Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> but I appreciate the blunt honesty.

There is a difference between blunt honesty and being rude. Honesty is pointing out that you're not pulling your weight, or how you did something was incorrect and not up to the teams standards. Rude is calling you names or otherwise insulting you. The insults also often lack any reference to the issue. Telling someone they are an idiot does nothing for that person or the team.




What are some examples of him insulting people (as opposed to their work/code)?


We’ll be here all day. He would associate the code to the person, which goes against the “I am not my code.” that many adhere to. Linus is stepping up and finally owning up to his behavior. We owe him a lot so we gave him a pass before. Now we won’t hopefully need to anymore.

To be fair, he has incredible judgment and we defer to him when it comes to being the road block to merging bad code.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18001144

He doesn't seem to hesitate to get extremely personal.


The more exaggerated the cursing, the more problematic is the subject according to Linus. Linus' over the top cursing is a means to transmit his evaluation of how problematic some code is. It's never personal.

Show me an instance where his cursing is not related to kernel code.


>Show me an instance where his cursing is not related to kernel code.

I think I and many others are reading your statement as:

"Hey, as long as the person wrote horrible code, it's OK to call the coder anything we want".

The whole discussion isn't about how he behaves outside the kernel development. It's about how he behaves within that context.


The key here is not to take the cursing personally. He's cursing the code not the coder. He don't hate specific persons. He can curse you on one not-so-good patch and praise you on another. The anger it's not directed at the person.


He didn't mean to direct it at a person, but he used a language that everybody would understand as statement directed at a person. And he is apologizing for the fact that he didn't realize that.


>He's cursing the code not the coder.

That's objectively not true. He may intend to curse the code, but he is clearly cursing the coder.


How does saying someone writing that code should die as a baby attacking the code?


don't spin it.

He wrote:

>I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted

"retroactively aborted" is a dark joke, if you have a sense of humor, and conveys how bad a decision Linus think is to make a system call to read each byte.

saying "should die as a baby" is a spin. To be precise is important.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: