TED
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2016–2026
21:31 · 6.9M views · May 3, 2016
TED curator Chris Anderson interviews Linus Torvalds about his personality, his engineer's pragmatism, and the creation of Linux and Git. Torvalds also discusses taste in code and why he open sourced Linux.
HN cites it for Linus's remarks on code taste, his self-description as an engineer rather than a visionary, and the growth of Linux.
5 comments from Hacker News
I don't think Linus is a people person. This is something which he talks about himself in the famous ted-ed video. I just re-watched the video (currently halfway) & I feel like the point of Linux is something which you are forgetting but it was never intended to grow so much and Linux himself in the video when asked says that he never had a moment where he went like oh this went big. In fact he talks about when the project was little. On how he had gratitude when the project had 10 people maybe 100 people working on it and then things only grow over a very large time frame (more than 25-30years? maybe now 35 just searched 34) He talks about how he got other people's idea which he couldn't have thought of things themselves and when he first created the project he just wanted to show off to the world to look at what I did (and he did it mainly for both the end result of the project and programming itself too) and then he got introduced to open source (free software) by his friend and he just decided to have it open source. My point is it was neither the code nor the talk. Linus is the best person to maintain Linux, why? Because he has been passionate over it for 25 years. I feel like Linux would be just as interested in talking about the code and any improvements now with maybe the same vigour as 34 years ago. He loves his creation & we love Linux too :) Another small point I wish to add is that if talk was the only thing, then you are missing the point because Linux was create
I'm reminded of Linus Torvald's interview at Ted [1] where he talks about programming "taste", and compares the following two code snippets: remove_list_entry(entry) { prev = NULL; walk = head; while (walk != entry) { prev = walk; walk = walk->next; } if (!prev) head = entry->next; else prev->next = entry->next; } remove_list_entry(entry) { indirect = &head; while ((*indirect) != entry) indirect = &(*indirect)->next; *indirect = entry->next; } [1]: this video
It's sort of funny that linus torvalds actually talked about why that sort of iteration is better: this video I think he puts it pretty well (although he them also goes on to say dumb little snippets like that really don't matter in the big picture). Essentially, by making a doubly indirect pointer you get to treat the first element exactly the same way you are going to treat every other element.
"There are people who care about the UI. I can’t do UI to save my life. I mean, if I was stranded on an island and the only way to get off that island was to make a pretty UI, I’d die there." - Linus Torvalds. Source of the quote above - this video If you don't want to watch the whole video, here's the exact part about the UI - [LINK] Transcript - [LINK]
Tesla is really great, but there exists a "take" on Edison that makes him also not so bad. Here, listen to Linus talk about him a bit: this video Linus: "I'm more of an Edison..." (TED2016, Feb. 2016)