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Comment by jpfed | Hacker News Reader

This is a common sentiment, but I disagree.

In technical discussions, rudeness and informativeness are orthogonal. There is some information that is not polite to convey (such as information about someone else's personal/physical characteristics) but that information isn't relevant to technical discussions. Sometimes there is a choice as to how rudely one wants to convey a particular fact, but that is indeed a choice that reflects more upon one's desire for politeness or rudeness than it does any actual constraint on the transmission of factual information.

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Rudeness is inferred or "felt" by the other party, and really worrying about peoples feelings or emotions is like worrying about which direction the wind is going to blow today because emotions have the ability to be extremely irrational. Perceiving something as "rude" ultimately comes down to the individual who is being told the information as interpreting it as rude. In this case, anything can be viewed as "rude" under the right microscope -- in fact Linus has brought up this very point multiple times in a sort of a "individual liberty" light. If you take feelings out of it and focus on the information -- Linus is either right or wrong. Something either sucks or it does not suck, for example. We can talk about how he might be wrong -- maybe it doesn't suck here's point x y and z refuting his a b c on why foo system suck.

You can certainly choose not to converse with Linus, just like I choose not to converse with overtly politically correct people who may take offense / report little thing, I personally don't have time to worry about if what I said "might" come off as a certain way and really I wouldn't want to be in that situation anyways -- It is exhausting to always have to editorialize what you are going to say in today's hyper-sensititve-filter-bubble-one-worldview monocultures.

Communication has always been a two-way street.

I definitely agree, but I don't think communication is complete on the internet. True communication only happens live (in my opinion of course). When you communicate using only text, a lot is left out, therefore what many people have done on the internet since the early days is discard any inference into mannerisms, or "rudeness" or read into sentences with malcontent and just focus on the content. I guess I learned to do this at an early age on the internet and maybe have "thicker skin" but I am just really surprised at how easily offended people can get at Linus (and just in general on online conversations), when the medium itself is such a shell of actual communication.

Eh, it's not that hard to be polite enough. If you focus on the facts without puffing them up with extraneous value judgments, there's no occasion for "really worrying".

Instead of saying "X sucks" or "Whoever thought of X deserves a time-traveller to retroactively induce their abortion", the discussion is better served anyway with something like "X has problem Y; Z is better because of these benchmarks/ tests/ metrics", because then supporters of X have a concrete argument to be convinced by (rather than simply cowed/shamed by) or argue against.

> Rudeness is inferred or "felt" by the other party

Not really. When you attack/insult someone, instead of attacking his ideas, it's pretty much universally accepted that you're being an asshole. It's not a matter of debate, interpretation, feelings or political correctness. In his first reply Linus is being an asshole and there is no justification about that. Those who defend him should note that even he realized that and apologized.

> If you take feelings out of it and focus on the information -- Linus is either right or wrong

That's absolutely not true, and in fact the main issue here is that Linus is very much driven by feelings and not focusing on information. I don't think anyone can seriously argue that adding this to a conversation adds any value:

“Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?“

“If you work in security, and think you have some morals, I think you might want to add the tag-line 'No, really, I'm not a whore. Pinky promise'“

And on and on

Without agreeing or disagreeing, I find it amusing that so many people are talking about it in this thread without any concrete examples. You could be having something Linus said in mind, and others will have other things he's said.

It looks like you're all talking past one other.

> Rudeness is inferred or "felt" by the other party

This just isn't completely true at all. People can most definitely be intentionally rude to others.

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