"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49512349)

There doesn't seem to be agreement as to exactly what one is, with several definitions already appearing in the comments here. Do you agree with one of them and think everyone else is wrong? Or do you have yet another standard definition that we should all be using?

My problem with the article was that "patch" doesn't seem to add any useful information. Unless he was using a restrictive definition intending to exclude things like crossover cables (which still work), he could have just as well said "transfer files over a blue Ethernet cable" with equal precision.

If he meant to say that at this point in time "you can use _any_ ethernet cable to transfer files directly between two computers", I think it would have been better to say that rather than appearing to add a restriction on the type of cable required.