I highly recommend reading the rest of the thread beyond just Linus' complaint. This isn't about Meltdown but Spectre which impacts all CPUs with speculative execution. I believe these patches apply to AMD too even though Intel engineers are posting them as they appear to be generic x86 code. Not only is David brilliant at defusing that situation, he provides quite a bit of context to clarify confusion for external readers while correcting Linus' potential misunderstanding of the patch too. The "moronic" patch Linus is complaining about is to fix Skylake that still is impacted by a potential exploit even with the though the other less ugly fixes fix the majority of chips. David even agrees with the unfortunateness of the whole situation & says he's OK dropping that last patch if Linus wants because the Skylake vulnerability is less clearly exploitable. Ingo provides a follow-up suggestion about a potentially cleaner & simpler way to fix just the Skylake issue which is great & the whole point of how RFCs are supposed to work. So not only does it look like Linus' may have overreacted, it didn't even move the conversation along in any way (angry responses rarely seem to).

> it didn't even move the conversation along in any way (angry responses rarely seem to).

From your other comment [0] it sounds like it worked perfectly. The angry response first got the Intel engineer to defend their work and explain it better than they originally had, then further got others interested enough to improve it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216289