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Comment by adamgordonbell | Hacker News Reader

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years.

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.

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I was there too and, at first, was wondering if the music thing was just a warm up to the main talk. But soon enough I settled into the flow of it.

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.

Thanks for this! If anyone can suggest a good title for the talk as a whole, we'll change it above.

(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.))

Edit: I've put a placeholder up there for the time being until we get a better suggestion. Submitted title was "Unix legend Ken Thompson announces he's switching From macOS To Raspbian Linux". I agree with the parent that this is trivializing (also cherrypicking and editorializing) and we should focus on the substance of the talk.

Thompson's talk is very interesting, but it's also interesting that Thompson has decided to use a UNIX clone for his daily compute over macOS. The original submission included the timestamp to concisely link to the comment. It might be that autocanonicalizing YouTube submissions to remove the timestamp is the actual issue, perhaps that could be reconsidered.

The one is a talk going deeply into a cool technical project and the other is a cherry-picked bit of celebrity gossip—admittedly a fun fact, but not interesting (at least not intellectually interesting) in the same degree.

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).

Well that's certainly your call but it's not gossip when it's first party at the very least. It's a statement by a luminary in the industry. As for timestamps, I can understand the intent with stripping them, but it might be an outsized measure when there are definitely other cases where including timestamps can help with context. Perhaps most usefully, allowing timestamps ensures the submitted title (which we as readers are voting on) matches the actual content you get when you visit the URL, so that the topic of comments can remain aligned with the submission itself.

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.

A good title might be "Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox"

"75 year project" seems to suggest that he's been working on it for 75 years - is that correct?

He's counting it from when he first started saving to get his first reel to reel tape recorder.

Got it. Ok, let's use that. Better late than never. Thanks!

dang, it's far too late to change the submission title when there are already hundreds of comments focused on the old title. The commentary makes no sense now.

If anything, there should be a separate submission with the new title.

Normally I would agree but not in this case. There's plenty of context in the thread, readers are smart enough to figure it out, and adamgordonbell is right: the talk, and the speaker, deserve better.

You're right that titles dominate discussion though. That's one of the most reliable phenomena on HN, for better or worse.

i submitted it ~4 days ago with the title "Ken Thompson's 75 year project", but the title was evidently too boring to gain any traction :) (like some others have commented, the raspbian os "revelation" was the least interesting part for me too)

it was cool to hear that he's still working on chess endgames, an interest which goes back many decades too [1].

[1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ken-games.html

I listened to the question and answer at the timestamped link, and I wonder if he was giving a completely bogus answer to see if anyone was paying attention. Consider:

> 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.

Maybe he means by extension, due to the BSD link?

Thanks, the headline has all the appeal to me of "big celeb wears new t-shirt." The jukebox sounds awesome

I’m sure he’d laugh at being called a big celeb. Jukebox is def cooler than the headline.

If Ken is not a big celeb, then nobody is.

i guess at the end of the day, people just want you to play the hits

Agreed!

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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This comment was copied from lobste.rs. https://lobste.rs/s/htwiag/ken_thompson_reveals_his_surprisi...

It's a technically oriented, open source, Linux conference and he's talking about basically his home stereo.

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. (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.

It'd be like if Beyonce held a concert and then instead of singing, talked about composting and gardening. I mean sure, whatever.

High status gives people a pass

I think we can all agree that a man who is unaware of the troubles you have experienced obtaining Raspberry Pis at list price is nobody's hero.

Do you want more?

He didn't know pac's relation to he-aac, or digital FM was renamed hd radio (which uses mdct, based on he-aac, based on pac). I was volunteering for the debian booth and thought Debian and raspberry pi os had no relation.

None of these things matter because you're just being an asshole.

I think being obsessive that someone didn’t know digital fm was renamed he radio or that Raspberry Pi OS was based on Debian (maybe if the name was still Raspbian it would be more obvious) makes you more of an asshole than the guy you’re responding to.

The point is prestige overrides all other faculties.

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.

> digital FM was renamed hd radio

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.

The man is 80 years old. High status doesn’t give people a pass, respecting what people have contributed and not having the need to “well, actually” every little thing does.

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.

> Who cares if he isn’t intimately familiar with RPi4 prices and availability?

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 was there in person and I debated with whether or not I should shout down the guy who basically insulted him for giving what I thought was a great talk. Obviously, I didn’t (because nothing good would come from making a spectacle like that), but it bothered me that he was insulted for presenting what I thought was a really beautiful and humanizing talk.

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.

Yeah, it made me sad because he sort of apologized to the person. Ultimately, Ken doesn't owe anyone anything.

That part kind of broke my heart. In retrospect, I should have gone with my gut and shouted “we love you, Ken” after he did that. Because you’re right, he doesn’t owe us anything. And he certainly doesn’t owe us trying to uphold some ideal we have of him that we’ve invented on our own.

I recall reading an interview many years ago where he mentioned downloading large quantities of music to build his personal collection and that his employer, AT&T, did not object.

Love your summary. It’s more for the minority of us. For the masses, the negative headline makes the money :-)

Thanks for this.

Better headline: “Unix Legend Ken Thompson Announces he is Switching From iTunes to a Raspberry PI, a Player Piano and Cabinets of old CD’s”

Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it is a better headline.

A better headline: Unix Legend Ken Thompson discovers that you can't use Apple products for building cool DIY stuff.

Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.

I’m suddenly reminded of the existence of n-gate!

It doesn’t exist anymore. Or rather I mean, it hasn’t been updated in months. Probably the author found something better to do with his time.

I spotted a user on the FT with that handle, and asked if they were the eponymous one.

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.

> Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.

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.

Apple music is only 10 bucks a month and lossless. But that is pretty cool.

today it is. tomorrow it might not be at all. or it might be $100/mo. or they might decide they need interstitial ads. or only if you use their recommendation engine with preselected 'channels'

the computational requirements to store and play music are so minimal now, I'd rather just take care of it myself

Apple music is lossless from the moment lossless analog signals get imperfectly sampled and chopped into bitly approximations, yes. There must be an alias for the name of that process...

(i love DSP, calm down, but i also like lossless English)

He has already been using raspberry PIs for years, and if you watched the talk you will find this has nothing to do with iTunes, it predates it by decades.

“Unix Legend Ken Thompson, still out of step, taps his foot to the sterile sound of CDs just as they are now again being outsold by warm, pressed, analog vinyl”

(i have no beef with CDs, it's just a headline)

@dang Can you change the title to the original one?

Yes, but I added what the GP says the keynote talk is actually about.

That's cool but I can understand the audience: you don't have to be named Ken Thompson to build a RPi based jukebox.

what about designing the DSP/memory scsi disk that managed to do realtime ripping to PAC, then changing all that to mp3 using LAME, and the most important, creating usable metadata and finding all these CDs, and even finding ways to find a top-N song collection from dates that didn't have any relevant publications. I think you're underselling his achievement a bit ;). I found the talk to be an epic geek journey.

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