Your comment was a passive-aggressive declation of stupidity in the other party.
Well, that is exactly how I perceived Linus' comment, which is why my comment came across that way.
Clearly I was wrong, but I thought everyone would find it obvious that Linus' reply was pretty much unacceptable (and thus understand the point I was trying to make... which was not a passive-agressive declaration of stupidity in the other party, despite how it came across).
As least in the comment that was linked to, all he does is "yell" (all caps) at the person he's attacking, and although he presents an argument, it doesn't address the things his attackee actually said; I (personally) found it to be thoroughly unsatisfying in an intellectual/technical sense.
Uhm, have you actually read the whole thread? This Andre guy was being an obnoxious rigid pedantic idiot and Linus was trying to help all the other people to just the the damn thing to work. I think behavior like this Andre guy's is not criticized enough in the industry - it's toxic attitudes like that that poison the whole environment, and I applaud Linus for not tolerating bullshit, in no uncertain terms - even in the 'position of authority' he's in.
No, I in fact have not; I just looked at Andre's last comment and Linus' flaming response which did not address his points and was very rude.
You may be right that Andre was being a pedantic, obnoxious, rigid idiot. I have no idea, I didn't read the thread. My only point is that "THE USER IS ALL THAT MATTERS" is not a valid software principle and that rather than communicate anything useful, Linus just yelled at people (in the particular commen that was linked to from HN).
I was baffled as to how you could make a dozen comments in this thread and be so consistently dead wrong, but with this confession it makes sense — you simply have no idea what you're talking about.
Even worse, you aren't interested in getting a clue by reading the damn material.
I never wanted to spend the time reading the 100+ comments in the original thread; while it would be interesting and enjoyable to do so, I have other things that are higher priority right now.
However, I was pissed off by one of Linus' comments (which, taken by itself was pretty ridiculous), and made a comment on HN about it.
My comment was sarcastic in a way that I think was misunderstood and made many people angry. Many insults were hurled my way, and I tried to defend myself, resulting in an ever-worsening spiral. It's pretty much just become a massive shitfest.
I wish people hadn't been so quick to attack myself and my character (yourself included). This kind of thing is definitely contributing to the decline of HN, which is something being discussed lately (as always, I guess). And, yes, I'm contributing to it too by even trying to defend myself, or maybe by defending myself too aggressively.
I can understand if you read the whole 100+ thread and then point out that what I'm talking about is completely unrelated. That's true, but I wasn't talking about the whole discussion; just picking at a bit of unreasonable rudeness on Linus's part that failed to make any intellectually worthwile point. And I stand by that: the individual comment I was picking at (i.e., the one linked from this HN post) was pretty ridiculous.
Your comment was a passive-aggressive declation of stupidity in the other party.
The two are not the same.