, you stop caring about what others think of you.

When you're old, you realize nobody is thinking about you.

This is such a great insight, and is one that I came across later in life. Once you realize how little friends/acquaintances care about the minute details of your life, it is very, very freeing.

I think we can only genuinely care for 20 or 30 people tops. Like as in really really care.

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