HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Steve Klabnik has done a lot for systems programming and that post is a lot more even-handed than you're suggesting.

If, however, we're talking about the kernel then perhaps we should listen to what Torvalds says about this topic.

"People who designed C, designed it at a time where the language had to be geared towards the output, so when I read C I can think about the Assembly that it will create":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=20m45s

Consider that he said this in a time with C++, even if Rust was in its infancy: it is not as tied to the assembly it produces. Not by a long shot.

⬐ TrickardRixx

Sounds to me like if I want to know "how computers think" I should learn assembly.

⬐ dijit

I know you're trying to be a smart-arse; but by virtue of using C you will learn Assembly.

The issue with Assembly directly is that it's absurdly non-portable, too low level and too unstructured to do anything reasonable with it.

There's a reason that Linux is written in C and not ASM Directly.

⬐ UncleMeat

> by virtue of using C you will learn Assembly.

I don't believe this at all. You won't learn how to deal with limited numbers of registers. You won't learn about method prologues and epilogues. You won't learn about oodles of stuff.

⬐ dijit

> deal with limited numbers of registers

I mean; you will likely end up stepping through debuggers where you will see registers being used. At least if you learned C like I learned C.

Similarly for Prologue and Epilogue.

"why does a function call have a cost" is a common question and it's solved forever after an hour googling.

⬐ Jensson

> You won't learn how to deal with limited numbers of registers. You won't learn about method prologues and epilogues.

Those things takes like an hour to learn, translating C to assembly is trivial, it takes time and will be verbose but it isn't hard at all. So even though you don't learn all the details you still learn all the higher level stuff related to assembly programming when you program in C.

This isn't true for other languages, translating arbitrary C++ or Java or Javascript to assembly is really hard, so they don't teach you to think like an assembly programmer.

⬐ jcranmer

> by virtue of using C you will learn Assembly.

Even interpreting this as charitably as possible--that you don't mean literally learning assembly but rather learning everything besides specific assembly syntax that you would have picked up from learning assembly--this claim doesn't hold water.

For starters, C isn't that much closer to hardware than, say, Java. The main differences you have with C are that a) C has a pointers-are-almost-integers model [1] and b) C has a more limited runtime than other languages. C is still a fundamentally based on an abstract machine semantics model, and that abstract machine doesn't have a close bearing on modern hardware.

In particular, C does not distinguish between registers and memory, and if I had to pick the single most salient feature of modern hardware you need to understand well to be able to say you understand how computers work, it's the register/memory distinction. If you think processors are mostly like they were in the 1970s--when you could say "add 1 to this memory location"--then C's shrugging off the register/memory distinction makes sense, but this is a situation that hasn't been true for several decades.

Another failure of C is that it's far less expressive than assembly. There are features in other languages that are impossible to express in C. How do you write a function with multiple entry points, as you can in Fortran? Or a coroutine, as you can in Algol? Or nested functions, as in Pascal? Or try-catch, as in C++? Or functions with multiple return values, as in Matlab? Indeed, how do you write something like JMP *reg in C, a useful primitive for state machines?

No, C does not come close to being a good description of modern processors, where "modern" means "anything that came out since I was born."

[1] Not going to open up the can of worms that is pointer provenance.

⬐ cesarb

> C does not distinguish between registers and memory

Just nitpicking, but doesn't C have the register keyword? (I know it does nothing at all nowadays, but AFAIK it did make a slight difference back in the dark ages.)

⬐ jcranmer

Considering that `volatile register _Atomic int x;` is a totally legal statement, and two [1] of those keywords have semantics that are only relevant for memory operations, I'd say that the "register" keyword isn't sufficient to distinguish register from memory.

[1] Okay, the official semantics of "volatile" strictly speaking are completely orthogonal to memory, but the practical effect that everyone agrees on (don't optimize this memory access) is inherently oriented towards memory, and the fact that the semantics are so vague about what it actually does is partially a reflection of the fact the semantics themselves don't distinguish between register and memory.

⬐ tialaramex

C's register keyword is a storage specifier, it actually does do something, what it does is announce "This might not have an address" (your CPU registers don't have addresses) and so you can't make a pointer to it with the unary & address operator.

Your C compiler might conclude - even if it doesn't decide to put the variable in a register - that since the variable notionally doesn't have an address some optimisations are available which it can't otherwise be sure are safe.

Linus seems to disagree with you.

Albeit old http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=20m45s

It remains true.

Rust uses references all over the place and reuses the same memory addresses within stack that once belonged to another object because the compiler can guarantee it, but that makes it much less reasonable to write.

If you can reason with -O0 you can take it that your code will remain correct in later levels.

⬐ pjmlp

I don't care what Linus thinks, I also happen to disagree with him in regards to C++ and NVidia.

> If you can reason with -O0 you can take it that your code will remain correct in later levels.

Unless you happen to be a Jedi master in UB performance optimizations, auto-vectorization, OMP, out of line code execution, I very much doubt that.

Linus Torlvads on why C and not something else (2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=20m45s

Nothing drastically changed since Torvalds had sended his gratitude[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2997 (time coded)

⬐ LargoLasskhyfv

I concur.

⬐ chupasaurus

Wayland support fiasco, changes in driver's EULA to deny the usage of consumer-grade GPUs in VMs are 2 things off the top of my head.

⬐ magic_quotes

> changes in driver's EULA to deny the usage of consumer-grade GPUs in VMs

Which changes? Where? I'm looking at said EULA right now and I don't see anything related.

⬐ chupasaurus

My bad, it was a silently added "feature" in Windows driver[0].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

⬐ floatboth

There was actually some period of time when the Tegra division (I think) contributed to Nouveau a bit (!) but that didn't really grow into anything good.

Here it is https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2142

⬐ pas

Thanks!

Very interesting to see that in the light of recent CoC adoption and Linus hiatus and so on.

Being firm, stating the goals, requirements, laying out a roadmap and so are very important and can be done without being abusive/abrasive. And similarly, asking for a plan and other project/engineering management basics should be the method of steering developers instead of shouting at them when they don't go on the correct way.

I agree.. people can be dishonest and hurtful while being perfectly polite, just like they can be honest, kind and caring while swearing like sailors. That is the difference that matters. When you ignore that and just look at the form, you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Here's Linux talking about being straightforward, and why he cannot afford ambiguity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=35m51s

Linus has spoken about why he speaks/writes this way before - https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2190

⬐ digi_owl

"On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

I remember Linus mentioning [0] about the major benefits of tuning Linux for super computers that came to be really useful for when trying to get performance out of a mobile phones decades later.

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=39m

That's an unfair judgement toward the C development community as a whole.

There are legitimate use cases for C. If you're writing low-level, bare-metal programs then there is no other portable programming language that offers better semantics. C programmers often laud that language because they can easily reason what the output of the compiler will be. That is an extremely important and rare property for a portable programming language.

But hey, don't listen to me, listen to an actual experienced C programmer: https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=20m45s

⬐ naasking

> C programmers often laud that language because they can easily reason what the output of the compiler will be.

They certainly do, and in doing so, conveniently forget all the instances of their compilers surprisingly deleting invalid code as optimization because it inadvertently depended upon undefined behaviour.

⬐ mamcx

> There are legitimate use cases for C* * Or C-like langs...

Of course something must be use to fill the niche C have. But is clear that exist a huge resistance to fill it with something better, to the point that anything is almost dismissed and the only "valid" answer is continue with C (or C++, or Unix, or Old-School Terminals).

Probably you have see

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

Is not hard to imagine that better/improved tools must have arise in all this decades. In contrast, we (as community) are stuck in more or less the same things and maybe even devolving in some areas.

⬐ sametmax

Would rust fit the bill though ? It's not as mature, and don't support as many platforms yet, but it is considered now as a serious safer alternative, with as much bare metal capabilities.

⬐ geocar

No.

Because it's not as mature, and doesn't support as many platforms. Those things are very important to me, and there is no steel thread for them.

I imagine that in twenty years, it could be worth talking about rust as an alternative, but rust is only two years "stable", and it's unclear what the language, the tooling and the libraries are going to look like in that time.

Meanwhile, I have software I wrote 20 years ago in C that still runs, correctly, and on the Internet, generating income, and a big part of the reason why is that C was already more than twenty years old at that point.

⬐ mamcx

> I imagine that in twenty years...

But WHY in 20? With this thinking NEVER WILL BE IMPROVED THE SITUATION!

And I don't mean you, I mean the whole industry.

Obviously stability and compatibility is important, but is not this almost like the COBOL problem? Nobody try to move out from COBOL because "maybe in the far future a solution will emerge" and the the future get here, and we are decades LATE?

And RUST is not the only viable alternative. Ada, Pascal, Oberon, Modula (to name the family of languages I know more, but is likely some lisp and others exist too) where already there (decades ago) without break too much from the C mindset (and go crazy with monads and stuff like that).

So, because look like without {} a system language have not chance in hell, take oberon and put the C syntax? And them we are not waiting 20 years in the future for it.

But this will fail, for the same reasons that renuevable energy will fail against carbon:

The community will not accept the costs in the short-term, not matter how much things could improve later...

P.D: And what if a "rust-alike" lang but trans-piling to C, like with Nim?

Or even better:

C2 (C with improvements and eliminating as much baggage as possible) trans-piling to C. Eventually this will allow to bootstrap and still keep a way to old code bases...

⬐ adrianN

The key-word is "portable". C is running on momentum in the embedded world because for many chips you only have a crappy "kinda C, but not standard C" compiler the vendor provides. Ada for example is a nicer language than C, suitable for embedded work, but not as popular and hence less supported. So is Pascal, and some more modern languages that get mentioned often enough on HN that some readers find it disagreeable.

Also see Linus' comments if it wasn't obvious enough that this is really important [0]

  [0]: https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=24m8s

⬐ jrgifford

Super important, but when I posted this nobody had stated the obvious, so I did. :-)

That's a caricature of his actual position, please be more honest than that.

edit:

Here's another video that does a better job of conveying his reasons for being the way he is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=35m41s

He's also been on record as saying multiple times that a lot of it is because he comes from a culture that's much more abrasive than US.

⬐ nickbauman

It's not a caricature if it's his own words. His culture? What a lame excuse. Daesh has a much more abrasive culture than the US. Does that make Daesh culture OK? Where do we draw the line?

⬐ ciupicri

Politeness is also culture dependent. What is polite in a culture might be impolite in another one.

⬐ pygy_

Godwin's law strikes again. You lose :-)

⬐ simoncion

> His culture? What a lame excuse.

You can reductio ad absurd. most positions to make them seem silly, but the cultural variation argument is a very valid one.

Most Germans I've talked to about the topic are somewhere between bemused and horrified about many aspects of US culture. Here's a sampling:

* We have -comparatively- a very high burden of proof for slander/libel.

* We do not require internet publications to have a byline positively identifying the author.

* We do not make it a crime to fail to register with The State every time we change home addresses.

* We permit -comparatively- incompetent people to operate motor vehicles.

I gather that USians are not infrequently similarly affected by German attitudes towards free speech restrictions, public sexuality, credentialism, anti-gun-ownership hysteria and the like.

There are a wide variety of cultures -bringing an even wider notion of what "proper" behavior looks like- even amongst people who live in the same country. Surely you're sufficiently worldly to understand that. :)

While the post is fantastic in showing the pros/cons of the other languages, it doesn't talk about the advantages of C, advantages to some people at least. Here's Linus on replacing C: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=20m45s

⬐ None

None

This is the part of that talk, I believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=2111

I actually find his reasons quite convincing, I think he's got a point.

⬐ buovjaga

He said the developer's friends told him "he is suicidal", not that he killed himself.

⬐ dan00

Oh, thanks, I just heard it again and yes, Linus says "suicidal", at the time I might just heard "suicided".

"obviously" is an understatement :)

Linus counted android as a victory in this video where he swears at nvidia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA

Here's the relevant part of the video that the picture is from:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2980

I'd like to piggy-back on your mention of Linus. It reminds me of a recent video I saw wherein he talked about how the work on the kernel works within a natural hierarchy.

The whole video, IMHO is worth a watch, but the relevant snippet is here, you can watch from about 15:57 to about 18:20 to get the idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=15m57s

I especially liked his comment at the end of this section:

"The way people work ... is inherent in our brains ... the whole development process ... works really well ... we used the hierarchy that just worked on its own, and that turns out to be the right hierarchy."

⬐ lifeisstillgood

Thank you - had not seen that.

no swearing either :-)

in a q&a round at aalto university in finland linus adressed the question why linux never took off on the desktop: the lack of being a pre-installed os. he mentions that without preinstalled operating systems there's now way to gain a significant market share in the desktop segment.

the whole talk by itself is very recommendable: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=23m45s

⬐ ColinWright

How many times will this be submitted?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123480

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4124097

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4124645

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4125890

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126185

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126272

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132025

... and it's likely I've missed some.

⬐ code_scrapping

My mistake.

You have to love Linus for not being afraid to speak his mind.

⬐ 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

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.

⬐ dwc

> incongruent considering the historically awesome driver support Nvidia has provided for Linux

It's not really incongruent. Nvidia has provided driver support for Linux, but that does no good for, say, FreeBSD. This driver support is in lieu of providing specs. They're keeping a lid on things and maintaining control. There are very good hackers who would make open source drivers if they had specs. Arguably less buggy drivers. Since they make sure they have control it's not surprising that they either 1) think this isn't worth their trouble, or 2) have actively decided they don't want this to happen, for whatever business reason.

⬐ cookiecaper

I haven't checked recently but nVidia also used to provide decent support for FreeBSD and Solaris.

⬐ fceccon

Yes they provide drivers for FreeBSD and Solaris, unfortunately what they don't provide is CUDA for this 2 platforms.

⬐ dwc

Perhaps. Now what about OpenBSD and NetBSD, or whatever else? If they provide specs then they don't have to write drivers, but they don't get to bless or withhold their blessing.

There was a stink a while back where Adaptec had been providing drivers for FreeBSD, but then stopped. People were stuck either not upgrading their boxes (bad!) or moving off their RAID setup (painful, expensive!). It's ugly. With specs, there is not this issue.

The (pervasive) idea that vendors providing drivers for your system of choice, for the time being is being open source friendly is something the vendor promotes, but it's not actually friendly.

⬐ cookiecaper

I've always harbored the hope that nVidia is working behind the scenes on a release that supports KMS/Wayland, and that the release of Optimus support will be released simultaneously. It makes sense when you consider that Optimus support is probably a pretty big change and putting that investment in the legacy X11 non-KMS driver would be a waste when KMS will be a requirement for all new distros in 2 years' time.

It's worth noting that just last night they released a stable driver that (finally) supports RandR 1.2. From what I understand this was also a significant change and it may bode well for future standardization improvements like KMS (moves multi-monitor management away from the proprietary TwinView driver components into standard xrandr, for instance, so that is complexity the KMS version will not have to handle).

Fingers crossed that they release this imaginary driver soon. :)

⬐ rmk2

> It's worth noting that just last night they released a stable driver that (finally) supports RandR 1.2

The XRandR support in the driver is not yet stable [1]. The 302.xx line is currently in beta, but will support both XRandR 1.2 & 1.3 at the same time. That part also works flawlessly, however, your mileage may vary in regards to suspend/hibernate, since both I and multiple others on the nvidia forums experience serious problems with resume from either, i.e. the computer hard locks (and doesn't even respond to ssh etc.), which requires you to powercycle it. So while the XRandR is a huge step forward, it is not without problems yet.

[1]: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/latest.txt shows you the latest stable driver, which is 295.59

⬐ cookiecaper

Please see http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2564605&p... ; as of June 16, 302.17 is classified as a "new official release" in the "Current NVIDIA Linux graphics driver releases" thread. 295.xx is now classified the "long-lived branch release".

ArchLinux has already sent out packages for this release in its stable update channel: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/commit/...

⬐ rmk2

Ah, you are of course right, I apologise. The update just hadn't been pushed to the ftp yet.

(As an aside, it still hardlocks my computer...but according to their forums, they "are working on a fix" for the soon-to-come 304.*)

⬐ superxor

I have a Notebook with Optimus, and watching this made me so happy. Nvidia is being an ass by not supporting Optimus.

⬐ AlexDanger

Later in the talk someone says they are working for nVidia and doing something with Tegra. I couldnt quite make it out, what is he saying?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&feature=playe...

⬐ grannyg00se

He said they are now upstreaming tegra (super? / supra?)

I guess he's talking about pushing out some new driver support.

⬐ zokier

>upstreaming tegra (super? / supra?)

support

⬐ bingbing

Your link didn't quite work for me, starting in the 49th minute somewhere,

Using a fragment identifier to demarc the time offset works better for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=48m14s

⬐ rsanchez1

Even nVidia can't properly handle Optimus on Windows, so it's no surprise they aren't even trying on 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.

⬐ twelvechairs

> Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so.

Not to disagree with your point (which is right), but It becomes in NVidia's financial interests when they have negative press coverage because someone like Linus says bad things about them.

I hope you understand what I am saying. Linus isn't just talking in an abstract-intellectual environment, his voice is strongly publicised and is here he is using it as an activist, to force NVidia into action. Its all part of the game...

⬐ batista

This is correct in abstract, but not in real terms. I don't think Linus sayings have any significant effect on NVidia's bottom line (if they have any effect at all).

It's not like more than 0.01% potential buyers will read this Linus quote and choose a competing product. Especially if NVidia's product is the best for their use case in the first place.

⬐ exDM69

Linux is quite popular with scientific computing people doing GPGPU math.

⬐ batista

All 10 of them?

Less fun edition: I'm sure it is. As it is with Linux based 3D render farms. Do both of those represent a large portion of Nvidia's income or an insignificant one?

I presume it's the latter: there are billions of desktops/laptops but only several thousands of scientific computing / 3D rendering installations. The fact that Nvidia doesn't seem to go out of its way to help people using Linux seems to corroborate that.

⬐ lailoken

Clearly you have not worked in enough fields to see where this may be used. I've worked at high frequency traders where we used some of this technology. And how about a large portion of android phones?

⬐ batista

>Clearly you have not worked in enough fields to see where this may be used. I've worked at high frequency traders where we used some of this technology.

And clearly if I had to have worked to some niche fields to know about that use, it's not that widespread.

I seriously doubt Nvidia's bottom line is affected by such professional uses of GPUs.

>And how about a large portion of android phones?

What about them? You think companies like Samsung or Motorola are gonna switch just because Linus said something negative? Or that Android customers are gonna demand a different GPU?

Not to mention that Nvidia is, if not "the only game in town", one of the "counted on the fingers of one hand with some digits cut-off in a tragic saw accident" games in town.

⬐ danmaz74

A bad hit to your image among opinion leaders in your field might not hurt your sales right away, but it can hurt them in the long run if this creates a negative image for your brand.

⬐ alecco

Linus rightfully singled them out. Are you saying the others are stupid?! Nvidia has the behaviour of a sociopath.

⬐ forrestthewoods

The video in question (including the woman's question) require a lot of outside knowledge to understand. Maybe I'm missing critical information? Right now Nvidia Optimus technology work only on Windows 7. It doesn't even work for Windows Vista or Windows XP.

Why should Nvidia devote resources, potentially a significant amount, to make Optimus work on Linux? I do not buy the argument that they should do so out of gratefulness that the Linux based Android OS let's them sell a large number of unrelated chips.

I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but citing a lack of "gratefulness" is not compelling.

⬐ grannyg00se

Furthermore, the woman who posed the question indicated that she knew the Optimus drivers were going to be troublesome for linux. Why would you try to combine two technologies that you know are troublesome to get working together and then complain about it?

⬐ marshray

Historically, the Nvidia proprietary drivers have sucked less than ATI/AMD's. I had had a not-so-horrible experience with them on my previous laptop. To be fair, I've also had a not-awful experience with AMD's OpenGL drivers, too.

Now try to find a laptop with a discrete Nvidia GPU that doesn't have this Optimus junk and you'll see the problem.

⬐ flabbergasted

I think the real issue is that Nvidia is the most closed when it comes to releasing specs. With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

⬐ psykotic

> With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

That may be true for specific features like Optimus--I can't say. But if you're talking about writing a full 3D driver stack for a modern GPU, you're almost certainly underestimating the effort involved by several orders of magnitude. NVIDIA has hundreds of full-time software engineers working on the various parts of the GPU driver stack. Now imagine doing it without the immense institutional knowledge.

⬐ thristian

Nobody disputes that nVidia's drivers (and hardware) excel at pushing textured triangles, but that particular measurement is fairly high up Maslow's Hierarchy of Video Driver Needs. As I understand it, people generally want nVidia drivers to be open source so they can add solid support for things like XRandR (instead of stupid TwinView), reliable suspend/resume, kernel mode-setting, that kind of stuff.

⬐ g-garron

You are right, business are business. But you do not need to be a badass. And the world changes (the ones that needs you now, will be the ones you need tomorrow), I have learned that the most grateful you are in business, the better business you do. Edited for clarity.

⬐ chalst

Quite. Given that the PC market, which I believe is the source of their highest margin sales, seems to be shrinking, perhaps high-handedness with potential allies is not the wisest course of action.

⬐ ElCabron

Do you think NVidia is not using Linux as part of their business ? If they use it or used it in the past, they could be more supportive. I wonder what will happen when Linux will be a gaming platform ?(Steam and others are going in that direction).

⬐ tikhonj

Linus actually talks about this later on. He lists off some reasons for a company to be difficult and then basically says that there is nothing he can do but be sad about it. He then wishes that everybody could be as nice as him. In short, tautologically, it would be nice for Nvidia to be nice.

Nvidia is being unreasonable in the same general way as Apple is unreasonable with its walled garden and other companies are unreasonable with pollution and poor working conditions. Just because you can get away with something and it makes economic sense does not justify it and does not make it reasonable!

I really don't think we should accept every company's actions just because they make business sense. We, as consumers (and as developers) should promote altruism and good behavior. Being a corporation is no more a license to be a jerk than being a normal person--it's legal in both cases, and we should not condone it in either.

Good communities have their own standards above and beyond the law. In the academic community, plagiarism is not tolerated even if it does not infringe on copyright. The open source community should similarly not tolerate companies and individuals who use the open source software and then refuse to cooperate. And this is all that's needed: cooperation. I don't think anybody even expects Nvidia to write open source drivers; all they want is enough information to not waste time reverse engineering each chip.

In short, Nvidia is unreasonable because it is acting like a jerk. Being legal and making business sense should not justify being a jerk, and we should disparage and avoid companies that act like jerks. So yeah, fuck Nvidia.

⬐ _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.

⬐ tomjakubowski

Same thing happened to Larry Page. When I saw the Charlie Rose interview I hardly recognized him.

⬐ zerostar07

really? i think he ages very gracefully, even looks younger than 43

⬐ 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."

⬐ faragon

Link to the source (Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=61m28s

I've found it while watching the video after the "fuck you nVidia" discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4121698

Edit: Actual quote: "I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended" (without the "the" before "people").

⬐ 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...

⬐ 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]

⬐ sdfjhjhjhjhd

web programming is boring CRUD work in almost all cases.

⬐ 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.

⬐ exDM69

Well, it was targeted at both, CVS and Subversion and centralized version control in general. He commented on the "SVN is CVS done right" that you can't do it right since it's the wrong thing to do in the first place.

⬐ 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...

⬐ cpinto

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

⬐ m_for_monkey

Here it is: http://memegenerator.net/Angry-Linus.

⬐ burke

As much as this isn't reddit, I can get behind this.

⬐ 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 .

⬐ None

None

⬐ 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.

⬐ jc-denton

F you to the only GPU actually working on Linux. Probably Intel or AMD are a bit more open about the specs, but the only one actually working. I have used them both for graphics and computational stuff with CUDA. Saying Nvidia is bad because they do not publish their specs is ridiculous IMHO. If you start thinking about how some things in a modern CPU are implemented (caching mechanism for example) you will notice that about zero information is published :) They sure have an x64 front end but when it comes to how the CPU works internally things are completely different.

⬐ duvuhq

There is a new video only with the answer!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g

⬐ 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.

⬐ None

None

⬐ 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?

⬐ Intermediate

I guess the problem is that Nvidia pretending to be Linux supporting company (they even joined Linux Foundation) while completely disregards linux users in many ways, e.g Nvidia still doesn't support Optimus in drivers for Linux. What stopped them? Today almost every second laptop goes with GPU built with nvidia optimus technology and it's can be a very painful experience to use linux on such devices.

⬐ btian

Presumably he said that because nVidia makes it difficult for developers to develop open source drivers for nVidia devices

⬐ flabbergasted

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

⬐ tshadwell

It's still much harder to find ATI drivers for Linux than Nvidia drivers.

⬐ Intermediate

There is basically no nvidia drivers available for many modern mobile GPUs on Linux, so I doubt that Nvidia is more linux friendly than ATI/AMD nowadays.

⬐ CrazedGeek

Which GPUs? The only one I can find that they're not supporting yet is the GeForce GTX 680M.

⬐ Intermediate

Any that comes with Optimus. Nvidia's blob just don't see them.

⬐ cdr

AMD is ruthless about dropping support for older architectures, which hits laptop GPUs especially hard. They're about to drop support for R600 and there's still lower-end devices being sold with those. Fortunately as noted above the AMD open source driver is pretty good, more than good enough for a laptop I would think.

⬐ JDShu

Wait, what? There are radeon drivers within the open source ecosystem, and AMD also supplies an alternate proprietary driver, bad quality as it is, for those people who find 3D support essential.

You can make the argument that nVidia Linux drivers are much better, but I don't see where you're getting the idea that it's hard to find AMD drivers.

⬐ cdr

The open source AMD driver has improved a lot over the past couple of years, it's really pretty good. "Pretty good" is unfortunately not good enough for really 3D intensive tasks like newer games, etc. Good enough for the vast majority of desktop tasks though including hardware-accelerated video rendering etc.

The closed AMD driver is pathetically bad. Neither multi-monitor mode works for me in Gnome3, due to from what I gather is AMD not keeping up well with architecture changes. AMD is also dropping support for their oldest architecture in their next driver release, leaving a ton of cards - some still being sold today - with nothing but the open source driver anyway.

My next video card is going to be an Nvidia for sure. Whatever Nvidia's faults, their proprietary linux support cannot possibly be as poor as AMD's.

⬐ dman

What distro are you using? Did you use aticonfig --dual-head to setup your xorg.conf file ?

⬐ cdr

Mint13 with Cinnamon; not precisely Gnome3 but close enough.

And yes, I did. I actually spent half a dozen hours fiddling with xorg.conf etc trying to get multiple monitors to work with fglrx [AMD proprietary driver]. I should have known better. Especially since my not-that-old card is being dropped in the next fglrx anyway.

⬐ dman

You didnt answer my question on whether you used aticonfig? Also which card are you using?

⬐ 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.

⬐ thristian

So far as I can tell, I get similar frame-rates under X11 with Wine as Windows users do on the same hardware. Intel's video drivers are wonderful, including for 3D acceleration, it's just their hardware that's lacking.

⬐ tikhonj

I don't think that this would have been the right venue to go into an in-depth rant about Nvidia's lack of cooperation. That's certainly not what the audience was looking for and probably not what Linus wanted to go into; moreover, I doubt anybody from Nvidia was there or would even have heard the talk.

The last point is somewhat ironic: if Linus had been reasonable and talked about Nvidia at length, Nvidia would probably not have noticed the talk; since Linus decided to be curt, the talk got onto HN and people from Nvidia have no doubt noticed it.

Besides, whatever you think about it, Linus's approach was indubitably effective. We are, after all, talking about the issue right now!

⬐ jofer

Actually, there at least one Nvidia employee in the room. Have a look at the last question (asked by an Nvidia employee).

⬐ sho_hn

Time index for the lazy?

⬐ karlshea

The time link thing doesn't seem to be working for me, but it's at 1h29s

⬐ flabbergasted

http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=1h28s

⬐ jofer

Linking to a specific time over 1 hour isn't working correctly for some reason, for whatever it's worth. (Or at least it hasn't been for me, anyway...)

Nevermind, we were both just doing it wrong. This should work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=1h28s

⬐ exDM69

There were several Nvidia employees in the room, I wasn't one of them because I missed the sign-up for the event. But my co-workers were there and they got the message, and I hope the message propagates upwards to the people who make the big decisions on this.

But Linus' message was a bit disheartening. Most of our crew would really like to open source everything we write. But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware. And the fact that Nvidia is a hardware company with a strong Windows background, so open source software is quite a strange thing in comparison. It kinda feels like being between a rock and a hard place.

When it comes to mobile software, Nvidia has been doing more open source work and upstreaming quite a lot of our changes. A lot of work has been done in the kernel internals and arm stuff. Not a lot of customer facing stuff but very valuable work if you're trying to build ARM-based system on chips.

⬐ pm90

you should really post this as a reply to the link. Not many will see this after its been nested all this way down (at the moment)

⬐ chromatic

But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware.

To whom? Certainly not your competitors.

Also what's wrong with releasing specs under NDA?

⬐ excuse-me

How exactly do you NDA an opensource driver?

⬐ Orva

No sane open source driver developer would agree to NDA in order to write driver. You wouldn't be able to contribute any other driver project (in that specialty area, which might be vast) until your NDA ends.

And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.

⬐ chromatic

No sane open source driver developer would agree to NDA in order to write driver.

Many Linux kernel developers have offered to sign NDAs with Nvidia and many other companies.

And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.

How? It's easy to obfuscate certain details of driver code. Think of magic constants, for example.

⬐ 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

⬐ JoeCortopassi

The new title completely changed what I was expecting when I clicked this link, which was much appreciated when I opened it at my in-laws with the volume on :-/. I honestly thought this was a follow up to the "Linus to Nvidia: 'F*ck You'" post for some commentary, and now feel like I just got Rick-Rolled...

Edit: Seriously though, is the new rule that we aren't allowed to submit anything other than the page's title?

⬐ flabbergasted

I guess the moderators were offended by a four letter word.

"People who get offended should be offended!" - Linus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=3672s

⬐ kitsune_

That was a great line by him.

"I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended."

⬐ None

None

⬐ aurelianito

I really agree with Linus on this one. I usually say that when one person offends other person, the one who is wrong is the offended person.

⬐ detst

This is really unfortunate and takes away from HN. I'm fully in favor of defaulting to maintaining the original title but often it's so vague to be completely meaningless. Most people don't have time to click on every link so we simply pass on content that we would have read with a descriptive title. Generally I just pass the first time and check it out if it's still on the front page later; thinking it might be worthwhile if it's popular enough to still be there.

Of course, in this case, it is a descriptive title for the talk but completely takes away the specific thing the submission is about. This is slightly less bad but still bad.

⬐ Devilboy

Can we get a mod to clarify the title rules please? This is getting annoying.

⬐ 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?

⬐ DanBC

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

> 1. Nobody even knows what the mod system is

That is not a problem. This is excellent feature of a moderation system. Meta is death - really. I'm never going to make another meta post after this one. (Unless it's t help a new user.)

> 2. Nobody knows who the mods are.

Again, that's not a problem. It avoids turning moderating into character battles. A mod who makes a mistake anonymously has no investment of face-saving; they can easily undo the error.

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

There is an email address clearly listed in the guidelines.

I really don't think the problems are as big as people are making out. Sure, some things are frustrating. Taking this video and post as an example: Don't link to the small part of the video where Linus tells nvidia to go fuck themselves, link to the entire video (and to the start of that video) and then give it a better title. Trying to attach blame to mods because someone made a weird sub-optimal choice when submitting a link is un-good.

⬐ sciurus

"Meta is death - really."

Metafilter solves this with http://metatalk.metafilter.com. Perhaps HN needs a dedicated place for meta discussion as well.

⬐ Maxious

"We'll handle technology over `here, we'll do social issues there. We'll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we'll have one track here and one track there. This doesn't work. It's never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called 'LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.' I can do no better than to point you to those documents."

www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

⬐ sciurus

Swap "doesn't work" for "usually doesn't work" and I'll agree. The level of moderation is key.

⬐ kristiandupont

It's an hour-long video. The fuck you-bit is a story in itself, and a different one than the entire talk. I think it's perfectly reasonable to submit that and because of the original title, I clicked the link. With the current title, I wouldn't have.

⬐ andyjohnson0

Two suggestions:

1. If a post is renamed then the original title(s) should be available to view somehow. Maybe via a moderation summary link.

2. The downvoting mechanism should require the downvoter to post their reasons.

⬐ 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.

⬐ Devilboy

Not sure if serious...

⬐ 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...)

(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...)

⬐ 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)

⬐ DanBC

Okay, I make a clear distinction between community up / down voting, and owner moderation. I should have been clearer.

Don't worry about the down votes. They are frustrating, but anyone on HN knows that you occasionally get a random down vote. By themselves they're usually meaningless. Yes, people should really either engage in the debate and not down vote, or not engage, and down vote, and explain if needed. (Personally, reasons for down voting should be restricted to "this comment does not belong here; it adds nothing to the discussion".)

I think there's general agreement about voting on HN - up vote things that are well written, even if you disagree. Don't down vote just because you disagree. Down vote things that add nothing to the discussion. Flag spam or other blatantly harmful stuff.

But all of that is separate from the issue of trusted people within HN locking threads, deleting threads, deleting posts, changing titles, banning users, etc.

> No insight and no accountability = bad moderation practices.

I honestly truly disagree with this. Strongly.

It's really simple to say "Here are a list of rules. Don't break them or we mod your posts". But when Bob starts skirting the rules there can be huge flamewars. Bob says he clearly wasn't breaking any rules, mods say he was, other people jump in saying that he wasn't and the mod is dumb and has made a bunch of similar stupid decisions, then other people jump in and say that maybe Bob was a bit close but he does so much good that we can make an exception for him, then other people leap in and say it's a stupid rule anyway. Meanwhile, this thread is getting so much attention that the real stuff of the forum is being ignored. New users are not interested in that stuff. The thread creates an unpleasant atmosphere which is noticed by other people. Now whenever Bob replies to someone who's a mod there's suspicion that Bob is just flame-baiting.

Anyway, I'm doing what I hate, so I apologies to everyone on HN. I'm setting my noprocrast settings for 48 hours. This is my lost post on this thread!

⬐ vacri

Yeah, my mistake. The word 'moderation' to me means more the forum-style stuff (given also the terms up/downmod), what moderation in the OP meant was what I consider 'editing', probably due to growing up with a publisher for a mother.

⬐ 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.

⬐ willvarfar

An approach I think would work is self-organising rather than moderated: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

⬐ SkyMarshal

> It's unlikely to change at this point.

I wonder about that. Is it b/c PG is the only the HN source committer, but without enough time to evolve the site fast enough to keep up?

Or is it something else?

⬐ unimpressive

> Keep it invite-only perhaps.

Well I probably count as the masses. But one model might be a sort of web of trust. You start off with a few people who are ultimately trusted. And then as your web grows you can track who let who into the site. People who consistently let in poor members get their invite privileges revoked or are kicked. Have a reputation threshold before you can invite people.

⬐ batista

For one, they don't even seem bothered enough to correct the "cache expired" continuation crap on the site, much less to build a new moderation system.

Second, if "poor members" get invited in large numbers, then the system you propose will fail, because they get to dictate what is good or not (by upvoting it), which will in term make them appear good (because they like/submit the 'good stuff').