Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it is a better headline.
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.
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.
the computational requirements to store and play music are so minimal now, I'd rather just take care of it myself
(i love DSP, calm down, but i also like lossless English)
(i have no beef with CDs, it's just a headline)
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.
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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. Because it doesn't matter. (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.
Of course you don't. You're just being an asshole
As a addendum, if it's hnuser:kristopolous pointing this out, then since there is no clout and prestige attached to my name I get attacked.
I claimed this social phenomena existed and then it happened like a scripted play in these replies.
I had to Google this. Seems it is some US-only thing I've never heard of.
The rest of the world calls digital radio "DAB" and occaisionally "DAB+". I've bought 2 DAB radios so far this year, since moving back to a country where I speak the native language.
I met him Saturday too and I was struck by how lovely and down to earth he seemed.
Who cares if he isn’t intimately familiar with RPi4 prices and availability? The cyclical and location-based nature in how these things work makes it impossible for anyone not absurdly obsessed to keep track. (I bought 8GB units in 2020, 2021, and 2022 at list price. If I wasn’t trying to get some CM4 units, I wouldn’t even be aware there is an ongoing shortage and I consider myself to be incredibly plugged in)
I found his talk about his home stereo to be far more interesting than a talk about the inner-workings of UNIX that’s he’s undoubtedly given a thousand times before. To each their own.
He says he has about 100 of them and made a number of specific claims on it - that he's some huge supporter of it. I chose that example because it was conclusively wrong.
Regardless, that's not the point.
The point is everyone will rise to his defense based on his status regardless of his content.
Not like that has been clearly demonstrated in my replies or anything ...
I met Ken the day before and he told me he was nervous about his talk. I hope he knows that most of us in the audience really loved what he shared.
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.
(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, but our software swapped in the canonical URL, which has no timestamp.))
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&que..., which is about titles but makes more or less the same point).
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.
If anything, there should be a separate submission with the new title.
You're right that titles dominate discussion though. That's one of the most reliable phenomena on HN, for better or worse.
it was cool to hear that he's still working on chess endgames, an interest which goes back many decades too [1].
> I have for most of my life, because I was sort of born into it, run Apple.
Assuming that's actually still Ken Thompson talking, that makes absolutely no sense. He's several years older than Woz, never mind Apple itself. He was already well into developing Unix on DEC minicomputers when the Apple I came out in 1976. Then, all through the 80s and 90s, I'm sure he used whatever non-Apple computers they used at Bell Labs. I think I read somewhere that by the 90s they were using x86 PCs. Anyway, you get the idea. So I wonder if he was totally messing with us in that answer.
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.