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Comment by r2dnb | Hacker News Reader

"Developer State of the Union", Jesus... you talk about a closed platform.

I've never been able to stand these ecosystems where you need to attend state of the unions to know what will be deprecated and how the "establishment" has decided you would run your business (tools, etc...).

I know there's good money to be made there but Apple is just too much for me.

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If it's any consolation, I've been downvoted a bunch of times when I tell stories about my time working for Steve at NeXT. People just don't seem to like hearing things that disagree with whatever perspective they hold. (And Steve used to refer to our software as the "crown jewels" that needed to be kept secret at any cost - even if we lost business or bankrupted partners. Steve freely admitted that we would overcharge anybody who was naive enough to pay high prices. But people don't like to hear that - even though I was in many meetings with Steve where he said those things.) And I should add that I'm not anti-Apple. I think we need to be able to see people and companies clearly - warts and all. Otherwise, how can we react to the real world?

I think the problem you are facing is that you have made some pretty outlandish claims with some basis in fact but also with some embellishments as to your role in all this and that HN has a whole pile of old timers on board many of who might have been present as other parties to those very same happenings. Likely they have long ago figured out who you really are.

That coupled with a hatred for rich people, the '1%' as you call them, and the fact that almost every major development in computing - according to you - in the last 20 years had your hand in it makes it hard to believe anything you say.

Maybe just stick to the facts, leave out the embellishments. For instance 'your time at NeXT' was just a single year but if we're to believe your comments then you were the guy that singlehandedly saved NeXT, Apple, Linux and Oracle to boot and if it weren't for a small glitch in your thinking we might have had global internet some years earlier.

It seems a bit much for one person, even if they've been quite active, Forrest Gump was fiction, not a biography.

Hmmm...sounds like a lot of things being conflated. I do think that the 1% has too much of the wealth, but I'm not sure how that is related to other things that I've said. You may disagree with that, but I'm not sure that justifies any downvote about my observations of the 1%. And, as best I can recall, I've only described computer-related events that I was present for. You may disagree, that is your right, but I was actually there and involved with the projects I've described. (And I worked in three different groups and multiple projects during my time at NeXT - it was chaotic to say the least. If one of your "old timers" thinks they know everything I did there, I would be pretty skeptical about that person's credibility.) I've never claimed to have saved any company at all - so I'm not sure where that comes from. I can't help it if I happened to grow up and work in Silicon Valley - where a lot of things were happening related to computers. Just because you weren't around when such decisions were being made, doesn't mean that nobody was.

Let's just say that adding 'and in a court of law I'll claim I made it all up' doesn't do much to add credence.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure you're more than welcome here but HN is kind of skeptical and if you are anonymous and start making grandiose claims about conversations between the execs of the largest companies in the IT space at some point in time expect some pushback ;)

To be fair, you don't need to attend anything, just wait 24 hours and read all the blog posts.

Actually, they put up the videos on their site and you can watch them there or download them. So, complaining that you can't stream it is a really minor complaint. Plus, I tried to stream it on my Apple TV and it wasn't available to stream, so the complaint is completely invalid.

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