I'm not fine with that. He's questioning whether another human being should be allowed to live or survive. I'm puzzled how calling for someones death (retroactively or not) is even remotely defensible in this context.
You're of course free to find that offensive, but if you think he's genuinely questioning whether or not another human being should be allowed to live or survive, you don't understand the message.
EDIT: It's also a point that likely stems from longstanding frustration. The amount of userspace software that does stupid amounts of system calls because people still do not realise how expensive system calls are is astounding. My favourite high profile pet peeve with this used to be the MySQL client library (don't know if it's been fixed) that used to do an astounding number of tiny read()'s which could have been cut to a tiny fraction with some basic user-space buffering. You can often find substantial bottlenecks in applications in about 10 seconds by attaching strace and look for stupid amounts of syscalls.
I think part of the problem with Linus' style is that people will inevitably try and imitate him. Not many will manage the intelligence and coding skills, but pretty much everyone can be a jerk if they put their mind to it.
I suppose you can say it's not his fault if people do that, but perhaps with a bit more kindness (to people, not to their bad ideas), the world would be a better place.
I'm puzzled by how someone can miss that, but of course this is HN and some people take everything literally.
I have my pet theory that getting outraged about random things like that is not genuine, but just signalling. You can see a lot of this kind of behaviour among the social justice movement.
Sadly the web has made it all too easy to take something out of its context.
Many insults are not meant literally.