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Comment by cooldeal | Hacker News Reader

Linus posted a NSFW rant about it a few days ago. The story mysteriously went off the HN front page and subsequent submissions of the story went [dead].

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279531

Rankings graph showing a deep dive.

http://hnrankings.info/5279531/

Part of Linus' email:

>Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead.

>If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's your issue. That has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kernel I maintain. It's trivial for you guys to have a signing machine that parses the PE binary, verifies the signatures, and signs the resulting keys with your own key. You already wrote the code, for chissake, it's in that f*cking pull request.

View on HN

HN dislikes anything that shows that real people have real emotions. Humour, anger and whatnot have no place here.

HN dislikes everything, just like the rest of the internet.

Every day someone comments saying that HN is biased against their team (see your sibiling “MS astroturfers” comment), and it’s always a different team, often opposites.

Yes, it’s annoying.

Is that a problem? There are plenty of other sites filled with cat memes and incoherent ranting for those that seek that.

I think it is just a vocal minority of people who take offense to words like fuck. Most people don't care.

Profanity is hardly the only thing. HN, or a subset of it's users, basically expect everyone to act like humourless, passionless robots.

It's b/c 99% of that stuff is noise not signal, and degrades the information quality here. There are plenty of places on the net to get your fix of humour and endelessly repeated memes, we don't need it here too.

According to Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, aversion to profanity is a middle class thing. The upper class[1] do not use euphemisms for profanity or obscenity. Fussell wrote that Jilly Cooper reported "I once overheard my son regaling his friends: 'Mummy says pardon is a much worse word than fuck.'"

I doubt that many members of the upper class (see Fussell's book for a definition of upper class, it is roughly the tastes of "old money" but not dependent upon actual wealth) read Hacker News. It is likely that those who do not object to obscenities such as the word "fuck" are more socially liberal freethinkers who dislike formality. Those who do object are likely to be members of the middle class who believe (foolishly) that in censoring profanities and vulgarities, they are emulating the upper class.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/d...

>Humour, anger and whatnot have no place here.

For certain, information-sparse, emotionally invested and biased definitions of 'humour, anger, and whatnot'.

I think that its just the common problem that people who are angered by something are more likely to respond than people who like it.

MS astroturfers? (they've pretty much ruined /. by now, wouldn't be surprised if they took control of HN too)

I don't think flagging is enough to take a post from #2 to ~#200 in less than five minutes.

My guess is the voting ring detector got triggered or it was mod action. The subsequent submissions of the same story from other outlets going dead suggests that it was mod action.

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