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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

Christoph Hellwig seems fun to interact with. He drive-by posts the same, repeated points and seemingly refuses to engage with any replies.

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Please don't cross into personal attack in HN threads.

I'm not saying it's never accurate*, it's just that, if you evaluate them through the site guidelines, the cost/benefit is negative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* (not a comment on this or any person)

AFAICT his only response in that thread:

> Right now the rules is Linus can force you whatever he wants (it's his project obviously) and I think he needs to spell that out including the expectations for contributors very clearly.

> For myself I can and do deal with Rust itself fine, I'd love bringing the kernel into a more memory safe world, but dealing with an uncontrolled multi-language codebase is a pretty sure way to get me to spend my spare time on something else. I've heard a few other folks mumble something similar, but not everyone is quite as outspoken.

He gets villianized and I don't think all his interactions were great, but this seems pretty reasonable and more or less in line with what other people were asking for (clearer direction from Linus).

That said, I don't know, maybe Linus's position was already clear...

Maybe, but "spreads like cancer" is not part of a well-reasoned technical discussion, but of an emotional one.

In many languages, like Italian which I am a native speaker of, to "spread like a cancer" doesn't have the negative subtext of the English idiom. It just means it spreads, wildly, uncontrollable. In English it gets muddled with the very negative idiom of "being a cancer", i.e. being very bad if not fatal.

I think it's because in English-speaking places (I'll say "The US and some rounding errors" to be explicit) the fact is that for a long time, cancer was a death sentence. This led to anything that is hard to kill as being called cancerous and the avoidance of such things is important (yes, this is where you chuckle and mime smoking a cigarette. There's still a population of the US that believes "smoking causes cancer" is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to push more cancer treatments or some bullshit like that.)

Calling something "cancerous" is to say it was an incurable disease that unless stamped out with some amount of precision will continue to cause rot and decay. Be it correct or not, saying "The cancer that is killing HN" is pointing a finger at a problem and scapegoating all the other problems onto it.

Like how "going viral" is not really the negative connotation that one might expect?

You're confusing language that causes a strong emotional response within you, with language that was written by a person experiencing strong emotion.

It's colourful language for sure, but gimme a break.

Building part of an "emotional discussion" doesn't require the author to be experiencing particularly strong emotions as they write it.

Not that you have evidence of the author's state of mind?

I don't think the confusion you describe is happening.

That's a good distinction, and it pretty much captures the exchange. Both sides felt quite strongly; Helwig used strong words. But that doesn't mean either side was unreasonable, despite some of us commenters being discomforted.

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