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Comment by charlesism | Hacker News Reader

If you know the symptoms of NPD, this stuff is cringe-worthy...

    I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people 
    can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm 
    a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving 
    bastard who doesn't care for ...

On the surface, the message is "Isn't it impressive how dominant I am?" but the unintended message is "I have a personality disorder!"

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Do you think Linus Torvalds has an exaggerated sense of importance?

These threads are always a bit disconcerting as people get so sensitive and personally offended by them. And invariably despite the astonishing success of Linus' leadership, we'll just throw that all aside and posit that if it were a committee of equals who treated each other with love and admiration it would be as successful.

Or maybe it would be an abject failure, which odds tell us it would have been?

Cheers. I just feel vicariously embarrassed for him (in regard to his writing here, at least). I can see how one might mistakenly read more into what I wrote than that, but that's all I intended to say.

Oh he's aware of it. He just doesn't care, because it works for him and the software he is the end responsible for.

I mean compare Linux to the Java ecosystem, which is similar in scale (billions of installs / dependencies) but run by commission. How is that working out? Less hurt feelings I guess but it's not making any significant advances either and has been stagnant for years.

it works for him and the software he is the end responsible for.

But does it work for the software he’s responsible for, or does the software he’s responsible for work in spite of his behavior?

How is that working out? Less hurt feelings I guess but it's not making any significant advances either and has been stagnant for years.

Commissions that don’t hurt people’s feelings make something stagnant? Could there be other forces at work to explain Java’s stagnation, other than a commission that doesn’t hurt people’s feelings enough?

> Could there be other forces at work to explain Java’s stagnation, other than a [committee] that doesn’t hurt people’s feelings enough?

Not a chance. All of Java's roadmap discussion revolves around dealing with legacy issues, and they even had an entire major release just trying to refactor the language into modules because the core was so bloated.

You can't blame lack of funding, or that it's a niche product or anything like that.

You can't blame lack of talent, because there were a ton of very smart people working on it.

You can't blame novel ideas, because very little in Java was unprecedented.

Java's legacy traces inexorably back to:

a. features that no one could say no to b. badly implemented features

    he's aware of it.

He comes off like someone who suffered abuse and mockery as a child. Was he aware he sounded like that? I doubt it.

That said, a behavior can be both cringe-worthy, and also productive. I can think of certain comedians, talk-show hosts, etc, who manage both.

Out of curiosity, why do you find it cringe worthy?

Do you think the statement is untrue? What makes you believe that he tries to convey "how dominant he is" instead of just stating a fact? Why would it be a problem that he has a personality disorder[1]?

[1] I believe that Linus himself aknowledged that when the CoC was added to the kernel documentation.

    why do you find it cringe worthy?

It's cringe-worthy the way someone who barks "do you not know who I am?" at a McDonalds employee is cringe-worthy. It's the grandiosity and lack of self-awareness.

    Why would it be a problem that he has 
    a personality disorder?

On reflection, it wasn't constructive for me to sound off about his mental health. It's none of my business. If my original comment were still editable, I'd delete it.

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