Some snippets from the response:
> since the peanut gallery is paying lots of attention it's probably worth explaining it a little more for their benefit
> not just drop it quietly because poor Davey is too scared that Linus might shout at him again
> If we can be done with the shouty part, I'd actually quite like to have a sensible discussion
None of this is adult. I'm not directly defending Linus' tone, or claiming that he's "more adult", but derogating and condescending the audience reading these public posts (1st quote), making cheap jokes about Linus' behaviour (2nd quote) and directly insulting Linus (3rd quote) is not what I would define as an "adult" response. Linus' email at least only gets angry and offensive while critiquing the code, and doesn't get personal.
> The rant contains no valuable information, the response is excellent and far more informative
Linus' "rant" informed me that Intel are setting IBRS as a default-off feature that must be asked for - offloading responsibility for security to the software. The response opens by condescending me, tells me that IBRS is expensive (we know), retpoline is performant, and the informativeness seems to stop there.
It then posits that as somehow justifying the offloading of said responsibility with the following:
> Then along came Paul with the cunning plan of "oh, indirect branches can be exploited? Screw it, let's not have any of those then", which is retpoline.
> But wait, why did I say "mostly"? Well, not everyone has a retpoline compiler yet... but OK, screw them; they need to update.
"Screw them" is the crux of his answer to Linus' concerns. Sorry, how is this in any way an adult response?
Really? The long technical explanation, with the word "shouty" is not adult? The plea for sensible discussion?
Your post isn't worth responding to beyond that. You've taken extreme liberties in your reading of his response. "Directly insulting Linus" lmfao are you fucking kidding me? You're calling "shouty" as directly insulting, when it's a response to "Fucking morons" writing "garbage" code? This is disingenuous at best if not willfully ignorant.
Cheap jokes about Linus's behavior?????
Seriously, take a step back and realize the loops you're jumping through to try to somehow justify Linus's behavior by attacking a reasoned response to it.
Linus' tone is not really defensible, but I just don't think the response compares favourably either.
And, perhaps more importantly, Linus' concerns aren't addressed and the response isn't particularly informative. dwmw2 mentions in comments here on this HN thread that he has been pushing back on Linus' concerns, but the response appears rather to defend those decisions in Intel. Perhaps I misread?
People in this thread are making the (understandable) mistake of assuming that Linus' remarks were aimed at individual engineers at Intel. But they obviously weren't: they were clearly aimed at senior management at Intel to say "we're not going to accept garbage from you."
And I don't even care if it was garbage. Because either it was garbage, or they failed to demonstrate to Linus that it was not garbage. Either way this is entirely Intel's fault.
I linked to a far more informative post that actually discusses a technical issue. Frankly, the response should have been what was linked on HN, not some rant.
I can't believe the irony of telling me to "chill out" with personal attacks when commenting on a rant that is majority perosnal attacks.
The issue occurs if you're not bulletproof on your position and then get too caught up on 'winning the argument' rather than solving the problem at hand.
This is why it's typically best to leave the theatrics aside unless absolutely necessary.
I'm pretty sure people aren't up in arms about Linus being a baby, but about your refusal to call out people on "subpar performance". Replace "subpar performance" with whatever you feel is an acceptable name for executing wrongly on very bad ideas.
And I feel like you might get downvoted because if there is one thing I HATE about companies, it's that people responding like this always get rewarded.
1) fuck up beyond belief (or just be assigned to a critical project and do nothing)
2) talk about the problem with everyone, without, of course, without fixing anything
3) inflict massive costs on everyone else because of the sudden urgent necessity of fixing your problem
4) get insane rewards for this
And I for one call statements such as the one from the top post here "optimism at it's finest":
> if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.
Unfortunately, corporate America is FULL, and I mean overloaded to the brim with people who will never admit the slightest mistake, and explode at anyone implying they made a subpar decision.
This attitude to "avoid blame" then proceeds to turn disaster into outright catastrophe. Many of these people who make some level of mistakes will see that not only can they get away with it, but aggressively attacking others for their mistakes comes with great rewards.
I have personally worked with several well known people in my field, who have climbed up the ladder this way. It isn't just that they didn't contribute, but they made great mistakes, both on the technical front (taking disastrous architectural decisions and forcing them through, despite agreement that there were very wrong), and on the financial front (doing budget allocations based on what THEY KNEW was a lost cause, and refusing to admit any fault or change course).
Once it does become clear that a disastrous mistake was made and propagated, and 90% of the budget was already spent (actually more like 150% in both cases), and none of the outcomes promised will be achieved, they then help organise a "code red", a "emergency sprint", an "extra effort", ... to "fix" things. But things are never fixed. Everyone is worse off, and will be for years.
The first few times this happens, these people are then rewarded. Promoted, in both cases. And of course, we are currently in the process of repeating one of these huge mistakes. Last time I so much as asked why this decision was made the guy very enthousiastically gave an answer, and I thought we both agreed it wasn't a good answer.
An hour later my manager asks to urgently see me.
A day later my director urgently called my manager and me to see him.
A week later we went to discuss "safety" with HR. (because of the 10 people thing, I'm sure, read on)
And yet, everybody, and I do mean everybody, knows this is a bad idea. However, having 50 people work for 1.5 years on a bad idea ... well those 50 people call it "a job", and nobody's going to be risking their career on calling this guy out any further (even if I did get 10 of them to walk into that director's office telling him that I did nothing wrong and that it's a bad idea).
But no worries ... no blame. We're still executing on that idea.
Finally, reading that thread further, it does seem like Linus's rant was a little premature & mistaken. David really handles it well & explains in detail in what way Linus may be misunderstanding what's going on. It's hard to know if that response mollified Linus or if he still thinks it's bunk & that thread was just taken offline so that it wouldn't have the noise of useless spectators chiming in, but it seemed like Ingo was perhaps satisfied & moved the conversation back to a way to solve the Skylake problem in a maintainable & clean way without the undesirable implementation that was originally proposed (you know, the whole point of an RFC). An RFC typically means they were looking for feedback & discussion not getting yelled at, especially for things outside their control. That being said, I certainly understand how frustrated everyone is with this given the amount of work that's been put into this by everyone.
Engineering culture is fundamentally about learning from mistakes (either as a community or individually). We can't fear them & there are limits to how much you can go to prevent making them before you just get decision paralysis. For that reason mea culpas are also unproductive. You should acknowledge your actions & your role in it - if you think you behaved incorrectly then of course apologize if you want to - but the person would made mistakes is just as much a victim of their environment as others (i.e. if I threw you into their position without the benefit of hindsight, would you do necessarily do a better job?) Yes corporate America has issues (as does every human endeavour btw) but I'm not convinced that in any way has to do anything with this discussion.
And
> Downvote away!
You're being far over the top dramatic. It's unnecessary, your setup text did a perfectly fine job of making the argument. The two comments about downvoting detract from the substance.
Regardless, I feel it's important to point out a consistent hypocrisy I've witnessed and experienced. I think it's totally relevant and substantive.
edit: I have no desire to continue a metadiscussion on downvoting. I don't care about downvotes, the downvotes are a symptom of an entirely relevant issue; a community that has a ridiculous double standard for Linus. It was not an attempt to attract or prevent downvotes, or to discuss downvotes, or downvoting, or the culture of voting on HN.
I brought up downvotes as an example of the underlying issue. Clearly I did a poor job of that as it's led to a number of unrelated comments. I apologize for the clutter that a one-off comment on hypocrisy has caused.
> "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That includes votes you're expecting. It distracts from the substance of what you're trying to say.
If you're concerned or thinking about downvotes when you're composing your comment, rethink how you can phrase it: if you think you're "speaking truth to power", "saying what must be said", or "pointing out hypocrisy", or something similar, you're already starting from a position of antagonism, real or imagined. People aren't going to respond to that well. Figure out — or at least attempt to find — a way to express what you're trying to get across in a way that'll be actually heard and understood by those you're trying to reach. What's actually going to make a difference?
If you think that they can't be reached or it's not worth the effort to try to do so, it's likely not worth the effort to comment at all. Given that you are participating on HN, please do make the effort. After all, that's one of the features HN members value: good, quality, constructive discussion.
If your argument has merit, it can stand alone. Responding to an avalanche of downvotes after the fact is the only thing I've seen on HN that makes sense. For example to try to counter a perception (eg if you think your argument is being taken incorrectly, or challenging the downvoters to discuss why they're downvoting; that can draw out more substance to a conversation).
Funny, I didn’t see that in your ten day long comment history.
The response is shockingly adult, given the culture Linus insists on trying to push:
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/05282.html
What an excellent writeup, despite the tantrum Linus threw just a few replies earlier.
I'd highly recommend only reading the response and avoiding the Linus 'rant'. The rant contains no valuable information, the response is excellent and far more informative.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted though for calling Linus a baby, because somehow insulting Linus for his flaws is never ok but when Linus does it it's so cool!