6 ms·

I always get a kick out of how Linus talks to people. It's so direct and he never coats his arguments to make them easier to swallow. You could learn a lot abou

I always get a kick out of how Linus talks to people. It's so direct and he never coats his arguments to make them easier to swallow. You could learn a lot about not bullshitting from that guy.

muppetman 15y ago
It's strange isn't it? When people do the same in places like this community (and other communities) they're immedietly downvoted or dismissed, unless they're someone held in similar esteem to Linus.
- qq66 15y ago
  It's not strange at all. Linus has earned his credibility. Some people in this community have too (pg, joshu, patio11, it's a long list). But people are downvoted when they act like they've earned credibility when they haven't.
  - muppetman 15y ago
    It seems you've missed my point. I don't doubt everyone you've listed has earned their credibility. What I'm trying to ask is "Why do you need to have earned credibility before you can be brutally honest with people?"
    - qq66 15y ago
      Because that's how people know that you know what you're talking about. I've seen many factually incorrect, heavily upvoted posts here on HN, and credibility is part of what lets me identify good material. For example, there was a post in the last few weeks about DNS -- I knew that davidu's answer was the one to trust, even though others were more upvoted.
      - palish 15y ago
        Speaking as a scientist, "don't think about it, don't care about it, just trust someone" is contrary to my nature. I was born with a burning desire to understand. Everything. I just wish I could locate a group of like-minded people to work with. I've been somewhat dismayed to find that "the real world" consists mostly of people whose sole ambition (or sole reality) is to fulfill their current role, without ever analyzing what it is they are doing or striving to improve the overall project. Status is very important. I wish it weren't so. At my last job, I was using EC2 to devise solutions to problems that they truly believed were technically unsolvable --- but no one would listen to me, because I was a newcomer. Their faith in the senior technical engineer was absolute and unwavering, and the senior technical engineer believed it was unsolvable, so therefore it was, for all intents and purposes, unsolvable. (After all, nothing ever came of my research, because no one cared enough to listen, or had time to think about something other than their current, immediate goal.) Worse, they even became offended when I tried to research the "unsolvable" problem in my own spare time. Status really sucks.
        Psyonic 15y ago
        Status often does suck, but it's a necessary evil. There is too much information out there -- filters of some kind are necessary, and status is more reliable than most
        qq66 15y ago
        I feel the same way about understanding things, but I don't have the time to understand every concept in the world from first principles. Nobody does. When there's a discussion on DNS, I like to know what's going on, but I can't take 2 years to go learn everything there is to know DNS (Well, I could, but I'm not going to). Luckily I know there is someone here who has done this, and until I have more or better information, I'm going to trust him. It's a necessary shortcut.
    - afshin 15y ago
      I think the idea is that being curt is a mild evil that is tolerable if the information contained has a high probability of being valuable. But if the person being curt (or even rude) has no particular bearing/merit in the listener/reader's mind, it just comes off as pushy or presumptuous, sometimes to the point where you are tempted to ignore what's being said altogether. It's not ideal, but I think the basic version is: I trust you enough to put up with your "brutal" honesty, vs. who are you and why are you being a dick?
    - ahoyhere 15y ago
      It's not really about credibility, it's about status. Bad behavior -- and being this rude is bad behavior -- is much more tolerated in high status individuals, in every type of community. Just like (extreme example) how senators and Goldman Sachs CEOs can walk away with a slap on the wrist and a little bad press, where you or I would go straight to jail. If it were just about the value of the information conveyed, people would do their own research when a person is "brutally honest" with them, and decide whether or not that information itself is credible. The confusion lies in the fact that in a community like HN, that worships logic (and also success), those things that make you "credible" are what make you a high-status individual. That means even the statements those high status people make which are NOT credible themselves will be accepted, or only gently rebuffed. (Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)
      - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
        >"(Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)" If you think someone is being ridiculous why don't you say something.
        G_Morgan 15y ago
        People don't do it because it is counter productive. Respected people have their supporters. Unless you first bury your argument in adequately respectful terms it will get downvoted. Regardless of content. You cannot say "The Linus rant about C++ is just wrong". You need to first blather on about why Linus is a great guy but has his limited perspective and from that perspective he is correct. However there is a world outside of that perspective where he is wrong. If I posted the Linus rant on C++ I'd just be called an idiot. Nobody would worry about my perspective because, to my knowledge, I don't have any supporters to appease. It is just politics. It affects tech communities as much as anywhere else. People get invested in their side. If you challenge their side then you must be sneaky about it.
        15y ago
    - brk 15y ago
      Because various forms of textual peacocking are frequently used by people who have no status, or knowledge, in a particular domain to try and appear as if they do. This is part of what a system like karma tries to address, if you see a comment that seems accurate, but is delivered in a very direct or even slightly annoyed tone by a user with high karma, you assume that this user is held in high esteem by others and while their comment may not be elegant, it should be taken to heart. Additionally, in the hacker sphere, it seems that many of the top hackers are also VERY busy with their projects. Thus, they may have less time to spend prettying up a comment. The goal is to share knowledge or information in the most efficient manner. Not to share knowledge without worrying about hurting feelings. Meanwhile, a direct comment from a new user with no standing in the community is likely to be met with some distrust or skepticism, even if wholly accurate. That user has not earned a status in the community. They have two options: 1) be brutally direct with all their comments and wait for people to realize they are frequently right, just inelegant. 2) start at least initially with more of a 'hearts and minds' campaign with their comments and build status in a more traditional method, slowly letting more of their actual personality come through in their comments.
      - trotsky 15y ago
        Hmm, I'm somewhat surprised to hear this description of karma. Does this mean people click through on a username to discover their karma score before deciding if they should believe or agree with what has been written? It seems pretty clear to me that karma mostly measures the amount of time spent commenting. An interesting metric, but not one I would look to to predict comment quality.
        brk 15y ago
        There have been times that I personally have seen a less-than-elegant comment from a new (to me) username. So, I check out the persons profile, look at their karma, other comments, submissions, etc., and then reply/vote/whatever. Not very frequently, but one or two times a month maybe. Could be just me...
        15y ago
    - scythe 15y ago
      If you're going to state an opinion, you ought to give some justification. Linus can use as his justification the experience he has gained from running a major open-source project. Someone who has not run a major open-source project cannot use that justification. If pg wants to talk about starting a successful company, he can use as a reference his experience starting that thing he sold to Yahoo! for loadsamoney, et cetera.
    - intended 15y ago
      This reminds me of this recent HN post: Hacking the status game: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 The part about people responding strongly to people acting above their status in particular was relevant.
  - contrast 15y ago
    On the other hand, I bet that same list of people would say that the credibility of the argument is more important than that of the person making it. Otherwise, you get either self-serving double standards or fawning hero worship (or both). Neither is strange, but neither is healthy.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >But people are downvoted when they act like they've earned credibility when they haven't. I downvote when people don't add to the conversation; when I consider them to be wrong or misleading (or when we had comment scores if they're comments seemed over-rated). Personally I don't find anything wrong with the comment made there - the chap is just asking that things aren't done without a proper rationale. Doesn't seem brusque, harsh or patronising to me. Just decide not to be offended, job done.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - alextingle 15y ago
    So in other words, you'll happily down-vote people who aren't on your friend list, even though they are trying to tell you something you need to know.
- kenver 15y ago
  I guess people (especially smart ones) don't like being told they're wrong by anyone who they consider inferior even if that person is right. By inferior I mean anyone who can't immediately prove that they're superior by listing a bunch of amazing achievements.
- reitzensteinm 15y ago
  I think even here, where politeness is one of the stated goals of the community, people will forgive someone for being very direct (but not mean) if they're also insightful. My gut feeling says that if this conversation happened here and both parties were unknown people, Linus' posts would have gotten voted way up, because he's just so right. But an attitude combined with less than excellent technical insight is, of course, going to get posts downvoted into oblivion. Well, -4, anyway.
  - dexen 15y ago
    I feel his raw response is reasonable there: the submitted patch stands against what has been tried and discussed for years. Developers ought to know the turf they tread on, instead of second-quessing. On the other hand, I've seen him trying to strong-arm his view in another case in just the same manner. Only here he had no technical (nor organizational) argument, beyond, ``it's easier to hack glibc than make Adobe fix Flash Player and make developers read man pages of memmove(3) and memcpy(3)''. Oh well. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477
    - DougBTX 15y ago
      I remember reading parts of that thread at the time, and being impressed at Linus standing up for end users. The background is important to understand his point of view: glibc was changed to in theory improve performance, but it broke flash audio and Linus couldn't see any performance improvement when he benchmarked it. So, his stance was to revert back to the working code. (Which come to think of it, is a very similar stance to this article.)
      - dexen 15y ago
        No he did not benchmark. Thus my remark on no technical argument. Linus stipulated that the number of CPU instructions retired stays the same, so there will be no sizeable improvement of performance. That's hand-waving, not a benchmark. Somebody else posted a micro-benchmark showing better performance in his particular case. ((in the glibc discussion)) Linus stood for users in the short term (works here and now). Not for good development practices (read manuals, fix bugs, use modern hardware facilities -- here HAS_FAST_COPY_BACKWARD CPU feature). EDIT: nb., the ratio of instructions retired to CPU clock ticks depends on caching issues & such -- thus a particular memory access pattern will perform better than other. That's indicated by the HAS_FAST_COPY_BACKWARD CPU feature. EDIT 2: I'm aware I'm making risky remarks here; Linus have worked at Transmeta for several years, so he knows way more about CPU design and internals than I do.
- bad_user 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
- phillmv 15y ago
  It's because being direct is not the same as being an immense prick. Most people (including Linus at times, credibility does not make you immune) confuse that issue.
- mynegation 15y ago
  It is not strange at all. The purpose of kernel hackers is to build best OS possible and communication is a tool. If it has to be blunt and direct so be it. HN on the other hand is the place where people come for communication and it is primary purpose, or secondary to - you know - news, but still very high on the list.
- quanticle 15y ago
  The difference with Linus, of course, is that he's so often correct. Its one thing to be a jerk. Its quite another to be a jerk that's right.
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  Actually, When Zed Shaw says stuff here, I think sometimes it's up-voted and some times it's down-voted. Sometimes the up-voted stuff is good and sometimes times the down-voted stuff is bad. In ways, I think that relationship is better. Zed has carved-out the position of being celebrity who's not automatically respected. Being a curmudgeon myself, I respect him more for this... Also, I've seen some high karma folks here still get -4's (back when karm was visible).
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
cromulent 15y ago
It's something of a Finnish trait.

I always get a kick out of how Linus talks to people. It's so direct and he never coats his arguments to make them easier to swallow. You could learn a lot about not bullshitting from that guy.

muppetman 15y ago

It's strange isn't it? When people do the same in places like this community (and other communities) they're immedietly downvoted or dismissed, unless they're someone held in similar esteem to Linus.

qq66 15y ago
It's not strange at all. Linus has earned his credibility. Some people in this community have too (pg, joshu, patio11, it's a long list). But people are downvoted when they act like they've earned credibility when they haven't.
- muppetman 15y ago
  It seems you've missed my point. I don't doubt everyone you've listed has earned their credibility. What I'm trying to ask is "Why do you need to have earned credibility before you can be brutally honest with people?"
  - qq66 15y ago
    Because that's how people know that you know what you're talking about. I've seen many factually incorrect, heavily upvoted posts here on HN, and credibility is part of what lets me identify good material. For example, there was a post in the last few weeks about DNS -- I knew that davidu's answer was the one to trust, even though others were more upvoted.
    - palish 15y ago
      Speaking as a scientist, "don't think about it, don't care about it, just trust someone" is contrary to my nature. I was born with a burning desire to understand. Everything. I just wish I could locate a group of like-minded people to work with. I've been somewhat dismayed to find that "the real world" consists mostly of people whose sole ambition (or sole reality) is to fulfill their current role, without ever analyzing what it is they are doing or striving to improve the overall project. Status is very important. I wish it weren't so. At my last job, I was using EC2 to devise solutions to problems that they truly believed were technically unsolvable --- but no one would listen to me, because I was a newcomer. Their faith in the senior technical engineer was absolute and unwavering, and the senior technical engineer believed it was unsolvable, so therefore it was, for all intents and purposes, unsolvable. (After all, nothing ever came of my research, because no one cared enough to listen, or had time to think about something other than their current, immediate goal.) Worse, they even became offended when I tried to research the "unsolvable" problem in my own spare time. Status really sucks.
      - Psyonic 15y ago
        Status often does suck, but it's a necessary evil. There is too much information out there -- filters of some kind are necessary, and status is more reliable than most
      - qq66 15y ago
        I feel the same way about understanding things, but I don't have the time to understand every concept in the world from first principles. Nobody does. When there's a discussion on DNS, I like to know what's going on, but I can't take 2 years to go learn everything there is to know DNS (Well, I could, but I'm not going to). Luckily I know there is someone here who has done this, and until I have more or better information, I'm going to trust him. It's a necessary shortcut.
  - afshin 15y ago
    I think the idea is that being curt is a mild evil that is tolerable if the information contained has a high probability of being valuable. But if the person being curt (or even rude) has no particular bearing/merit in the listener/reader's mind, it just comes off as pushy or presumptuous, sometimes to the point where you are tempted to ignore what's being said altogether. It's not ideal, but I think the basic version is: I trust you enough to put up with your "brutal" honesty, vs. who are you and why are you being a dick?
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    It's not really about credibility, it's about status. Bad behavior -- and being this rude is bad behavior -- is much more tolerated in high status individuals, in every type of community. Just like (extreme example) how senators and Goldman Sachs CEOs can walk away with a slap on the wrist and a little bad press, where you or I would go straight to jail. If it were just about the value of the information conveyed, people would do their own research when a person is "brutally honest" with them, and decide whether or not that information itself is credible. The confusion lies in the fact that in a community like HN, that worships logic (and also success), those things that make you "credible" are what make you a high-status individual. That means even the statements those high status people make which are NOT credible themselves will be accepted, or only gently rebuffed. (Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      >"(Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)" If you think someone is being ridiculous why don't you say something.
      - G_Morgan 15y ago
        People don't do it because it is counter productive. Respected people have their supporters. Unless you first bury your argument in adequately respectful terms it will get downvoted. Regardless of content. You cannot say "The Linus rant about C++ is just wrong". You need to first blather on about why Linus is a great guy but has his limited perspective and from that perspective he is correct. However there is a world outside of that perspective where he is wrong. If I posted the Linus rant on C++ I'd just be called an idiot. Nobody would worry about my perspective because, to my knowledge, I don't have any supporters to appease. It is just politics. It affects tech communities as much as anywhere else. People get invested in their side. If you challenge their side then you must be sneaky about it.
        15y ago
  - brk 15y ago
    Because various forms of textual peacocking are frequently used by people who have no status, or knowledge, in a particular domain to try and appear as if they do. This is part of what a system like karma tries to address, if you see a comment that seems accurate, but is delivered in a very direct or even slightly annoyed tone by a user with high karma, you assume that this user is held in high esteem by others and while their comment may not be elegant, it should be taken to heart. Additionally, in the hacker sphere, it seems that many of the top hackers are also VERY busy with their projects. Thus, they may have less time to spend prettying up a comment. The goal is to share knowledge or information in the most efficient manner. Not to share knowledge without worrying about hurting feelings. Meanwhile, a direct comment from a new user with no standing in the community is likely to be met with some distrust or skepticism, even if wholly accurate. That user has not earned a status in the community. They have two options: 1) be brutally direct with all their comments and wait for people to realize they are frequently right, just inelegant. 2) start at least initially with more of a 'hearts and minds' campaign with their comments and build status in a more traditional method, slowly letting more of their actual personality come through in their comments.
    - trotsky 15y ago
      Hmm, I'm somewhat surprised to hear this description of karma. Does this mean people click through on a username to discover their karma score before deciding if they should believe or agree with what has been written? It seems pretty clear to me that karma mostly measures the amount of time spent commenting. An interesting metric, but not one I would look to to predict comment quality.
      - brk 15y ago
        There have been times that I personally have seen a less-than-elegant comment from a new (to me) username. So, I check out the persons profile, look at their karma, other comments, submissions, etc., and then reply/vote/whatever. Not very frequently, but one or two times a month maybe. Could be just me...
        15y ago
  - scythe 15y ago
    If you're going to state an opinion, you ought to give some justification. Linus can use as his justification the experience he has gained from running a major open-source project. Someone who has not run a major open-source project cannot use that justification. If pg wants to talk about starting a successful company, he can use as a reference his experience starting that thing he sold to Yahoo! for loadsamoney, et cetera.
  - intended 15y ago
    This reminds me of this recent HN post: Hacking the status game: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 The part about people responding strongly to people acting above their status in particular was relevant.
- contrast 15y ago
  On the other hand, I bet that same list of people would say that the credibility of the argument is more important than that of the person making it. Otherwise, you get either self-serving double standards or fawning hero worship (or both). Neither is strange, but neither is healthy.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >But people are downvoted when they act like they've earned credibility when they haven't. I downvote when people don't add to the conversation; when I consider them to be wrong or misleading (or when we had comment scores if they're comments seemed over-rated). Personally I don't find anything wrong with the comment made there - the chap is just asking that things aren't done without a proper rationale. Doesn't seem brusque, harsh or patronising to me. Just decide not to be offended, job done.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- alextingle 15y ago
  So in other words, you'll happily down-vote people who aren't on your friend list, even though they are trying to tell you something you need to know.
kenver 15y ago
I guess people (especially smart ones) don't like being told they're wrong by anyone who they consider inferior even if that person is right. By inferior I mean anyone who can't immediately prove that they're superior by listing a bunch of amazing achievements.
reitzensteinm 15y ago
I think even here, where politeness is one of the stated goals of the community, people will forgive someone for being very direct (but not mean) if they're also insightful. My gut feeling says that if this conversation happened here and both parties were unknown people, Linus' posts would have gotten voted way up, because he's just so right. But an attitude combined with less than excellent technical insight is, of course, going to get posts downvoted into oblivion. Well, -4, anyway.
- dexen 15y ago
  I feel his raw response is reasonable there: the submitted patch stands against what has been tried and discussed for years. Developers ought to know the turf they tread on, instead of second-quessing. On the other hand, I've seen him trying to strong-arm his view in another case in just the same manner. Only here he had no technical (nor organizational) argument, beyond, ``it's easier to hack glibc than make Adobe fix Flash Player and make developers read man pages of memmove(3) and memcpy(3)''. Oh well. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477
  - DougBTX 15y ago
    I remember reading parts of that thread at the time, and being impressed at Linus standing up for end users. The background is important to understand his point of view: glibc was changed to in theory improve performance, but it broke flash audio and Linus couldn't see any performance improvement when he benchmarked it. So, his stance was to revert back to the working code. (Which come to think of it, is a very similar stance to this article.)
    - dexen 15y ago
      No he did not benchmark. Thus my remark on no technical argument. Linus stipulated that the number of CPU instructions retired stays the same, so there will be no sizeable improvement of performance. That's hand-waving, not a benchmark. Somebody else posted a micro-benchmark showing better performance in his particular case. ((in the glibc discussion)) Linus stood for users in the short term (works here and now). Not for good development practices (read manuals, fix bugs, use modern hardware facilities -- here HAS_FAST_COPY_BACKWARD CPU feature). EDIT: nb., the ratio of instructions retired to CPU clock ticks depends on caching issues & such -- thus a particular memory access pattern will perform better than other. That's indicated by the HAS_FAST_COPY_BACKWARD CPU feature. EDIT 2: I'm aware I'm making risky remarks here; Linus have worked at Transmeta for several years, so he knows way more about CPU design and internals than I do.
bad_user 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
phillmv 15y ago
It's because being direct is not the same as being an immense prick. Most people (including Linus at times, credibility does not make you immune) confuse that issue.
mynegation 15y ago
It is not strange at all. The purpose of kernel hackers is to build best OS possible and communication is a tool. If it has to be blunt and direct so be it. HN on the other hand is the place where people come for communication and it is primary purpose, or secondary to - you know - news, but still very high on the list.
quanticle 15y ago
The difference with Linus, of course, is that he's so often correct. Its one thing to be a jerk. Its quite another to be a jerk that's right.
joe_the_user 15y ago
Actually, When Zed Shaw says stuff here, I think sometimes it's up-voted and some times it's down-voted. Sometimes the up-voted stuff is good and sometimes times the down-voted stuff is bad. In ways, I think that relationship is better. Zed has carved-out the position of being celebrity who's not automatically respected. Being a curmudgeon myself, I respect him more for this... Also, I've seen some high karma folks here still get -4's (back when karm was visible).

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

cromulent 15y ago

It's something of a Finnish trait.