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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that nobody notices the selection bias? Linus sends hundreds, if not thousands, of e-mails every week. Does it really surprise anyone that we've been able to find fully four instances in the past six months in which he sounded somewhat angry? Is there anyone here who can claim a pristine post history?

This certainly applies to RMS as well.

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You have a very valid point. Recently, it seemed that Linus couldn't go 5 minutes without calling someone a moron. So, I went to his G+ feed and read a few entries. It seems he does NOT call someone a moron in every post! edit: He must get quite frustrated sometimes.

It seems to be that there are pretty much "roles" that we expect public persona to fill. RMS is supposed to be a freedom nut, Linus is supposed to be a rude ranting geek, Palin is supposed to be a complete nut that never gets anything right and so on.

Somehow it seems that in the flow of news and information we turn all the individuals into characters from a sitcom. Not allowing information through when they are acting "out of character" or even appearing to be quite human.

I just did the same and found the guy has a sense of humor I can relate to: https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts

I've seen posts here on HN lambasting Torvalds for being abusive, but on further examination, it was around comment #130 in a thread where he'd patiently and politely explained his point of view four times already in that thread, and was still hitting a brick wall with someone wilfully ignoring his points. Of course, this prelude wasn't indicated in the 'linus is an arsehole' tone of the story, it was linked directly and out of context.

And that's frequently how it is. There's a fascination that people seem to have with _proving_ that Linus (or RMS, or Jeff Atwood, or others) are jerks.

In almost every instance I've seen, it really is a case that someone has been pestering them, or out to pick a fight, and by the time the argument happens, all the back-story is forgotten (or, in the git-hub pull-request case, deleted by the original author).

The end result is that we have these tabloid-esque articles showing up on blogs telling us that we should be shocked and outraged at the actions of these people because they're "role models" and "shouldn't act like that". It's insane; it truly is.

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