6 ms·

Ask HN: Alan Kay or DHH?

16 points by jhancock 18y ago

The quote I was looking for and still have not found is Kay referring to the problem that the best minds are absorbed by unimportant tasks that pay good money instead of solving meaningful problems. While trying to find this quote today, google turned up this page: http://www.devtopics.com/101-more-great-computer-quotes/ See quote #53: “The best way to predict the future is to implement it.” – David Heinemeier Hansson Not sure if this was a mistaken quote or if DHH is delusional. That part doesn't matter much. What is troubling is there are two comments at the bottom of this page. One reads: "Hi Rob, Yes, when I was translating the article, I thought #53 was Alan Kay too. But apparently David Hannson is credited with saying it on many of the quote sites, so I’m not sure who was first." Has it really come to this? Bonus points for anyone that can come up the quote I was originally looking for ;)... EDIT: not trying to bash DHH here. I was just adding some humor to my quest to find the original quote I was looking for. Still noone has been able to come up with any ideas.

gecko 18y ago
Wow. That just makes me amazingly sad--not simply because it's factually wrong, but because attributing it to DHH loses its impact. DHH is an amazingly egotistical man who made a couple of somewhat popular websites and an okay web framework. Alan Kay, working with Dan Ingalls and other luminaries at Xerox PARC, invented many of the concepts that define what a personal computer means today. I am profoundly sad to see such historical ignorance.
- bjclark 18y ago
  It's profoundly saddening to know that this, of all things, makes you profoundly sad.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
tlrobinson 18y ago
Blasphemy. Alan Kay first said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" in 1971, before DHH was born. If DHH decided to tweak Alan Kay's quote (changing "invent" to "implement") and attribute it to himself, well, that's bullshit.
- pg 18y ago
  If DHH decided to tweak Alan Kay's quote (changing "invent" to "implement") and attribute it to himself, well, that's bullshit. You can safely assume he didn't.
  - jhancock 18y ago
    Can anyone recall the quote I was looking for? It had something to do with how the brightest minds are being wasted and aren't working on the most interesting problems. I could even be wrong about it being a Kay quote, but I think so. thanks HN, I figure if someone here doesn't know, maybe someone can call Kay and ask him ;)
    - Hexstream 18y ago
      I have one very related quote, though by Greenspun, not Kay: "We will live in a society where the best educated engineers are not designing anti-lock brakes. They are either managing comparatively poorly educated people who are designing anti-lock brakes, stitching up wounds in people who were injured by faulty anti-lock brakes, or defending companies that got sued for their anti-lock brake systems that didn't work." from http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html
      - jhancock 18y ago
        thanks. that's a nice one. The Kay quote is along those lines. I'll know it when I see it. It will be odd if it turns up and its not Kay ;)...I think so though.
        kirubakaran 18y ago
        You may also want to google grim meathook future
      - nomoresecrets 18y ago
        Reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from John Carmack: "I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work."
lsb 18y ago
It's from Alan Kay, in 1971. Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. "The origin of the quote came from an early meeting in 1971 of PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, folks and the Xerox planners. In a fit of passion I uttered the quote!". — Alan Kay, in an email on Sept 17, 1998 to Peter W. Lount http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
- mapleoin 18y ago
  hm... so what this translates to is: Stop wasting time on HN?
gruseom 18y ago
This is a well-known statement by Kay: http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm I highly doubt that DHH claimed to have originated this. The problem here is the proliferation of adspam quote sites that attribute whatever to anybody. This same quote is even attributed to Lincoln on a few of them.
acangiano 18y ago
In all frankness this thread is gossipy. Most programmers know that Alan Kay is the author of the original quote and a simple Google search would verify that. Just because a site or two quote David Heinemeier Hansson on a variation of said quote, it doesn't mean that he claimed it was his quote. Your message is an open invitation to bash him for no good reason. Quite frankly this is the sort of attitude I'd expect on Reddit not on Hacker News.
- jhancock 18y ago
  I wasn't trying to be too "gossipy". What I really wanted was for someone to help me find the quote I was looking for? Not this quote that everyone knows. I wasn't trying to bash DHH, I even said that it doesn't matter if its a mistake or not but that others do not know its a mis-reference is the more poignant issue.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Now you're being less "gossipy" and more "insulting to everyone's intelligence", since your original post questions whether DHH is "delusional", and asks if it's "really come to this". You could have just asked the question you claim to have been asking. But that wouldn't have attracted all this attention, now, would it have?
    - jhancock 18y ago
      oh come on!! Do I have to put little smiley faces next to ever piece of humor ;). There, maybe I should end all my sentences that way ;). I am very well aware that everyone on HN knows that quote and that it was mis-referenced. The fact that it was ref'd to DHH just added some humor. And some of my closest friends have referred to me delusional at times... I take it as a compliment ;) There, more smileys for you ;)
      - gruseom 18y ago
        I am very well aware that everyone on HN knows that quote and that it was mis-referenced. Then as far as I'm concerned you wasted our time.
mynameishere 18y ago
or... A lot of people: http://www.google.com/search?q=predict+future+create+-kay http://www.google.com/search?q=predict+future+create+-kay And a number of sites have Lincoln saying it, http://www.ehow.com/how_4415898_predict-your-future.html http://www.ehow.com/how_4415898_predict-your-future.html I'm sure there are earlier varieties.
mileszs 18y ago
The closest thing I found (via quick search) was a quote (apparently) by Paul Krugman: "Meanwhile, how much has our nation's future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?"
- jhancock 18y ago
  that's a good one too. thanks. The quote I'm looking for, I know I read in 1995 or maybe before.
xal 18y ago
The quote is actually by Lincoln. I'm sure a lot more people cringe when it's attributed to Kay than when it's attributed to DHH. In neither case it has anything to do with the persons it's attributed to. The whole point behind attribution is that it's done by third parties. What a useless mud slinging invitation.
- gruseom 18y ago
  I would be very surprised if Lincoln said this. It doesn't sound like a 19th century thought to me at all. Notice how all the garbage fake quote sites out there never cite any references?
  - petercooper 18y ago
    "Notice how all the garbage fake quote sites out there never cite any references?" - DHH.
divia 18y ago
I'm not sure if it's what you meant, but I found this: Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects. You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sue/475/AlanKay.html http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sue/475/AlanKay.html (Edit: I just saw that this was from a 2005 interview, so it can't be what you were referring to.)
- jhancock 18y ago
  great stuff!! this does sound like a 2005 evolution on the original thought/quote I was trying to hunt down. thanks!
hernan7 18y ago
DHH was probably paraphrasing Kay's quote, and assuming the readers of the interview would be familiar with the original.
palish 18y ago
It doesn't matter. Good advice stands on its own, and doesn't need its creator's name to help it along.
sfk 18y ago
Worldofquotes attributes the quote to Theodore Hook, source: Bubbles of 1825, in "John Bull" http://www.worldofquotes.com/author/Theodore-Hook/1/index.html http://www.worldofquotes.com/author/Theodore-Hook/1/index.ht...
- ahoyhere 18y ago
  I found the article in question, Bubbles of 1825, and it's definitely not from there. Too bad: http://www.archive.org/stream/choicehumorouswo00hook/choicehumorouswo00hook_djvu.txt http://www.archive.org/stream/choicehumorouswo00hook/choiceh...
dhh 18y ago
I'm truly honored to have a whole post dedicated to me because a mistake on a list of 101 computer quotes. Someone has too much time on their hands. Oh, and OF COURSE I was quoting Alan Kay.
- nailer 18y ago
  Note to self re HN: * dhh is actually DHH * rms is not actually RMS
  - rms 18y ago
    if rms wants the username though, he can have it
    - kirubakaran 18y ago
      I would be funny if the real RMS got banned from Hacker News over karma transfer :-)
      - rms 18y ago
        I think I would be expected to keep my karma -- this account would have its username changed to my real name, and rms would get a fresh account. Gotta respect the integrity of the karma.
redsquirrel 18y ago
There are themes of what you're looking for in http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

iofthestorm 18y ago

Geez, how elitist can you get? I just started coming here because there's more programming related stuff that sometimes doesn't hit /r/programming, but I haven't seen any evidence that people here are somehow more sophisticated or something than people on reddit. Seems about the same to me, except without the pun threads, and the layout is similar but slightly worse than reddit (like how replying opens a new window).

davidw 18y ago
> I haven't seen any evidence that people here are somehow more sophisticated or something than people on reddit. Many of us also have reddit accounts. What's really different is the culture: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html People want this to be a civil, interesting, and mostly serious site about hacking and startups.
- andrewljohnson 18y ago
  These guidelines have little to do with it, though the editors probably do. The main thing that distinguishes Reddit, Digg, and HN is pure volume. If HN had the same traffic Digg did, you better believe that the average intelligence would go down, and you'd need a heck of a lot more editors to keep the content on target.
  - davidw 18y ago
    Well, the guidelines sum up some of the culture, and you're right that it wouldn't be possible to transmit that if too many people showed up at once. However, it is a real thing. There aren't many editors here, and the idea is to keep the volume down by only posting things that interest a limited segment of the population.
acangiano 18y ago
Please don't misconstrue this as a form of elitism. Rather it's a matter of expectations. I've been a member of Reddit (under different nicknames) since their early days, and still have a somewhat active account there. Currently when I visit Reddit I expect a good laugh, some cute pictures, conspiracy theories, sensationalized headlines and the occasional good article and/or discussion. When I comment on Reddit I do so at my own peril, knowing all too well that it's acceptable in that culture to be rude and to offend other redditors, while hiding behind a monitor. Programming.Reddit was the last subreddit where I had some sort of expectations left in regards to learning about, and commenting on, interesting subjects with other professionals. Sadly the mob culture has reached that subreddit too. Anything Ruby or Rails related is considered fair game, and if you hang out there, you'll see a lot of unjustified bashing and character assassinations. There are still good discussions, articles, and good people (like dons), but overall I've lowered my expectations of what I can get from, and offer to, that community. The "alanic" thing is that Python receives a lot of attention and respect in that community, and yet Python and Ruby really are not that different. Their communities may be slightly different, but I wouldn't trust anyone who highly praises one while drastically dissing the other. I've simultaneously had my posts on the homepage of Reddit and Hacker News, including Programming.Reddit. The difference between the two groups of discussions was huge. For example, my post about a great math book generated a series of discussions about math books in general and other reading suggestions on Hacker News. On Reddit the top comment was a link to the Pirate Bay, plus other comments that essentially said "I agree". So while it's not a problem, I have different expectations from the two. I can go to Reddit, Digg or even 4chan for a cheap laugh. But that's not why I come to Hacker News. I come to Hacker News, increasingly more often, in the hope of learning new things, sharing ideas and having nice conversations with like-minded programmers and hackers. Polite, civilized, mostly serious conversations. Conversations that don't require you to be juvenile and rude or that always degenerate into meme/pun threads. And I also expect to network with people. Guys, I'm in Toronto, if you want meet for a coffee, I'd love to. It is not elitism if I have different expectations from two communities that act so differently. We also need to consider the danger of gradually evolving into Reddit. In its early days Reddit was like Hacker News. It was fantastic and addictive. But a lack of moderation, an increasingly wider audience and above all a lack of respect between people in the same community, led Reddit to where it is today. Reddit went from scientific articles and interesting discussions between experts to the mob-like virtual assassination of Joe Clark. Quite frankly, I was disgusted to see a respected professional be attacked so viciously by the community. That's not a community that represents me and that's not a community I have great expectations from or hopes for. And that's part of the reason why I'm pretty much leaving Reddit behind in favor of Hacker News. It's not perfect here, but there is a much better signal to noise ratio and sense of community. Thankfully PG has a clear idea of what this community shouldn't be and as such there are explicit guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Stories get flagged and killed regularly when they don't belong. This, combined with a very clear intent to keep the conversation civil ("Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.") makes Hacker News the great, unique site that it is. In all fairness, I don't feel elitist for enjoying all this and expecting nothing less from Hacker News.