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Comment by gregschlom | Hacker News Reader

Am I mistaken in thinking that in this case, it might also be a cultural/communication problem?

When Yinghai answers:

  We did do the analyzing, and only difference seems to be:
  good one is using 0x80000000
  and bad one is using 0xa0000000.

he clearly didn't understand what Linus meant by "think and analyze".

I don't know the Chinese culture well enough (assuming Yinghai is from China), but I am under the impression that they would emphasize more on results (fix the problem) than on processes (understand why the fix works, in order to be sure we are not breaking something else).

Am I wrong?

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You are wrong, on both individual level and stereotyping to a nation of people.

On the individual level, he did do the debugging and analysis, on a smaller scope. Linus was asking a bigger scope analysis and a lot of work. Some people are willing to spend time to understand and fix problem for free. Some people have better things to do and aren't willing to spend the time to do it. That's their prerogative.

On a nation level, there are Chinese who want to get things done and there are Chinese who want to understand the root causes, just as there are people in other nations/cultures who want to get things done and there are people who want to understand the root causes.

Thanks for the explanation on the individual level. Sounds reasonable.

On your second point, yes, you can say of any cultural group that there are people who do X and people who do non-X, but that doesn't proves that there are no global traits and that all cultural stereotypes exists for no reason.

But I understand your point as "you are wrong to try to attribute the behavior of an individual to a stereotype, since they can only be used at a very broad level", and I think you're probably right.

It's not an acceptable approach in kernel development.

A patch like that has zero (actually, negative) value. It simply shouldn't be accepted and regressing to the last "working", most tested version should be the option.

So, all in all, if you are not willing to do your homework well enough, it's better for everybody if you don't bother at all. It wastes both your time and the maintainers' time. Linus' time no less.

Indeed, those are cultural differences. However, I don't think those are directly linked to nations. Even within a single country like Germany, I'm observing vastly different approaches to software development.

Also, issues like "Why don't you accept my (seemingly) working patch?" appear quite frequently in a lot of Free Software projects, independently of the nations of the people.

I guess this cultural difference has more to do with professionalism and long-term experience on software projects.

I don't know about Chinese culture, but I am always amazed that so few people in software engineering actually understand the difference. I think that's the essence of the "being smart and getting things done" thing of Joel Spolsky. Things which would be obvious to most people here like "profile before optimize", "is this a symptom or the cause of the issue" are actually not that well understood in the large, unfortunately. All those are the symptoms of the same (lack of) skill for a programmer IMO.

Hmm.....the place where i studied cognitive science, one common theme of most experiments were global vs local be it on visual perception/language/etc......Wondering is local being extolled too much nowadays..... reminds me of the other post on "How not to scale?"

"I don't know the Chinese culture well enough (assuming Yinghai is from China), but I am under the impression that they would emphasize more on results (fix the problem) than on processes (understand why the fix works, in order to be sure we are not breaking something else)."

The greatest living mathematician has Chinese origins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao

If someone 'thinks and analyzes problems' then he does.

I don't like categorization by nation because I am Hungarian and I am afraid a lot of people in the U.S. who don't know me yet thinks something entirely different of my problem solving style than reality.

Of course, any nation is able to produce any kind of individual.

I'm a great believer in cultural traits, and I think they are normal. We are not all identical, and we are not all totally randomly different. We all share some cultural background from the country we grew up in, in varying degrees, and it does not prevent any individual from having any specific ability.

Yet, I was wrong to try to correlate a specific behavior of a specific person to his/her culture. That's where my logic was flawed.

If anyone wants more insight on cultural differences, I really recommend "When Cultures Collide" from Richard Lewis, it's a great book.

When I think of Hungarian problem solving I think of Polya's renowned book on proof heuristics, "How to Solve It"[1]. How accurate is that impression?

[1] http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html

Quite close.:) I've read that book when I was a child.:) I've had some math influence, and I had the luck to be the student of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lajos_P%C3%B3sa_(mathematician) when I was 13 years old.

While Terrence was of Chinese origin, he certainly did not grow up imbued in the Chinese culture. He was more of an Australian. I not saying this to imply Chinese are not deep thinkers. I have worked with Chinese (China bred) engineers who are damn good thinkers. So it is just a matter of personal style and priority(influenced at times by the culture one grows in).

When I think "Hungarian problem solving" the first association that comes up is John Von Neumann.

What assumptions do you normally encounter?

I think there is a generic implicit assumption that programmers in less rich countries are lower quality. Of course it is rarely said explicitly but it can be seen from some signs: salaries are so much lower here that I cannot see any other reason why not more development work comes here. When companies do offshoring they bring here only the boring job which does not need much creativity, etc...

Funny, I think Paul Erdős.

Did you just generalise an entire nation of people based on the internet postings of one person with a Chinese name?

Are you implying the "fix it and get it done with" people don't exist in other nations?

Nope, I did the oposite: I already had a generalisation in mind, and used it to try to understand the posting of one persone with a Chinese name.

Mind you, cultural traits of nations are a reality. I'm a Franco/Brazilian guy living in Vietnam, and I have seen it well enough. It doesn't mean that since you're from country X you will do Y, but it helps in understanding general behaviors.

edit: excellent book on this topic: When Cultures Collide, by Richard Lewis

http://www.amazon.com/When-Cultures-Collide-Richard-Lewis/dp...

>I already had a generalisation in mind, and used it to try to understand the posting of one persone with a Chinese name.

So you admit you are just fuelling your confirmation bias.

Forgive me if I'm about to mis-characterize you, but it sounds to me a lot like you've seen one question and decided on that basis that the person in question must be racist. Then it looks like you've cherry-picked what he said in explanation to confirm your own beliefs.

It looks to me like you are more guilty of the charge you are levelling than is the target of your accusations.

I might be wrong, but I'd appreciate a clarification.

First you thought that if one culture has a particular trait, then it implies another cannot share the same trait. Then you changed your position 180º to maintain the same basic premise i.e. that the GP thinks in logical fallacies.

But the GP is simply applying inductive reasoning. That isn't guaranteed to produce a correct outcome, but generalisations from large populations are not inherently flawed. It's indicative of mature thinking; generalisations are part of life and inductive reasoning is part of progress.

If you think the generalisation is deeply flawed, then make your case. That would be an honest discussion. As it is, you're just embarrassing yourself.

The key difference is that the GP asked questions based on a reasonable (although disputable) premise, while you are making conclusive statements based on simplistic (and flawed) logic.

I've seen this behavior many times in 100% US dev teams. This happens because it tends to be the "easy" way out.

Hmm...there's a problem with this code. It looks like changing this index to start at 5 works. OK, bug fixed!

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