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0 pointsaidenn014y ago0 comments

I haven't worked closely with Torvalds, but I have worked with other OSS project leads that have such asshole responses roughly proportional to the popularity of the project, and have a theory on it.

I don't know if it's intentional or not but many OSS project leads respond like this to questions that come up a lot but don't merit a response. How many times do you think Torvalds has had to field "questions" of the form "C is crap, you should use C++, it's like C only better!"

To a certain extent it is garbage in, garbage out, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.

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pavanky14y ago· 2 in thread

This is the situation not only with OSS projects, but BBS, forums and / or IRC chat rooms in general. Given the technology, it is amazing tha we haven't developed bots that will automatically answer these questions based on previous responses.

slowpoke14y ago

That wouldn't even be too hard. I've seen some help channels that have bots with commands to answer FAQs (mostly in the form of "here is a link, READ IT"). A simple question answering AI would be interesting, though.

pavanky14y ago

That still needs human intervention. I think stackoverflow has a bot named community. I am not completely aware of how it works, but if it is completely automated, it is good.

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