9 ms·

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama. He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the whole thing. Touch screens, voice activation and so on. Hardware and software and data hoarding project. He said he has massive cabinets of CDs, all the music he ripped and tested audio encoders with his own ears. Ken is 80, and still building cool side projects and scratching his own itch! That's the story. Be like Ken by building something cool, not by using whatever OS.

asddubs 4y ago
i guess at the end of the day, people just want you to play the hits
klyrs 4y ago
Thanks, the headline has all the appeal to me of "big celeb wears new t-shirt." The jukebox sounds awesome
- mtillman 4y ago
  I’m sure he’d laugh at being called a big celeb. Jukebox is def cooler than the headline.
  - watt 4y ago
    If Ken is not a big celeb, then nobody is.
hedora 4y ago
Better headline: “Unix Legend Ken Thompson Announces he is Switching From iTunes to a Raspberry PI, a Player Piano and Cabinets of old CD’s” Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it is a better headline.
- amelius 4y ago
  A better headline: Unix Legend Ken Thompson discovers that you can't use Apple products for building cool DIY stuff.
  - artificial 4y ago
    Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.
    - jen20 4y ago
      I’m suddenly reminded of the existence of n-gate!
      - codetrotter 4y ago
        It doesn’t exist anymore. Or rather I mean, it hasn’t been updated in months. Probably the author found something better to do with his time.
        disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        I spotted a user on the FT with that handle, and asked if they were the eponymous one. They didn't reply. But just in case you're reading this, person/people/AIs behind n-gate, you are sorely missed. That is all.
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      > Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them. I remember when I first discovered the StackOverflow website. Every question had tags on it and some number next to each tag. Me at the time thought that this number meant how many times people had added each of those tags to the specific question I was looking at. It took like a year or something before I realised that this is not what those numbers meant.
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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amelius 4y ago
That's cool but I can understand the audience: you don't have to be named Ken Thompson to build a RPi based jukebox.
- ramrunner0xff 4y ago
  what about designing the DSP/memory scsi disk that managed to do realtime ripping to PAC, then changing all that to mp3 using LAME, and the most important, creating usable metadata and finding all these CDs, and even finding ways to find a top-N song collection from dates that didn't have any relevant publications. I think you're underselling his achievement a bit ;). I found the talk to be an epic geek journey.
pmarin 4y ago
@dang Can you change the title to the original one?
- dang 4y ago
  Yes, but I added what the GP says the keynote talk is actually about.
deleted 4y ago
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agent281 4y ago
Agreed! I have to say I was disappointed by the question at 59:23. They seemed to expect a retrospective on Ken’s career or some grand philosophical statement on software or open source. To be honest, I was pretty surprised by the direction of the talk myself, but I ultimately enjoyed it. You see, Ken decided to talk about his 75 year project: his music collection. He talked about audio formats, collecting music from different groups, sourcing metadata, building hardware to play music and more. He was deeply interested in the topic and honestly probably a bit obsessive for multiple decades. This was very humanizing. And to be completely honest he reminded me a lot of my girlfriend’s father who we think is undiagnosed autistic. Ultimately, I think the reason why Ken was so prolific over such a long time is his ability to be deeply interested in problems. He was not too fussy about tools. He didn’t push Go or Linux or UNIX. He wasn’t self aggrandizing. He just wanted to tell people about his project that he’s been working on. Honestly, I thought it was a great lesson that might have gone over a lot of people’s heads. --- This comment was copied from lobste.rs. https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprising#c_6p6cva https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprisi...
- kristopolous 4y ago
  It's a technically oriented, open source, Linux conference and he's talking about basically his home stereo. Well ok, I guess he can do whatever he wants. There's expectations from the context though. That speech was the first time I understood how people can become too famous for their own good. I saw him the day before (and I've got the photos to prove it) and he made a bunch of factual mistakes. Nobody cared enough to push back. I only did a little when he claimed raspberry pi prices have been stable and plentiful throughout the pandemic. But even I quickly gave up and I'm usually an asshole about things being right. (2019: 1gb pi4 was $35.00 and now it's $132.95 for the record. Buying 1000 cheap computers to sit on them 4 years and then just resell would have made you about $100,000) He can basically say whatever and do whatever and people just politely murmur in approval because he's computer royalty. There's no real feedback loop or anything to keep him in check. It'd be like if Beyonce held a concert and then instead of singing, talked about composting and gardening. I mean sure, whatever. High status gives people a pass
superposeur 4y ago
I was there too and, at first, was wondering if the music thing was just a warm up to the main talk. But soon enough I settled into the flow of it. His slides were incredibly minimal throughout and then, at the end, he played a video of maple leaf rag pouring forth from his player piano midi setup and it was like choirs of angels singing. How many boring ass talks have I sat through that I’ll never remember — but I suspect I’ll remember his talk for a long long time.
Simplicitas 4y ago
Love your summary. It’s more for the minority of us. For the masses, the negative headline makes the money :-)
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Thanks for this.
dang 4y ago
Thanks for this! If anyone can suggest a good title for the talk as a whole, we'll change it above. (By 'good' I mean accurate, neutral, and representative of the talk as a whole.) ((The submitted URL was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaandEt_pKw&t=3473s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaandEt_pKw&t=3473s, but our software swapped in the canonical URL, which has no timestamp.)) Edit: I've put a placeholder up there for the time being until we get a better suggestion. Submitted title was "Unix legend Ken Thompson announces he's switching From macOS To Raspbian Linux". I agree with the parent that this is trivializing (also cherrypicking and editorializing) and we should focus on the substance of the talk.
- rezonant 4y ago
  Thompson's talk is very interesting, but it's also interesting that Thompson has decided to use a UNIX clone for his daily compute over macOS. The original submission included the timestamp to concisely link to the comment. It might be that autocanonicalizing YouTube submissions to remove the timestamp is the actual issue, perhaps that could be reconsidered.
  - dang 4y ago
    The one is a talk going deeply into a cool technical project and the other is a cherry-picked bit of celebrity gossip—admittedly a fun fact, but not interesting (at least not intellectually interesting) in the same degree. Although we didn't write code to do it on purpose, I think removing timestamps from videos (and similar things, like removing HTML anchors) generally does more good than harm, because people tend to use those to cherry-pick some detail they think is important rather than letting the reader make up their own about the whole submission. Generally we try to discourage that (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20title%20cherry%20pick&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which is about titles but makes more or less the same point).
    - rezonant 4y ago
      Well that's certainly your call but it's not gossip when it's first party at the very least. It's a statement by a luminary in the industry. As for timestamps, I can understand the intent with stripping them, but it might be an outsized measure when there are definitely other cases where including timestamps can help with context. Perhaps most usefully, allowing timestamps ensures the submitted title (which we as readers are voting on) matches the actual content you get when you visit the URL, so that the topic of comments can remain aligned with the submission itself. Ideally, I think this talk should have been two submissions, one for the OS commentary (which HN mods can choose to moderate or not) and one for the actual talk.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
I recall reading an interview many years ago where he mentioned downloading large quantities of music to build his personal collection and that his employer, AT&T, did not object.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

asddubs 4y ago

i guess at the end of the day, people just want you to play the hits

klyrs 4y ago

Thanks, the headline has all the appeal to me of "big celeb wears new t-shirt." The jukebox sounds awesome

mtillman 4y ago
I’m sure he’d laugh at being called a big celeb. Jukebox is def cooler than the headline.
- watt 4y ago
  If Ken is not a big celeb, then nobody is.

hedora 4y ago

Better headline: “Unix Legend Ken Thompson Announces he is Switching From iTunes to a Raspberry PI, a Player Piano and Cabinets of old CD’s” Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it is a better headline.

amelius 4y ago
A better headline: Unix Legend Ken Thompson discovers that you can't use Apple products for building cool DIY stuff.
- artificial 4y ago
  Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.
  - jen20 4y ago
    I’m suddenly reminded of the existence of n-gate!
    - codetrotter 4y ago
      It doesn’t exist anymore. Or rather I mean, it hasn’t been updated in months. Probably the author found something better to do with his time.
      - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        I spotted a user on the FT with that handle, and asked if they were the eponymous one. They didn't reply. But just in case you're reading this, person/people/AIs behind n-gate, you are sorely missed. That is all.
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    > Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them. I remember when I first discovered the StackOverflow website. Every question had tags on it and some number next to each tag. Me at the time thought that this number meant how many times people had added each of those tags to the specific question I was looking at. It took like a year or something before I realised that this is not what those numbers meant.
4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

amelius 4y ago

That's cool but I can understand the audience: you don't have to be named Ken Thompson to build a RPi based jukebox.

ramrunner0xff 4y ago
what about designing the DSP/memory scsi disk that managed to do realtime ripping to PAC, then changing all that to mp3 using LAME, and the most important, creating usable metadata and finding all these CDs, and even finding ways to find a top-N song collection from dates that didn't have any relevant publications. I think you're underselling his achievement a bit ;). I found the talk to be an epic geek journey.

pmarin 4y ago

@dang Can you change the title to the original one?

dang 4y ago
Yes, but I added what the GP says the keynote talk is actually about.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

agent281 4y ago

Agreed! I have to say I was disappointed by the question at 59:23. They seemed to expect a retrospective on Ken’s career or some grand philosophical statement on software or open source. To be honest, I was pretty surprised by the direction of the talk myself, but I ultimately enjoyed it. You see, Ken decided to talk about his 75 year project: his music collection. He talked about audio formats, collecting music from different groups, sourcing metadata, building hardware to play music and more. He was deeply interested in the topic and honestly probably a bit obsessive for multiple decades. This was very humanizing. And to be completely honest he reminded me a lot of my girlfriend’s father who we think is undiagnosed autistic. Ultimately, I think the reason why Ken was so prolific over such a long time is his ability to be deeply interested in problems. He was not too fussy about tools. He didn’t push Go or Linux or UNIX. He wasn’t self aggrandizing. He just wanted to tell people about his project that he’s been working on. Honestly, I thought it was a great lesson that might have gone over a lot of people’s heads. --- This comment was copied from lobste.rs. https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprising#c_6p6cva https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprisi...

kristopolous 4y ago
It's a technically oriented, open source, Linux conference and he's talking about basically his home stereo. Well ok, I guess he can do whatever he wants. There's expectations from the context though. That speech was the first time I understood how people can become too famous for their own good. I saw him the day before (and I've got the photos to prove it) and he made a bunch of factual mistakes. Nobody cared enough to push back. I only did a little when he claimed raspberry pi prices have been stable and plentiful throughout the pandemic. But even I quickly gave up and I'm usually an asshole about things being right. (2019: 1gb pi4 was $35.00 and now it's $132.95 for the record. Buying 1000 cheap computers to sit on them 4 years and then just resell would have made you about $100,000) He can basically say whatever and do whatever and people just politely murmur in approval because he's computer royalty. There's no real feedback loop or anything to keep him in check. It'd be like if Beyonce held a concert and then instead of singing, talked about composting and gardening. I mean sure, whatever. High status gives people a pass

superposeur 4y ago

I was there too and, at first, was wondering if the music thing was just a warm up to the main talk. But soon enough I settled into the flow of it. His slides were incredibly minimal throughout and then, at the end, he played a video of maple leaf rag pouring forth from his player piano midi setup and it was like choirs of angels singing. How many boring ass talks have I sat through that I’ll never remember — but I suspect I’ll remember his talk for a long long time.

Simplicitas 4y ago

Love your summary. It’s more for the minority of us. For the masses, the negative headline makes the money :-)

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Thanks for this.

dang 4y ago

Thanks for this! If anyone can suggest a good title for the talk as a whole, we'll change it above. (By 'good' I mean accurate, neutral, and representative of the talk as a whole.) ((The submitted URL was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaandEt_pKw&t=3473s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaandEt_pKw&t=3473s, but our software swapped in the canonical URL, which has no timestamp.)) Edit: I've put a placeholder up there for the time being until we get a better suggestion. Submitted title was "Unix legend Ken Thompson announces he's switching From macOS To Raspbian Linux". I agree with the parent that this is trivializing (also cherrypicking and editorializing) and we should focus on the substance of the talk.

rezonant 4y ago
Thompson's talk is very interesting, but it's also interesting that Thompson has decided to use a UNIX clone for his daily compute over macOS. The original submission included the timestamp to concisely link to the comment. It might be that autocanonicalizing YouTube submissions to remove the timestamp is the actual issue, perhaps that could be reconsidered.
- dang 4y ago
  The one is a talk going deeply into a cool technical project and the other is a cherry-picked bit of celebrity gossip—admittedly a fun fact, but not interesting (at least not intellectually interesting) in the same degree. Although we didn't write code to do it on purpose, I think removing timestamps from videos (and similar things, like removing HTML anchors) generally does more good than harm, because people tend to use those to cherry-pick some detail they think is important rather than letting the reader make up their own about the whole submission. Generally we try to discourage that (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20title%20cherry%20pick&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which is about titles but makes more or less the same point).
  - rezonant 4y ago
    Well that's certainly your call but it's not gossip when it's first party at the very least. It's a statement by a luminary in the industry. As for timestamps, I can understand the intent with stripping them, but it might be an outsized measure when there are definitely other cases where including timestamps can help with context. Perhaps most usefully, allowing timestamps ensures the submitted title (which we as readers are voting on) matches the actual content you get when you visit the URL, so that the topic of comments can remain aligned with the submission itself. Ideally, I think this talk should have been two submissions, one for the OS commentary (which HN mods can choose to moderate or not) and one for the actual talk.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

I recall reading an interview many years ago where he mentioned downloading large quantities of music to build his personal collection and that his employer, AT&T, did not object.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]