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Comment by michaelmcmillan | Hacker News Reader

I always find these essays interesting, not necessarily because I agree with them, but rather because Paul has a very special way of looking at things.

    [...] being mean makes you stupid.

Linus Torvalds is definitely not stupid, but I would not hesitate to call him mean [1]. But you can't deny that he's successful and certainly he's not stupid [2].

Business and open source seem to both center around the same things: creating something people want [3] and surrounding yourself with other smart people. I would imagine that the latter is hard if you're mean - but not impossible. Take Linus or Steve Jobs, none of whom are very nice.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8#t=883

[2] http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/...

[3] http://paulgraham.com/good.html

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Linus Torvalds is rude, not mean.

As I understand it the difference between rude and mean is a matter of intention. With mean being intentional. Linus behavior is frequently explained with him only behaving that way when people deserve it. Making him, or at least his behavior, mean rather than rude.

Which is a pile of complete BS. If all actions were fully justified simply because the person doing the deed felt a certain way, then we would need no laws nor rules of conduct because everyone would always show the correct behavior. He's more than old enough to know that the kind of language he uses is meant to be insulting. He's a jackass.

That burns down to how you define 'mean'. In my book, this is mean:

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fuck 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?"

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495

Wow. I don't know what to think about this.

That you should read more than one byte at a time :(

Saying a mean thing every once in a while doesn't make you a mean person. He was just frustrated, he gets frustrated often and does not practice enough self control when venting his frustration. That's not the same thing as consciously setting out to be mean to someone, at least, that's how I would define 'being a mean person'.

Maybe what he said was mean, maybe imprudent, rude, crude, etc., but also: Maybe he was mostly just trying to get his point across -- with what he said, it would be tough not to get his point!

And maybe clearly it was important for him to get that point across, to have people consider it; or, of course, reading one byte at a time via a system call is dumb: Since that practice had been going on for a long time, apparently he felt he needed to work hard actually to get the real and meaningful attention of people.

Another way to put it might have been, "What needs to be done, to go around with a 20 gallon barrel of ice water and one person at a time dump it on them to see if they are just asleep or really dead?". When seeing something clearly bad going on for a long time and still little or no outrage, or even effective attention, to improving the situation, can get frustrated and then be crude, rude, etc. if only just to get people shocked enough actually to pay attention.

Maybe I'm not the only one to "feel his pain", and maybe such a statement, under such a circumstance, does not make someone "mean".

Contrast the support for Linus "just getting his point across" in the other responses to you, with the downvotes another person got elsewhere for calling something "retarded." I find it interesting.

I'm sure Linus didn't meant that person to actually die. This is his style. Calling out undesirable behaviour with a dark humor. It not "mean".

I don't understand what distinction you are drawing here. The examples provided of Linus Torvalds' uncivil behavior seem like textbook meanness to me.

The distinction I'm drawing is that Linus Torvalds' insults are so obvious and over the top that they are a greater risk to his reputation than to the feelings of the insulted. Whereas with genuine meanness one says things that a. one can claim weren't meant to hurt and b. make the victim worry that there is some truth to them.

At first he was rude but now he's mean.

The difference being if you cause offence but don't know it will hurt someone you're just rude. If you know it will hurt them and you do it anyways you're mean.

At this point Linus knows how his behavior affects people so to do it intentionally is either ignorant/stupid or mean.

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