He was the creator of Cranky Geeks. One of the first podcasts I listened to.

I used to listen to No Agenda from episode 1 on. It literally was just John and Adam recording their regular phone calls, discussing dinners they had together, etc. Over time it became more and more of what I'd describe as a conspiracy podcast.

No Agenda, John and Adam will forever have a special place in my heart regardless of the show eventually putting me off. Adam was what first brought my attention to Second Life where I ended up randomly meeting my now wife. We ended up listening to early No Agenda during long car rides. During one of the episodes John and Adam talked about their visit to Chez Spencer near our home in SF. We checked it out and loved it and later had our wedding rehearsal dinner there. Thank you, John!

He was often wrong.

How wonderful to be human, and to be able to have your own political views and opinions such that you could be, subjectively, wrong. We can all only hope to one day also have our own opinions and proudly be wrong.

so this cuts both ways. You voluntarily publish your "beliefs" widely and publicly, be prepared to be called on it. Most of us choose not to do this, but if you want to exert influence you are held inviting criticism.

You’ll note that the comment above was not “criticism” or argument of any meaningful kind.

It simply flagged that he was on the “wrong team”.

There's nothing wrong in being wrong. I'm often wrong, and I'm very happy when I learn something and cease to be wrong about that.

If you take the political views angle, up to 2005 or so, I was very much for small State and liberal economics, but, over the years, I observed the results of assistance programs for vulnerable populations, industrial policies that developed entire regions, and other measures that ensured more opportunities for upwards social mobility, especially for populations that were often excluded from that. Then, in 2015, a coup came, that ousted a left-wing president and demolished most of those policies. Then a far-right president finished demolishing what was left.

At this point, I am very left-leaning because of this. I have seen what injustices do, and how we can eliminate them - and it's not even hard to do so. If even a relatively poor country such as Brazil can do that, anyone can.

>There's nothing wrong in being wrong.

That is highly dependent on what you're wrong about, and if you change your beliefs based on evidence, and how many people you try to influence to believe your wrong beliefs.

There's nothing wrong about being wrong, unless you try to force others to live under your own wrong assumptions. He didn't do that.

RIP he was highly skeptical, not necessarily open to the long range view.

What made him useful for a set of things made him wrong for another. That's kind of being human - you don't judge by evidence alone, but also on your previous experiences and biases.

Centrist libertarian. Absolutely fun and amazing insight.

Meh, none of that includes the conspiracy bullshit. I liked Jon, but I didn't like where he went in the last decade or so.

This is really sad. I used to listen to Cranky Geeks religiously when I was younger. I was always excited about a new episode. I still remember many of them. I remember them talking about web 2.0 and what that means, talking about twitter, and tweeting. A lot of good information and laughs over the years. He will be in my memories.

I like that his Wikipedia page really sells that he was a Kentucky Colonel. That was one of the easier titles I've gotten.

How did you get it? ... How many titles do you have?!

I know there's people like Sir David Attenborough who have three alphabets worth of letters after their name, but I hadn't considered the idea of gaming the system to get superfluous titles.

Hey rosrepa... I want to go down your rabbit hole & collect some titles... would you be kind enough to recommend some easy ones to start with?

The Universal Life Church has an online form to get ordained as a minister, that's an easy one to get

Hurricane Electric has dead simple IPv6 certification

The Alonzo Church of the Eval Genius has a self evaluation program sponsored by the Y Combinator. I anonymously passed myself to myself -- until a fixed point!

This is sad.

I grew up watching his show on Tech TV and reading his columns in PC Magazine.

He used to butt heads with Leo Laporte and it was great:

https://youtu.be/C96YG7qzN80?t=142

I enjoyed John and Leo butting heads. I agree that it was great. It's a bummer they haven't done that for a long time.

It was great until Leo went off the deep end and lost 99% of his audience.

Both of them kind of lost the thread. I really enjoyed the show but they became increasingly polarized and unmoving in their opinions.

When Leo cut off Dvroak and CJal I turned out. You really do need that sort of personality for people to bounce off otherwise its less entertaining.

Is CJal here supposed to be JCal by chance? I feel like that was close to 15 years ago, but I'm in the same boat. I used to listen to almost every show Twit put out, which was quite a bit.

I didn't stick around that long to see what became of it.

I see different people saying different things about Leo and John. What happened?

I think their butting heads eventually got on both of their nerves. John would derail the show just to get under Leo’s skin. And Leo became increasingly ridged with the show structure. The show was losing popularity and I think some guests said they didn’t like John because he was cranky and his politics, but the real issue was probably that the studio was no longer as convenient for people to get to.

At the same time they both became increasingly politically polarized. John C Davorak became a full right wing conspiracy theorist. Leo increasingly embraced the left wing ideology of the moment.

It came to a head with that story about the kid making a clock and getting in trouble. Leo was all in on one side that it was about racism and such, with John suggesting he fell for a media lie.

I think John turned out to be right in the end. They did seem to patch things up with John appearing on a episode years later I think "a christmas miracle" was the title, but that was the last time he was on as far as I know.

I used to listen to so many TwiT podcasts 10+ years ago. But then slowly lost interest and I don't remember why.

But they used to be awesome. FLOSS weekly, Security Now, MacBreak Weekly, etc.

But a few years ago, I found out there were some scandals at TwiT, etc, but the network still seems to be going on though.

The last place I listened to Leo was that security podcast I think Leo hosting with Steve Gibson. And it just seemed devoid of any useful information whatsoever. Then one day I decided if I don't learn something I can use at work during my entire drive to work, I'm just not listening again. And that was that.

What were the scandals? I still listen to TWIT and MBW, but they are so long and too preachy sometimes. If you get past that and some other things (constant AI talk), they are still good shows.

Deep end how?

It’s no tech all lecture about evil nobody wants to listen to that shit.

IMHO they both went a bit too far. Used to love Twit (with JCD), used to love NoAgenda (when they were still relatively politically neutral), I guess it mirrors a bit what happened to their country.

RIP BuzzKill.

And Leo will say nothing but nice things about him and express nothing but regret when he talks about this on the next episode.

I am not sure John would have done the same.

Why take this to a place of insults and divisive antagonizing?

It’s ok I am sure John would appreciate the discussion. They both are treasures.

As a counter to the many comments I saw implying that Leo is mostly to blame for their disagreements and "banned" John. Those "insults and divisive antagonizing" came first, and which I notice you did not object to, curiously.

I liked them both too. And I listened to No Agenda for a while, and my opinion is based on years of hearing and reading them both.

I promise you John would have been sad. Their differences are similar to why half the country dislikes the political views of the other half of our country. They both were tech nerds at heart and they both are treasures even with Leo’s TDS.

The only "TDS" is Trump devotion/defense syndrome.

Maga all seem pretty derganged to me.

Same...well I'll always remember it as ZDTV. Maybe it was my youth, but I remember how exciting tech was then - cool new websites, gadgets, services, etc.

I haven't followed him much since, and seeing his recent pictures made me realize how much time has passed since those days.

Rest in peace, sir.

I watched ZDTV, later renamed Tech TV, on my big ugly satellite dish.

Dvorak's show was called Silicon Spin. John had a panel of guests, sort of like the original Meet the Press with Lawrence E. Spivak.

I also listened to a weekly public radio show named Real Computing. John would interview entrepreneurs about their new tech products. I think about 3 interviews per show. The station which carried Real Computing in Albuquerque was KANW, 89.1 FM.

I never heard of No Agenda until this Hacker News piece, and it seems to me Silicon Spin and Real Computing were probably much more worth my time, so I didn't miss much in my ignorance of No Agenda.

I miss the older shows, and I would have appreciated more similar appearances by John since, but those days are gone. RIP.

August Dvorak's father's, brother's, nephew's, cousin's, former roommate.

So... what does that make him?

John C. Dvorak

There does not seem to be a documented close lineal connection between August Dvorak and composer Antonín Dvořák, although it would be reasonable to suppose some relation exists.

There's also no documented close lineal connection between John C. Dvorak and August Dvorak, any more than his birthplace being Los Angeles. Both of which are blindly-repeated, unsourced (and untrue) Wikipedia inventions.

Wikipedia sources the claim to an article by Jerry Pournelle in BYTE magazine, from 1985.

Here's the snippet in question from the magazine:

https://imgur.com/a/8SVQGnj

Wikipedia and Pournelle are wrong, here's John Charles Dvorak himself on November 27, 1988:

https://ibb.co/x8RJvWyX

"I'm told there is a relationship, but I can't prove it."

John knows who his uncles are. His father is Walter Charles Dvorak born in Minneapolis to John Steve Dvorak (also born in Minneapolis). August Dvorak and all of his siblings (none of them Walter) were all born in McLeod County to IMMIGRANT Joseph Dvorak. If there's a connection it goes back to Bohemia.

Is that from the San Francisco Examiner? Do you have sources for the family information you mention?

Yes it is, and yes, several primary sources that anyone can easily find if they're looking in the proper places.

Interesting, that’s the only way I thought I knew this man.

> of the Dvorak keyboard

Ok, I'm going to shame myself in public for this but, I always thought they were "DVORAK keyboards" and they were called this way just like the "AZERTY keyboards", that is, the first 6 letters of the first row were "DVORAK".

Uhm TIL…

There's no shame in not knowing something or inferring wrong conclusions from facts you do know. From left to right the first 6 keys of the top row are:

  ',.pyf

Which isn't as catchy as Dvorak.

Unfortunately python scripts turn out to be not as vulnerable to character escaping exploits.

Character escape, in this context, of course, refers to the keys themselves flying out of the keyboard, this being a hardware product and all.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I can't see anything here to do with either Python or hardware.

quick search shows that .pyf is some Python file (interface between Python and Fortran) so it was a joke I guess

It was a bad joke, a .py and an apostrophe character reminded me of an SQL injection escape.

...Yeah I don't work in SQL if it wasn't obvious lol

Or on a US keyboard its known as QWERTY :-)

Wait, you mean the Dvorak keyboard isn't named after the order of its letters like Querty??!

How are you supposed to remember it then?

Or is there also a keyboard inventor named Querty?

Its Qwerty/z, not Querty :-)

Did you ever meet someone in the real world using the Dvorak ayout?