

Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds  - flabbergasted
http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=49m45s
You have to love Linus for not being afraid to speak his mind.
======
saurik
The original title of this submission was 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"', which
was renamed by someone (the moderators? can the submitter change the title?)
after a ton of people had upvoted and commented on it, and despite the link
being not to the entire video but instead to a specific point in the video for
which the title of the entire video is probably not even an appropriate
description.

So, when people are reading the comments of this submission in the future,
please keep this in mind as a historical note. (This, humorously, was actually
the kind of situation that caused the complaint[1] that itself turned into a
massive hullabaloo recently regarding what can be discussed on HN and what the
policies regarding hell-banning are; to view the reference you will need
showdead.)

[1]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013>

~~~
SkyMarshal
The current moderation system isn't scaling. This post is a good example to
illustrate the problem.

At first glance it appears to be a flamebait title, and hence a mod who sees
it may feel it's a no-brainer - correct it and move on.

However, there's a nuance to it - that is exactly how Linus Torvalds expresses
himself, and the original title ("Linus to Nvidia: Fuck You!", or something
close to that) captured his sentiment accurately, so maybe it's not flamebait
after all.

Or maybe it _is_ flamebait even despite that, since Linus's SOP is to
sometimes start flamewars to make a point, break through the red tape, or
otherwise just make a command decision and move on.

Clearly plenty of room for moderation error, a nd that's just one submission.
What's a mod to do?

So on the one hand, there has been a spate of godawfully-titled submissions in
recent months:

1\. "X things you should ... whatever" type titles (clearly banned in the HN
posting guidelines)

2\. Too short and uninformative (like a word or three).

3\. Sensationalism, flamebait, miscategorized comparison results, etc.

4\. more I'm sure...

But on the other hand, the mod system has problems as well:

1\. Nobody even knows _what_ the mod system is

2\. Nobody knows _who_ the mods are.

3\. There's no way to give feedback on moderations, for the ones that were
incorrectly modded.

4\. Too many false positives (posts that shouldn't be modded but are,
resulting comments like saurik's above, and entire threads complaining this
problem).

5\. Too many false negatives that slip through anyway.

And of course, not part of the mod system, but too many submitters just don't
know how to descriptively, accurately, concretely title submissions anyway,
increasing the volume a seemingly too-small group of mods has to deal with.

HN isn't the first social media site to have problems like this, but most
others have a full-time dev team working on solving them, and they evolve
certain solutions like Slashdot's meta-moderation or Reddit's user-run/modded
subreddits.

So I don't think the mod system in its current form can scale with those
problems, but on a more meta level I'm not sure that PG can scale as the
developer of the mod system, given that YC takes 110% of his time.

Just trying to identify the problem before attempting to solve it, any
thoughts?

~~~
mcav
It's been like this for a long time. It's by far the least transparent
moderation in a community I've ever seen. For a long time I thought of HN as a
generally smart, reasonable community (less so these days with the masses
here) but the completely opaque moderation has always seemed extraordinarily,
unnecessarily restrictive and elitist. It's unlikely to change at this point.
The minority who care don't matter enough.

Personally I'd love to see another smaller, more refocused community spin off
where better, more open and reasoned tech/startup discussions can take place.
Keep it invite-only perhaps.

~~~
vacri
It's certainly the only web community I've been a part of where the moderation
system is constantly being complained about over the long term.

~~~
DanBC
Wait, what? Really?

Moderation has been a feature of complaint across _every_ web forum (and many
non-web forums) I've ever been a part of.

See, for example, the comments here (and even there) about StackExchange;
4chan; suicidegirls (NSFW) "spring cleaning"; the HUGE amount of meta / drama
on Wikipedia (ANI alone is gigabytes of guff stretching over years about
moderating that community. The holy books of millennia old religions are
smaller than ANI. International trade argrements are smaller than ANI.)

But this meta bike-shedding has also been a feature of older systems. It's
frequently created flame wars on Usenet - leading to various trolling groups
sporging Usenet feeds. It's a feature of mailing lists.

I don't know what the average[1] age of HN is, but here's a result from a
Usenet search for results before 1990 - before a lot of HN would have been
born.

([https://groups.google.com/groups/search?safe=off&q=moder...](https://groups.google.com/groups/search?safe=off&q=moderation&btnG=Search&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=1&as_maxm=1&as_maxy=1990&as_drrb=b&sitesearch=))

(Also, Google, please give me a shorter URL option to cut n paste. Don't make
me have to learn what your URLs are doing; don't expect me to use a nasty URL
shortener (which are blocked on many boards)).

Here's a mildly interesting message discussing some of the problems of
moderating Usenet:

([https://groups.google.com/group/mod.comp-
soc/msg/ee189feb225...](https://groups.google.com/group/mod.comp-
soc/msg/ee189feb22561a51?dmode=source))

~~~
vacri
I'm not part of the 4chan nor suicidegirls communities, and the meta in
wikipedia is not forum-style moderation. The places I've been that have
moderation issues don't have people wondering why they've been hit. I'm not
saying that other forums don't have issues, but that there is a constant
sussurus about the problems of moderation here that I don't have in other
places. No insight and no accountability = bad moderation practices.

Case in point: my parent comment is currently downmodded. Thanks to that
downmodder for marking against my personal experience. But I have no way to
find out _why_ I've been affected, only that some random person somewhere in
the world doesn't like what I said for some unknown reason, and my words are
literally diminished in the eyes of others because I have (at least) one
single dissenter.

Since I started here, I've noticed that people on HN have been complaining
about the moderation more consistently than on any other web community I've
been involved with, with the exception of Wikipedia (as you point out, but
it's not the same flavour of moderation I mean)

~~~
saurik
I had down voted you (and thereby might be the person whom you are referring
to who did so) as you are making an anecdotal statement that is sufficiently
far-fetched as to be ludicrous. Now, in your follow-up, you seem to be lumping
me (the person who downmodded you) into the category of "moderators", which is
technically fine but then useless: I am another member of this site, just like
you; the mechanisms here are then no different than they are on almost any
other system that ha peer moderation. If you are using Slashdot, reddit, Digg,
DISQUS... virtually any modern forum solution, there is a downvote feature,
and it works virtually the same way. Yet, now your new comment (which I also
"downmodded") seems to be ignorant of this mechanisms on all of these sites,
disregards the list of sites procided by DanBC, and continues to not list any
other sites thaw here moderation was _not_ a common topic; you seriously just
look like you've never used any other websites at this point.

~~~
vacri
No different from other peer moderation? And you downmod me? Using your first
example, Slashdot, there is exactly the thing I am talking about: a reason for
the mod. You seem to be more ignorant of the topic than you accuse me of
being.

Similarly, you say I disregard a list of sites when I mention three of the
four in my response about my _personal experience_ being _part of_ web
communities (and seriously, 'as good as 4chan' is hardly an argument for
content quality, particularly on a site where the users pride themselves on
intellect and quality).

~~~
saurik
The reasons on Slashdot are both coarse (no detail: just a few adjectives; on
the negative side, we have flame air, troll, offtopic, redundant, and
overrated... I am not even certain which one I would have picked for "poster
is arguing an anecdote without even providing his single datapoint), transient
(when I spent years on Slashdot, and maybe currently still, you could only see
one of these adjectives, even if a bunch of people downvoted you), and
anonymous (your decisions could be meta-moderated, but the meta-moderation did
not disclose who you were).

Your issues with not knowing who downvoted you for what reasons seem nearly
identical to Slashdot, then (modulo I guess being marked "troll" when you were
really downvoted for something more readily corrected). You had previously mad
it clear that you cared deeply about the moderators being anonymous, and boy
if Slashdot didn't maintain that.

Regardless: you have still, to this point, not stated even a single other web
community you were a part of, only that they existed. The conversation becomes
interesting an useful when you can point at actual examples (as it has now for
Slashdot).

To look at this from another analogy, imagine it you claimed that you had
never seen a bank that charged fees. Someone else responds saying they had
never seen a bank that didn't charge fees _and then lists ten banks that
charge fees_. You then respond with simply "I don't agree those are banks"
_but don't provide a list of banks that don't charge fees_. I fail to see how
you can claim you are then being helpful in that conversation.

------
SkyMarshal
TLDR: Linus at a Q&A, a woman asks why Nvidia still isn't providing any
support for Optimus on Linux, Linus responds that Nvidia is being really
difficult about that without good reason and "Fuck You Nvidia!" (flicks off
the camera).

Her question actually starts a minute earlier than the link:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=48m14s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=48m14s)

PS - Bravo Linus. This is issue is a real PITA, and a bit incongruent
considering the historically awesome driver support Nvidia has provided for
Linux.

~~~
alecco
That doesn't reflect his opinion. First, Linus states Nvidia is an exception,
one of the worst trouble spots. And he is also very upset because Nvidia at
the same time tries to sell a lot of chips into the Android market, a Linux
based system. Very ungrateful of Nvidia. I agree, fuck Nvidia.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Ungrateful? Since when is that part of any sensible business plan? I don't
know why Linus would expect a corporation to devote significant resources to
an endeavor out of kindness. Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it
becomes in their financial interests to do so.

Edit: I expected downvotes and I'll gladly take them if someone can explain to
me how Nvidia is being unreasonable.

~~~
lsc
>Ungrateful? Since when is that part of any sensible business plan?

If you depend on free software to sell your hardware, it is probably in your
interest to see to it that the people that write the software that is required
to sell your hardware don't hate you.

~~~
nitrogen
As an example of this, kernel developers have in the past responded to NVidia
by marking kernel symbols used by the nvidia kernel module as GPL-only.

------
_delirium
I'm behind the times here, but it took me a second to realize this was really
Linus in the video. I still think of him as looking like the now-10-year-old
photo gracing his Wikipedia article
(<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus_Torvalds.jpeg>), but he looks a
_lot_ older here, possibly accentuated by the business attire.

~~~
evincarofautumn
I think Linus looks better these days. He’s lost weight, and the grey hair and
glasses make him look wiser.

~~~
jvehent
I guess he just proved he isn't any wiser, after all :)

------
benwr
"I like offending people, because I think the people who get offended _should_
be offended."

~~~
sho_hn
One for the ages. Added to Wikiquote:
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#2012>

------
kennywinker
if you skip ahead to 1:00:30 a guy in the audience who works at Nvidia
responds during Q&A, ever so politely. Linus responds, quite politely as well.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&feature=youtu.be&t=60m30s)

------
srean
Aside from the FU, its a nice and interesting talk with an engaging Q&A that
spans: decision making, being blunt by choice, micro-optimization, licensing,
commercial interests, limited success on the desktop....

------
nnq
...anybody else picked up the line where he basically says that WEB
PROGRAMMING ISN'T [REAL] PROGRAMMING? I wonder what a community like HN, with
so many people developing web apps thinks about this... :)

Quote (~min 11:30): "I have never in my love done any web programming because
I'm not interested, I think that kind of stuff... there's MIS people to do
that for you, right? I'm interested in programming"

[edited some spelling bugs]

~~~
pm90
I hope people like him continue to say things like that. He is a systems
engineer who loves what he does so of course he feels that what he does is
better than everything else. That said, he also mentions that he feels bad
when people take him too seriously on such things, so don't :)

------
kabdib
There is a bunch of hardware in the world that is inaccessible. I don't see
this changing.

Reasons include: Keeping competitors away from what you think are valuable
secrets and maintaining an advantage. Keeping people away from features that,
if misused, could result in chip damage. Keeping security holes secret (e.g.,
badly designed DMA hardware that could be exploited, if the flaws were known).
Limiting access to known buggy features, or unfinished features that either
don't work or that could leak damaging hints about strategic direction. You
have purchased or licensed 3rd party technology that you contractually cannot
divulge details of. For interoperability with other products you have embedded
knowledge of them in the product, under NDA.

More: It's expensive to document chips to the point that outside development
can be done. Perhaps the documentation doesn't exist, at all, and would have
to be reverse-engineered out of the chip design (yes, this happens). It's
expensive to write drivers for multiple platforms, or even to get software
into a state where it can be consumed by an outside party (just dumping a tree
onto GitHub is /not/ a release). You feel that "forking" would result in a
loss of control of your own product (and would dramatically increase the cost
of future releases, lest you break things). You regularly rev chips and cover
the changes transparently in the software layer, and this would /not/ be
transparent if you released product details (thus increasing the cost of
revisions).

More (the slimey side): You have misappropriated technology and divulging it
would be harmful to you. There are design errors or bugs verging on
malfeasance that could expose you to litigation. You have lied about the
product's capabilities and a release would reveal this (whereupon,
litigation).

Or, it's a pain in the ass, the market is significantly less than 1 percent of
your total, and you have a horizontal skyscraper of engineers already behind
schedule. "Good faith and being nice" doesn't pay the bills.

[I have also heard, from other parts of the industry, that the company in
question is hard to deal with].

~~~
joe_the_user
Sure,

Some companies have a financial incentive to effective tell the open source
movement to f-- off. Sure, when they take that, they may not be being evil on
a grand scale. But hey, if they are telling linux to f-- off, it seems
appropriate Linus return the favor. He's just making things clear.

Is there anything wrong that?

------
unkoman
A man who speaks his feelings about his passion, oh how will we ever handle
this.

------
flabbergasted
From "If you like subversion, you are ugly and stupid" and now this. I always
enjoy this man's talks.

~~~
simonbrown
It was CVS.

~~~
flabbergasted
His comment was more general:

"You can disagree with me as much as you want, but during this talk, by
definition, anybody who disagrees is stupid and ugly, so keep that in mind."

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8&feature=youtu.be&t=8m12s)

------
cpinto
Let the memes begin! Here's an image template of Linus giving the finger:
<https://skitch.com/cpinto/ebemj/linus>

~~~
sp332
Try posting it to <http://canv.as/> you might get a better response :)

------
StephenFalken
We desperately need open sourced chip cores. An open community would build
them with open source EDA tools and the final tapeout would be physically
produced by a foundry. I know open source EDA tools are still decades away
from proprietary ones, but we won't go anywhere if we don't start somewhere.

~~~
vidarh
We do have open sourced chip cores: <http://opencores.org/>

It's still in its infancy, and faces a lot of challenges that open source
software doesn't, but it's come a long way in a few years.

------
dredmorbius
A few observations:

1\. One of the highly distinctive characteristics of being a Free Software
project leader is having the freedom to speak your mind. What Linus does
(hacking the Linux kernel) and who pays him to do it (presently the Linux
Foundation) are pretty loosely linked. The primary objective of LF is to fund
Linux development, and Linus is pretty much the guy to get that done. If LF
didn't pay him for it, someone else would. He can state his opionions on
relevant technical matters with few if any fears of repercussions. I'm looking
forward to next week's press releases from Nvidia.

2\. Linus addresses what Nvidia are doing wrong at a few points, both directly
and indirectly.

Around 15 minutes in he talks about what Free Software provides in the way of
_developer_ freedoms: you can focus on what _you_ are interested in and what
_you_ are good at. In Linus's case, issues such as maintaining Linux-related
websites, init, QA, and Linux distributions is stuff he fundamentally doesn't
care about (while other bits such as, eventually, creating a useful revision
control system he does). Free Software lets you focus on your own core
competencies.

He also makes the point, around 35 minutes, that it's very important that
people need to know how he feels about things. Including how he feels about
support received from hardware vendors.

More specifically, for hardware manufacturers, playing nice and closely with
the kernel development community leads to both better product performance and
customer relations. The woman asking the Nvidia question clearly wasn't happy
with her Nvidia experience. I've learned in assessing hardware compatibility
to treat any Nvidia componentry as at best a red flag if not a show-stopper.
I'll actively go out of my way to avoid their products (Intel have gone out of
their way to ensure compatibility and open specs, my most recent purchases
centered on Intel chipsets, in particular for graphics). Playing well with
devs also means that issues are addressed in a timely manner, compromises can
be reached, and in general communications are open and positive. I don't know
the full backstory on the Nvidia front (though searching the LKML mailing list
should turn up some bits).

3\. ... and yes, the HN moderators fubared this one.

------
kristofferR
The title you gave it doesn't make much sense considering what this post/part
of the speech and following discussion really is about - Nvidia's lack of
support for Linux and Linus' reaction.

You should have titled it "Linus Torvalds Angry at Nvidia, Flips the Finger at
Speach" or something.

That would have been more descriptive, just a heads up for next time! ;)

~~~
flabbergasted
I used the title 'Linus to Nvidia: "Fuck You"'.

Apparently, a clueless moderator decided to change it.

------
rosser
"I wish everybody was as nice as I am."

------
wordplay
<http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=20m50s> "If you think like a computer, writing
C actually makes sense."

------
abruzzi
At one point in the video he says he's proud that Linux is the only OS (I'm
presuming he meant kernel) that is in mobile and desktop/server systems.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption that OSX and iOS were
both based on essentially the same Darwin/XNU kernel?

------
gdi2290
he also said Microsoft is full of shit

------
TimMontague
This was a really interesting talk. Does anyone know where to find other
lectures (or whatever this is technically called) by other influential
programmers/computer scientists?

------
stesch
What have I expected? He really says it and gives the finger.

------
FlyingSnake
I hope NVidia notices this and instead of going into a shell, helps make
Optimus chips a first class citizen in Linux land.

------
castilhor
here's a gif <http://cl.ly/313u2y471p1F0G3Q1a2i>

------
zerostar07
I liked that he likes the open science publication movement. I think he would
be a great advocate for it .

------
dbbolton
Does anyone know the full story behind the "suicidal" reference?

------
zokier
Was there anything else of interest in that talk?

------
cnp
ughhhh by the time you get to that fuck you part you're cheering along as
well... perfect timing

------
rsanchez1
Optimus has to be one of the worst products nVidia has pushed. There's the
Linux incompatibility, and there's the little problem where you are always
tied to the vastly inferior integrated graphics. Games that I should be able
to play at 60+ FPS with highest settings and resolution play at 20-30 FPS
because I can't use the graphics card to the fullest. Then I need to do
obscure hacks to get some games to even recognize the nVidia graphics card
because the game developer thought it would be a great idea to wait until you
downloaded and installed a 7GB game and launched it to tell you, "Oh, you're
one of those Optimusers, well fuck you." Just google "sonic generations
optimus" and you'll see what I mean.

------
ellie42
MS Vista has no drivers: "Vista sucks! Mi$roSoft sucks!"

GNU/Linux has no drivers: "Fuck NVIDIA!"

~~~
wowoc
GNU/Linux has drivers, but they are distributed as a binary blob compiled
against a specific version of kernel.

------
tubbo
wow linus is really the original DHH

~~~
cookiecaper
Linus is so ridiculously out of DHH's league that just the existence of this
comparison is asinine.

------
dazzawazza
It's a shame he doesn't go in to specifics, just saying "Fuck you" makes him
look like a child, which I am sure he isn't.

What is the problem?

~~~
flabbergasted
Unlike Intel and ATI, Nvidia doesn't play nice with open source developers.

~~~
paol
While this is true, nvidia's closed-source drivers do have the virtue of
_actually working_.

(ok, this is slightly unfair to intel's video drivers, they work fine as long
as you don't need 3D acceleration)

~~~
fmoralesc
I must have hallucinated playing 3d games on my intel-based systems. (Of
course, performance isn't great, but it doesn't work bad at all, at least in
my experience).

~~~
exDM69
Intel has really stepped up in the past few years. But it's not too long ago
when their h/w was pretty much unusable in Linux so their track record isn't
very good.

