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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

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Settle down, Beavis. Not everyone is running Linux in a 24/7 production environment. I hear some people even fart around with it at home for fun.

I've been in pager rotations for most of the last 20 years so I'm sympathetic to that. If some genius symlinked unzip to 7z with no testing in production and caused an incident I'd be real mad. But uh I don't think that's remotely what OP was suggesting here.

Indeed. Which is why I said:

"if no critical service depends on it, just update and see"

It did not sound like OP was running a hospital infrastructure. And I never did either, nor intend to. I try to have a linux that does what I want on my computer. 7z was helpful to me, so I shared it, that's it.

Why the hostile comments?

This guy has been ranting and raving here longer than I can remember or thought to make an account so I assume he is HN royalty and that's why it's tolerated. That said it doesn't really bother me if I understand the circumstances.

“This guy” is Don Hopkins who, amongst a long list of achievements in the field of computer science specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics, is one of the authors of the UNIX haters handbook - specifically the extremely prescient chapter 7 "The X-Windows Disaster", published when Linux was in its infancy. You don't have to like what he is saying, but he has decades of experience and research behind what he says. Know where your field came from. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward - sadly something a vocal minority of the community refuses to do.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/resume.html

Neat. But to be clear: my complaint was the rude and dismissive attitude, not the substance.

When you've been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and seeing the same responses, more often than not made by people who don't understand where this all comes from, and which do not really counter what you're saying, you'd be rude and dismissive - especially whith the dogma that surronds the "UNIX philosophy", which, in case you aren't aware, wasn't actually put forward by anyone heavily involved with UNIX development. Some empathy with the protagonist whould help.

But I get your point...

I once got a mail back from dang, about why my account got restricted. (Limited posts per day)

"I made plenty of good comments, but this one thread counts as flame war and he has to go by the worst, not by the best comments"

I thought about replying with some Don Hopkins comments, that were way worse than what was here and he is clearly not restricted. But I didn't, as I don't do Kindergarten, I just took a time off from HN.

But it definitely is not equal standards.

So I respect Don Hopkins for his knowledge and experience, but not his style of communication sometimes.

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