3 ms·

On this very forum I had Alan Kay politely tell me I was a fool, and I thought it was great. I bragged to my developer friends, who also agreed that it was grea

On this very forum I had Alan Kay politely tell me I was a fool, and I thought it was great. I bragged to my developer friends, who also agreed that it was great. And that I was, indeed, a fool.

da02 8y ago
What did you write that made him say that? (I've written some pretty dumb things to him and he never called me a fooled. He was nice enough to try to re-explain things to me. I finally had to give up because I felt I was wasting his time.)
- cabaalis 8y ago
  No he was polite. I suppose I should restate, he didn't call me a fool straight out but let me know it was foolish to comment on things I had no firsthand knowledge of. I think it was an article regarding Steve's visit at Xerox PARC.
  - mentat 8y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 - that didn't seem like 6 months ago.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      I think this is a case where you didn't take the trouble to find out the facts and are instead projecting your beliefs on a situation at which you weren't present. I'm calling you on because there is much too much of this kind of commentary in most forums. I bet dang saw that and wanted to remind him about the HN guidelines and then realized that the author of the comment was freakin Alan Kay and just said never mind.
  - da02 8y ago
    But in the opening post, John Carmack said that is what Steve would do: "It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions." Alan is very smart and was a prodigy, but I think he put up with Steve Jobs' eccentricity to a larger extent than our eccentricity because he could influence people and got a few things right. (Although Alan has been said to call out CEOs for incompetence.) Murray Rothbard (economist) said all the billionaires he ever met were crazy. Probably because their colleagues and employees would put up with a lot of stuff they would never let anyone else get away with.
icc97 8y ago
He was giving a YC startup talk and asked for emails in his presentation. I did and he answered. He seems to genuinely enjoy talking to anyone that cares. He's answered pretty much all the ridiculous things I've asked him on HN.
DonHopkins 8y ago
I once gave Marvin Minsky a headache by showing a video tape of bright blinking PostScript graphics! I apologized, and we had a nice conversation about how eye tracking interfaces tend to do the same thing.

On this very forum I had Alan Kay politely tell me I was a fool, and I thought it was great. I bragged to my developer friends, who also agreed that it was great. And that I was, indeed, a fool.

da02 8y ago

What did you write that made him say that? (I've written some pretty dumb things to him and he never called me a fooled. He was nice enough to try to re-explain things to me. I finally had to give up because I felt I was wasting his time.)

cabaalis 8y ago
No he was polite. I suppose I should restate, he didn't call me a fool straight out but let me know it was foolish to comment on things I had no firsthand knowledge of. I think it was an article regarding Steve's visit at Xerox PARC.
- mentat 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575389 - that didn't seem like 6 months ago.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    I think this is a case where you didn't take the trouble to find out the facts and are instead projecting your beliefs on a situation at which you weren't present. I'm calling you on because there is much too much of this kind of commentary in most forums. I bet dang saw that and wanted to remind him about the HN guidelines and then realized that the author of the comment was freakin Alan Kay and just said never mind.
- da02 8y ago
  But in the opening post, John Carmack said that is what Steve would do: "It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions." Alan is very smart and was a prodigy, but I think he put up with Steve Jobs' eccentricity to a larger extent than our eccentricity because he could influence people and got a few things right. (Although Alan has been said to call out CEOs for incompetence.) Murray Rothbard (economist) said all the billionaires he ever met were crazy. Probably because their colleagues and employees would put up with a lot of stuff they would never let anyone else get away with.

icc97 8y ago

He was giving a YC startup talk and asked for emails in his presentation. I did and he answered. He seems to genuinely enjoy talking to anyone that cares. He's answered pretty much all the ridiculous things I've asked him on HN.

DonHopkins 8y ago

I once gave Marvin Minsky a headache by showing a video tape of bright blinking PostScript graphics! I apologized, and we had a nice conversation about how eye tracking interfaces tend to do the same thing.