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He actively answers questions on Quora and those answers come in a format (short length - though his are unusually well thought out - and narrow focus) that is

He actively answers questions on Quora and those answers come in a format (short length - though his are unusually well thought out - and narrow focus) that is easy to browse.

theGnuMe 3y ago
He's been here on HN as well in the past.
- justin66 3y ago
  His answers on Quora represent a pretty extensive body of work. That's not true of his comments here (which are very appreciated, of course). Quora's a better place, with a better UI, for that almost-blogging sort of thing.
DonHopkins 3y ago
I think Quora is "a poor imitation of old static text media" that's difficult to browse and not very accessible, since it takes so much clicking and waiting to open up "more" buttons and follow replies and threads, and is impossible to easily print, or just scroll, skim, and search through, so I collected Alan Kay's answers, some discussion we had, plus some more discussion with David Rosenthal (who developed NeWS with James Gosling), here: "Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard: https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser... >Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).” Also here's a collection of HyperTIES discussions from Hacker News (including some discussion with Ben Shneiderman about why hypertext links are blue): https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
- infinite8s 3y ago
  Agreed about the Quora interface. I have a Jupyter notebook that scrapes all of Alan's answers and comments into a json database - he's answered a lot of questions!
bitwize 3y ago
He's been known to answer questions and leave comments right here on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay

He actively answers questions on Quora and those answers come in a format (short length - though his are unusually well thought out - and narrow focus) that is easy to browse.

theGnuMe 3y ago

He's been here on HN as well in the past.

justin66 3y ago
His answers on Quora represent a pretty extensive body of work. That's not true of his comments here (which are very appreciated, of course). Quora's a better place, with a better UI, for that almost-blogging sort of thing.

DonHopkins 3y ago

I think Quora is "a poor imitation of old static text media" that's difficult to browse and not very accessible, since it takes so much clicking and waiting to open up "more" buttons and follow replies and threads, and is impossible to easily print, or just scroll, skim, and search through, so I collected Alan Kay's answers, some discussion we had, plus some more discussion with David Rosenthal (who developed NeWS with James Gosling), here: "Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard: https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser... >Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).” Also here's a collection of HyperTIES discussions from Hacker News (including some discussion with Ben Shneiderman about why hypertext links are blue): https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

infinite8s 3y ago
Agreed about the Quora interface. I have a Jupyter notebook that scrapes all of Alan's answers and comments into a json database - he's answered a lot of questions!

bitwize 3y ago

He's been known to answer questions and leave comments right here on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay