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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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!

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.

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

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