Okay? Is that really worthy of being submitted to hn however?
The function being called is directly above this declaration. It's a static function not used outside of this file. What are the chances that someone would edit this code without understanding what "three" is used for in this context? Pretty slim I wager.
It's good that people are auditing the linux source code but if you stumble upon some weird looking code (which again, is not the case here in my opinion) the right way to deal with it is not to post it on hacker news. Contact the maintainer (look at the MAINTAINER file at the root of the kernel) if possible with a patch to fix the issue.
Depends on the intent of submitting it. If his intent was to point out a potential bug in the Linux kernel then yes, it shouldn't have been submitted. On the other hand what has resulted has been a rather interesting debate about the merits of variable naming vs. proper commenting, with some side commentary about what a shitty name something like three and five make for variables.
But the variable doesn't contain the number 1. As is clearly explained in the comment, it's only initialized to 1; it contains any arbitrary power of 3 (I'm assuming "arbitrary" because the variable is passed by address to a function accepting a pointer; as long as that kind of thing is going on, who knows what's inside the variable). And that's true from initialization onwards, as 1 is the 0th power of 3.
If I adjust your comment to "for a variable whose only purpose is to be passed to another function as the parameter called 'three', 'three' is a shitty name", would you endorse that sentiment?
I don't know. Upon seeing a variable named "three", I wouldn't immediately assume it contained the literal number 3, since that would be rather pointless use of a variable. It's an odd name, but I don't think it'll be mistaken for its literal meaning.
The LaTeX source code has definitions for the constants \@ne, \tw@, \thr@@. It's a microoptimization that is useful because of the way the TeX/LaTeX parsers work. I don't understand the details, it's beyond my LaTeX wizardry.
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/9787/ne-tw-thr
On the other hand, I think that this kind of definitions are not useful for C.
Good commenting is no substitute for good naming. For a variable containing the number 1, "three" is a shitty name.