An open discussion on a very low level technical implementation with a heterogeneous crowd on Google+ seems to be the dawn of a new era; open source programming becomes public in full sunlight the same way books or mathematics became public after the invention of the printing. Compare it to mailing lists or earlier forms of engineering discussions behind closed doors. Many outsiders all around the world are now working hard on sunday learning C or with their gcc compilers trying to solve Linus's bitwise calculation optimisation problem and they previously had nothing to do with kernel programming. Their results may go into the next Linux kernel release and that is exciting for a puzzle.

and as opposed to you I find this to be a nice thing for everyone++ to be invited to think Linus's question on Google+ (which is better than facebook or linked in or pinterest for this purpose)

'...so it's not a generic "count number of bits" (or even a generic "count number of bytes"). So I was hoping somebody would come up with something simple like (x & mask1) + (x&mask2)>>shift that just got the four possibilities right.'

I love that Linus does his thinking out in the public, but that's nothing new. Google Plus isn't enabling anything that he didn't do before, it's just being exposed to a new audience. Frankly, I love that this new audience is seeing his writing. I love being able to watch smart people doing their thing and I hope they inspire others.

But, I'm afraid you you've totally missed my point. What I don't love is the commentary being mixed in with the game. This is why when you have a panel discussion, you don't hand a microphone to everyone in the auditorium. When you go to a concert, you don't hand everyone an instrument. People have varying levels of contextual awareness and/or self control: it's not really their fault for throwing in their $0.02. I'm just pointing out that Google Plus is a type of forum and I'm still not sure what kind of conversation is supposed to go on there. This kind of discussion feels unnatural to me.

yes i agree about g+, though i feel the same about facebook, linked in and disqus about any type of discussion. only on HN; i mostly feel "these are the right people here answering"

what linus does is more like an experiment, not on what g+ is but on what it can become. i pray the experiment will be successful, but i think i wont.

Nobody tries to have these kinds of discussions on Facebook because it's obviously the wrong place (my mom doesn't care what I think of bit-shifting). Disqus is fine because it's in the context of the blog post. People have to seek it out. Twitter is fine because conversations are not globally visible, they are filtered by @replies to relevant parties.

Google Plus was seeded with Google employees and they are the most enthusiastic users so it is filled with these kinds of discussions.

Linus knows exactly what kind of comments it will get.

So either he doesn't care about the comments at all, or he is fishing for these exact pats on the back.

Or he naively thought the signal to noise ratio would be higher.

He was aware of the "other" public: his post with the picture of his cat got more "upvotes" than anything before:

https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/Uk1YxfFD...

meanwhile everybody awkwardly +1'ing each other

"Its things like this that make me realize how little I really know.." +8

The people who +1 stuff aren't the ones that understand the discussion, and the ones that do understand it don't +1, because why would they, it's obvious by reading the comments which ones are good and which ones are bad... It's a fantastic culture clash.

I don't know because I don't have the same problems (I make few posts on Google+ and receive even fewer comments when I do), but presumably, all the smart guys and girls already have each other circled and just ignore all the spam. I can't imagine Linus would even use Google+ if there wasn't an easy method of filtering the wheat from the chaff.