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.)
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Edit: Seriously though, is the new rule that we aren't allowed to submit anything other than the page's title?
"People who get offended should be offended!" - Linus
"I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended."
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.
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.
Edit: I expected downvotes and I'll gladly take them if someone can explain to me how Nvidia is being unreasonable.
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.
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. :)
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
I guess he's talking about pushing out some new driver support.
Using a fragment identifier to demarc the time offset works better for me:
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").
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]
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].
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?
"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."
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.
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.
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! ;)
Apparently, a clueless moderator decided to change it.
GNU/Linux has no drivers: "Fuck NVIDIA!"
What is the problem?
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!
(ok, this is slightly unfair to intel's video drivers, they work fine as long as you don't need 3D acceleration)
