I'm really baffled about this. Maybe I'm from older hacker generation (and I'm also a Finn). I just did not see personal insults going on. I would like to see more neutral discussion about cultural differences (between hackers and nations) and not opinions and own cultural biases stated as normative.
Here is my personal cultural bias:
1. Insulting people personally is not same thing as insulting their ideas or their actions. If someone insults my actions or my ideas, I may get emotional, but I don't take it as an insult. For me it means that I'm being challenged.
2. Cursing is not unprofessional or insulting in itself. Cursing is to be used for emphasis and to get people involved emotionally (good thing). Cursing has its place to signal frustration and get trough people. Too much cursing is like underlining everything.
3. (Anglo American) business culture is not necessarily something to be emulated. Being overly polite invites all kinds of side stepping, passive aggressive behavior and ineffectiveness. I feel that "being professional" is used here as thought terminating cliche.
4. Some hacker cultures can be both fiercely competitive and cooperative at the same time. Being heavily criticized and challenged is part of that process. Kernel hackers compete to get their ideas incorporated into the same codebase. Javascript hackers borrow snippets from each other and do their own things (no need to be as competitive as forking is easier). This might lead to different hacker cultures. What is accepted in one culture is not accepted in other.
5. Management by perkele[1] is management strategy that can be very effective with the 'Shut Up and Show Them the Code' hacker culture.
6. Pacabel may have a point. Younger generations may no be used to their work or behavior being harshly criticized and take it as personal insult. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8089706
>If someone insults my actions or my ideas, I may get emotional, but I don't take it as an insult.
The fact that people get emotional in response is exactly the problem. Knowing that an insult wasn't technically directed at them doesn't stop them feeling shitty, and being unproductive as a result.
>Younger generations may no be used to their work or behavior being harshly criticized
Younger generations are used to their work being criticised constructively and dispassionately.
>Knowing that an insult wasn't technically directed at them doesn't stop them feeling shitty, and being unproductive as a result.
Again, this is not culturally universal reaction. In some people and cultures it gets your blood flowing and it encourages you to work harder.
>Younger generations are used to their work being criticised constructively and dispassionately.
Is dispassionate interaction something you should automatically want? I also don't agree that with the constructive criticism and passionate delivery are somehow exclusive.
I don't personally use the language that Linus uses, but I strive in the environment where people are very competitive and compete against each others by engaging personally (both negatively and positively). It's inevitable that we associate some part of our ego into our ideas and work and feel a sting when it's criticized. I love it when I'm right and others are wrong and little hurt when I'm wrong and and get called for it. I assume others feel the same. This does not mean that I am personally attacking or hating people. If someone can't cope with it, I have to find other way to communicate with them of course. But if I'm in good competitive alpha-team where nobody is taking it personally I feel that we should be able to keep our culture and not change just like very PC and non-emotional "professional" team culture should not change if they feel they are in good and productive place.
I think that the overly critical culture of many European nations prevents younger people from trying out or voicing ideas because humans are human and don't like being humiliated , especially in public. This is something I think we should not emulate.
>overly critical culture of many European nations prevents younger people from trying out or voicing ideas
I don't think this is what is happening here.
>humans are human and don't like being humiliated , especially in public.
This is just the cultural difference I'm talking about. Someone criticizing your work or behavior does not universally signal humiliating you as a person. I acknowledge that this may be so for you personally or in your culture.
I read the bug report thread and that was as professional as I would expect from grownups. I was responding to your statement about anglo-american culture.
I have observed this "it's OK to be direct" motto from some parts of modern Europe and, interestingly for me, Israel.
Everything we interpret depends on our training, but my observation is that this motto is very commonly interpreted to allow rude, condescending and arrogant behavior. I spent a lot of time in India. In this respect correct behavior (as taught to us by our parents) aligns with the Anglo-American view of politeness in many respects.
I have come to believe that the directness championed by some current European cultures may perhaps be a modern phenomenon, not so common before the 1940s in those countries?
I agree that too much politeness can be perverted into passive aggressive behavior but so can (and I think is) this "Let's be direct" attitude.
There has been much talk on HN and everywhere else of how to develop a code of conduct that allows honest exchange but maintain civility. I think politeness and respect is a central part of this code.
People are not computers. You can not kick them when their output does not please you. You can not kick them when you think you are better than them.
Well, perhaps you can. Perhaps being rude and arrogant leads to a better world.
I would like, however to live in a world where everyone tries to respect each other and show that respect.
nabla9 -> I have a technical question about HM comments. I see two interesting things about your reply
1. I can not see a down-vote button (To clarify I personally never down-vote anything, just upvote things)
2. I don't see a reply link to your comment.
This does not seem to be a nesting limit (I can see a reply link for other comments elsewhere here)
What is this - is there some option one picks when responding to a comment?
The downvote button (and presumably the ability to downvote) is removed for direct replies to comments you have authored. It is also removed for top level comments on articles you have submitted.
My theory about this is that Linus treats his mailing list like a semi-public IRC chatroom (I mean, it is his mailing list for his kernel, so it makes sense) and HNers are not accustomed to that kind of cross-over if they've even ever idled on an irc channel run by hackers. It usually gets much more crass in there, so in that context these kind of comments make sense.
But when you consider Linus is responsible for, I dunno, billions? trillions? in spending on technology based on his OS, it's also easy to understand people getting nervous or offended by IRC-style banter. It's like seeing the CEO of a large company make jokes about retards. Pretty off-putting.
(And no, of course Linus is not a "CEO of Linux" and he doesn't owe anybody anything, i'm just saying I get how people could feel shocked or offended by his behavior)
Seriously. If a community/somebodey cares more about how something is said more than what is said, said community/person lacks the allegedly so important professionalism.
at least the conversation around it is amusing. I may never enjoy anything as much as the convoluted logic of people who want the world to work hard to not personally offend their sensibilities
FWIW, I unflagged this submission again, because amongst the comments there was some interesting discussion, specifically about automatic reduction of test cases and the kinds of tool that are used to do it today.
(I did flag the submission at first, though. Someone being rude isn't particularly interesting, and usually isn't worth bothering to read either since any underlying point worth exploring will invariably be made more concisely and politely elsewhere.)
Linus has earned the right to that tone, care about Linux or not. Now when some unknown emulates it, that's the time to take note (and ignore that person ever after).
This attitude is breeding the jerks and aholes in this industry. It is far too common to encounter teams and communities where in professionalism is accepted on a sliding scale of "accomplishment". If you accept this type of disrespectful/demeaning behavior from one "special" person then you will get it from everyone. Eventually, people tire of this type of nonsense and leave. You may be able to backfill their talent, but regular churn per mantle inhibits the creativity and velocity of the group. Linus is extremely fortunate that folks are paid very well to take it, and many very large companies (e.g. IBM, Red Hat, Intel, etc) have a significant portion of their long term livilihoods dependent on Linux.
Specifically the issue is that if offensiveness is considered a perk of being amazing, then people who think of themselves as amazing are more likely to be offensive to demonstrate that they are amazing. Sounds silly, right? But that is what leads to prima donnas.
Well quoted. It's always fascinated (and worried) me how the human brain allows for the elevation of certain people to God-like status, and then excuses behavior they would normally find abhorrent.
The important thing to note about Erik's behavior is that occurred on Usenet, and unlike the mailing list or places like HN, on Usenet, there were (I have not looked closely at Usenet for about 12 years) no "owners" or moderators for a newsgroup and no way for the newsgroup considered as a "community" or a "collective" to enforce behavioral norms (e.g., around politeness) on individual posters.
Individuals regularly complained about Erik's nastiness, saying (correctly, IMHO) that he was scaring people away from Lisp.
Also, I never saw any of the intense admiration for Erik on comp.lang.lisp when Erik was alive that I have seen on Hacker News. The quality of his Lisp code and the insightfulness of his posts won him respect from many on comp.lang.lisp (specifically, those who accepted that there were almost no limits on speech on Usenet), but he would definitely not have been tolerated for long in most places on the internet where technical subjects are seriously discussed today (particularly HN, which has higher politeness bars than most such places) if he were posting with the same hostility that he did on comp.lang.lisp.
All good points, but I would debate about whether newsgroups would not be considered a "community". A few I'd been involved in in (lord, so many...) years past certainly had all the hallmarks of one. c.l.l was large enough to have perhaps diluted that, but the lack of an owner I don't think is necessary.
But yes, those were different days in different contexts.
You know what, here's a thought. HN is a place that emphasizes civility. Would Linus be allowed to act like that here, or would we say that he's earned the right to act like that here? Double standards suck because something has to break to accommodate them, and often the things that break are the things that everyone else likes when the world is a nicer and more innocent place.
The most striking thing is the number of downvoted gray comments. Probably 10% of them are like that, at the moment!
It kind of gets distracting when so many are like that. With that many being grayed out, I know a lot of them aren't obvious commercial spam or anything like that. So I end up trying to read them all, which of course is awkward because of how they've been grayed out.
Prediction before clicking: Half of the thread, or more, will not be about what he says, but about his tone and "professionalism."
Never change HN. Never change.