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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

> For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings.

What is no longer acceptable is to personally insult a developer for breaking things, poorly designing an API/implementation, etc. By "personally insult" I mean call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics.

Judging from Linus' post, he agrees that stuff like that is unprofessional.

And there are plenty of examples of Linus' posts where he clearly called particular developer stupid, as opposed to calling their ideas stupid. I can provide examples if you've never read one of them.

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> call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics.

That's a positive change. But it also ought to be possible to say "this is a dumb idea" or to engage in friendly ribbing when someone does something dumb. These are good, healthy mechanisms in normal groups of people. Eliminate all teasing, and everyone is friendly on the outside and bitter and resentful on the inside. People should be teased for breaking things. There is such a thing as attempting to be too professional.

I completely agree.

Calling an idea dumb is candid, I'd consider it a breath of fresh air from corporate speak. I left my prior position for similar concerns, specifically 'Architects' who I'd called out (and rather abruptly so) when they quoted AWS as being 'not redundant and only have one DataCentre'.

We're not talking a conversation from 10 years ago either. This was June last year!

Comments or statements like that need to be shouted out of the room.

I feel there's a finesse to be drawn and understood here.

If some one states, AWS is single site and no one else in the room challenges the stupidity of the claim. Some one ought to. That guys/girl is a fucking idiot.

But some one who perhaps needs to be coaxed or massaged into a different angle because their code base will grow 90% in size? Depending on the context that might be for the best. Or it might not be.

Coming back to my earlier analogy. Hammers and scalpels are both honest. Different tools for different needs.

> But it also ought to be possible to say "this is a dumb idea" or to engage in friendly ribbing when someone does something dumb.

"Friendly ribbing" doesn't translate well on a public mailing list, especially one with an international audience.

> People should be teased for breaking things.

Again, that doesn't work very well on a public mailing list, especially one with an international audience. If people break things they should be told clearly and precisely what they did wrong.

> There is such a thing as attempting to be too professional.

Do you have an example of a current FLOSS project that is too professional?

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