
Ask HN: Alan Kay or DHH? - jhancock
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.<p>While trying to find this quote today, google turned up this page:  http://www.devtopics.com/101-more-great-computer-quotes/<p>See quote #53: “The best way to predict the future is to implement it.”
– David Heinemeier Hansson<p>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:<p>"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."<p>Has it really come to this?<p>Bonus points for anyone that can come up the quote I was originally looking for ;)...<p>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.
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acangiano
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.

~~~
iofthestorm
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
> 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>

People want this to be a civil, interesting, and mostly serious site about
hacking and startups.

~~~
andrewljohnson
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
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.

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lsb
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>

~~~
mapleoin
hm... so what this translates to is: Stop wasting time on HN?

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dhh
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
Note to self re HN:

* dhh is actually DHH

* rms is not actually RMS

~~~
rms
if rms wants the username though, he can have it

~~~
kirubakaran
I would be funny if the real RMS got banned from Hacker News over karma
transfer :-)

~~~
rms
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.

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tlrobinson
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
_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
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
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>

~~~
jhancock
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
You may also want to google _grim meathook future_

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gecko
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
It's profoundly saddening to know that this, of all things, makes you
profoundly sad.

------
mynameishere
or...

A lot of people:

<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>

I'm sure there are earlier varieties.

------
gruseom
This is a well-known statement by Kay:

<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.

------
divia
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>

(Edit: I just saw that this was from a 2005 interview, so it can't be what you
were referring to.)

~~~
jhancock
great stuff!! this does sound like a 2005 evolution on the original
thought/quote I was trying to hunt down. thanks!

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mileszs
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
that's a good one too. thanks. The quote I'm looking for, I know I read in
1995 or maybe before.

------
sfk
Worldofquotes attributes the quote to Theodore Hook, source: Bubbles of 1825,
in "John Bull"

[http://www.worldofquotes.com/author/Theodore-
Hook/1/index.ht...](http://www.worldofquotes.com/author/Theodore-
Hook/1/index.html)

~~~
ahoyhere
I found the article in question, Bubbles of 1825, and it's definitely not from
there. Too bad:

[http://www.archive.org/stream/choicehumorouswo00hook/choiceh...](http://www.archive.org/stream/choicehumorouswo00hook/choicehumorouswo00hook_djvu.txt)

------
redsquirrel
There are themes of what you're looking for in
<http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html>

------
hernan7
DHH was probably paraphrasing Kay's quote, and assuming the readers of the
interview would be familiar with the original.

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palish
It doesn't matter. Good advice stands on its own, and doesn't need its
creator's name to help it along.

------
xal
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
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
"Notice how all the garbage fake quote sites out there never cite any
references?" - DHH.

