Given that others also asked, I'll give a rundown of the discussion:
The context of the discussion was cpuguy83's suggestion that compared to AMD, Intel has been "suffering from shortcuts leading to Spectre/Meltdown and the performance regressions due to patching those".
cpuguy83's comment was very concise, so let me elaborate that the distinction between Spectre and Meltdown is essential here. Both are security flaws in CPUs that were published at the same time. Spectre is an industry-wide problem that also hit AMD, but "Meltdown" is the result of an Intel-specific implementation choice that I think one might fairly describe as a "shortcut". (Even IshKebab later agrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21342048) Meltdown was also more immediately dangerous, and the software workarounds that were necessary to mitigate it in existing CPUs cost a lot of performance.
Given this context, I'll quote the relevant item from cpuguy83 again and then IshKebab's reply:
> cpuguy83: Intel [... has been ...] suffering from shortcuts leading to Spectre/Meltdown and the performance regressions due to patching those.
> IshKebab: AMD chips suffer from Spectre too (which is the hard to fix issue). They didn't really take any fewer "shortcuts" than Intel. And they weren't "shortcuts".
Note how IshKebab carefully ignores the Meltdown part of cpuguy83's comment to be able to claim that Intel hasn't been doing any worse than AMD, and that there were no shortcuts. For Spectre in the stricter sense, that's technically true. It's not true in the context of the entire Spectre/Meltdown event, which was cpuguy83's argument.
The context of the discussion was cpuguy83's suggestion that compared to AMD, Intel has been "suffering from shortcuts leading to Spectre/Meltdown and the performance regressions due to patching those".
cpuguy83's comment was very concise, so let me elaborate that the distinction between Spectre and Meltdown is essential here. Both are security flaws in CPUs that were published at the same time. Spectre is an industry-wide problem that also hit AMD, but "Meltdown" is the result of an Intel-specific implementation choice that I think one might fairly describe as a "shortcut". (Even IshKebab later agrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21342048) Meltdown was also more immediately dangerous, and the software workarounds that were necessary to mitigate it in existing CPUs cost a lot of performance.
Given this context, I'll quote the relevant item from cpuguy83 again and then IshKebab's reply:
> cpuguy83: Intel [... has been ...] suffering from shortcuts leading to Spectre/Meltdown and the performance regressions due to patching those.
> IshKebab: AMD chips suffer from Spectre too (which is the hard to fix issue). They didn't really take any fewer "shortcuts" than Intel. And they weren't "shortcuts".
Note how IshKebab carefully ignores the Meltdown part of cpuguy83's comment to be able to claim that Intel hasn't been doing any worse than AMD, and that there were no shortcuts. For Spectre in the stricter sense, that's technically true. It's not true in the context of the entire Spectre/Meltdown event, which was cpuguy83's argument.