Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindstab | Hacker News Reader

The man wrote git for use on the Linux kernel. Trying to argue with him about how to use git with respect to your tiny patch to the Linux kernel seems... like missing the point on a great many things. The rules for submitting kernel patches are laid out in great detail. Do you really thing arguing with the gatekeeper is going to change anything?

View on HN

In that vein, when somebody tells Linus:

"You might have fun raging on the internet, but I think your goals would be better served if..."

He rightly responds:

"Umm. I think I've been able to reach my goals on the internet better than most people."

I believe in civility and courtesy in many areas, and Linus doesn't phrase things exactly as I would. But then, I don't have his responsibility or experiences, either - and while people can disagree about whether he expresses his thoughts in a polite manner, he certainly does so in a clear one.

> I believe in civility and courtesy in many areas, and Linus doesn't phrase things exactly as I would.

And a few messages down, he proceeds to say "You are a moron".

Not exactly a role model of civility.

But that was in response to some "Joseph", presumably one of "dozens of troll comments" that got deleted shortly after.

That was in response to

  pirtlj commented on pull request 17 on torvalds/linux a day ago
  I did not realizes that Linus' shit does not stink. Thanks for clearing that up...

It's kind of Finnish way of expressing things. We might say "jos sä teet tän näin, voisit vetää ittes hirteen" (if you do it like this, you might want to hang yourself) without actually meaning it literally. We have less PC compared to many other countries and I still find it refreshing while living outside of the country.

tell me what "PC" means or go hang yourself.

Political correctness. Mostly comes from USA, but exists also in other countries. Like in Germany people have lots of PC for Jewish people.

Thanks, I don't like PC too much either, seems like hypocrisy most of the time. We also in Italy have little of it. I mean, instead of PC one should make sure to treat everybody in a fair way, but even if somebody is in a minority of some kind, if he/she does silly things, it is offensive to don't respond to it (possibly in a rough way) in the same way you would reply to everybody else.

>Like in Germany people have lots of PC for Jewish people.

Which is probably also the best example of why PC is dumb. For example, it's hard to criticize Israel in German politics. At best, you'll be looked at in funny ways, at the worst you'll be accused of being a nazi.

There are good things in the anti nazi movement. People still remember and they don't want it to happen again.

Still I don't understand why you can't criticize the politics of Israel in Germany. Even my Israeli friends do it.

You can. Just make sure you say something smart, and everything is fine. The shitstorm might be, however, a little bigger than usual if you say something stupid. (Günter Grass' poem etc.)

I never tried to imply that it's bad to be vigilant of fascism and right-wing ideology. I'm very much among the first people who'd step up to prevent an abomination like the Third Reich to ever happen again. I hold high respect for people such as Stauffenberg and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who risked and ultimately laid down their lives fighting against the Nazis.

The motivation behind the German PC towards Jews and Israel isn't motivated by that, though. Maybe it originally was, but these days it's but a way to silence opposition to the questionable politics of the Israeli government. To be fair, it's slowly fading out, probably not in small part thanks to the emergence of the internet and new political movements, such as the Pirate Party.

Also, it's not like you can't criticize Israeli politics in Germany. It's that you will see few politicians who are willing to do it openly, because it's a minefield.

This went into Godwin territory really fast...

Although Linus is from Finland, he comes from the Swedish-speaking minority population there and his native language is Swedish. Sweden itself is pretty PC, but I don't know if that goes for the Finnish-Swedish as well, or if it is just Linux being Linus

My mother's husband is a Swedish speaking Finn and the cultures are quite the same. They are not Swedish people, they are Finns. The difference may be that they're a bit more international and also some studies say they enjoy life more than a typical Finn.

The whole country has two official languages, but Finnish-Swedish people use Sweden as their everyday language.

Finnish expressions are like Korean expressions. "나가 죽어" is a common Korean expression meaning "go outside and die."

The problem is that many times you can't have one thing without another. What I mean is that what Linus accomplished is also fruit of his character, you need character and be opinionated to do "git" for instance. Or even to make the Linux kernel the success and good piece of software it is, with many contributions: what separates a big software project to become a mess is character.

And the side effect is that he gets bored to listen at stuff that he thinks are silly. But see it from a different perspective, Linus is really, culturally an hacker, and not an academia professor. He is out there on github writing flames, arguing with people that have a github account completely clean and never wrote possibly a line of code at all. Exposing himself in the process to insults and so forth.

I really admire him.

> He is out there on github writing flames, arguing with people that have a github account completely clean and never wrote possibly a line of code at all. Exposing himself in the process to insults and so forth.

I never understood why do people who have completely clean github accounts feel the need to preach to someone who has been programming for a long, long time and is the major force behind two of very significant, technically hard piece of software. This won't be the first time this has happened. In the "Linux on C++" thread, someone comes in and says "I am surprised you wrote git in C. Don't tell me C++ is bad. That's bullshit. Clearly I know more about this than you do". Or even the Eric Raymonds' post about "Curse of the gifted" - he comes out of nowhere and starts calling Linux names. The fact that other developers didn't even bother responding to his bullshit made me happy.

I think people are arguing for two reasons:

1.) Linus is being a bully. There's a difference between speaking your mind openly and using rhetorical force to invalidate contrary views.

2.) The kernel requirements can be whatever those who control the kernel demand. That's just common sense. Making the leap to declaring that only one text wrapping approach is objectively correct is delusional.

If Linus simply said "The github pull request interface makes it impossible to follow the kernel commit guidelines, and we are not open to reconsidering those guidelines" there'd be no argument.

I don't think his goal is to have no arguments. His goal seems to be "fix this issue, god damn it!" And amusing rant can help bring attention to the issue (note tomayko comment in the original thread). I don't know about you, but the rant is entertaining to me.

My take from that message is he doesn't care if they fix it or not, but rather he won't be doing pull requests in it's current state.

Linus certainly cares. Otherwise he wouldn't tell github about it:

> I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github.

IMO, the reason Linus is where he is today as an icon and at least some part of the reason we have a rock solid Linux to use across all our commercial and non-commercial projects is because Linus has strong opinions about how things should be.

Somehow, I don't know or have read about that many (if any) world-changing people, who also happen to be "so nice and understanding of others opinions" or "agrees to disagree".

I'm sorry, but there are indeed few ways to design a BMW and many ways to design a glob of metal that can't even move.

2. He clearly stated his reasons why his text wrapping approach is objectively superior (not correct). If you think he's delusional, point out the criterion he has failed to consider, or explain how some other system meets any of his criteria better.

In response to the pull request he did simply say "I don't do github pull requests." and explained why, and basically said he would if github supported commit messages in the appropriate style. He never insulted the pull requester. He called whoever is this "Joseph" person a moron, and now we have no idea why.

Apparently "Joseph" deleted his comment (very un-git-like of GitHub to make deleting a comment without a trace so easy). I checked all the other participants above where "Joseph" posted and found a Dan, but no Joseph.

Joseph said something snarky along the lines of "Oh I'm Linus Torvalds, I'm always right" -- I think Linus was overreacting, but he was at least a little justified. He seems to get very angry when people state anything more than what's based on "facts."

Reddit[1] found the "Joseph" in question, his comments are still visible in his public activity stream: https://github.com/pirtlj

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/tionj/linus_tor...

Thanks, good find!

So, if @pirtlj said that in response to Linus's first comment, then he was way out of line, and something should have been said. Maybe Linus didn't say the exact right thing, but I doubt I would have been able to say much better. Hopefully @pirtlj learned more than that he shouldn't have said anything (although even that would be a good thing, I think)

The idea that one text wrapping approach is objectively superior for all purposes is incoherent. By that I mean it is an impossible claim given our most accurate understanding of epistemology.

Did he say it was for 'all purposes'? He said 50 characters for the first line is ideal for shortlogs, and 72 characters for more verbose logs, etc, when viewed in a terminal. He also said that encoding word wrap at write-time is better because only the author knows how to appropriately wrap. As he said, sometimes lines go longer, if the commit message includes program output that shouldn't be altered. So, you can't relegate word wrapping to the presentation layer without an unreasonably smart algorithm.

I interpret his statements to mean that the git/kernel projects' commit message standards are objectively better on all the ways we know how to measure (or at least, for all of the most common ways of looking at commit messages). So again, if you want to disagree, your choices are to point out a criterion that is not being considered, or how this system is not better at a known criterion.

Contrary views like "Linus's shit doesn't stink"?

Actually, I think Linus was factually correct. The persons involved were morons. :-)

"using rhetorical force to invalidate contrary views"

Thank you for epitomizing what makes Linus worth emulating.

Rhetorical force. Coooool.

On the very least, knowing his reasons is very informative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com