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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

The quote in question:

"'I may not be a software developer, but as I read the invention [of eBay], it’s displaying pictures of your wares on a computer network and, you know, picking which ones you want and buying them.' [Chief Justice Roberts] next said about the multibillion-dollar Internet corporation: 'I might have been able to do that.'"

That statement is reasonable to this software developer.

edit:

"In a recent oral argument about a computer-implemented, electronic escrow service, Justice Kennedy asked whether 'a second-year college class in engineering” or 'any computer group of people sitting around a coffee shop in Silicon Valley” could write the code for it 'over a weekend.' The lawyer said yes, to the dismay of many in the industry."

I completely lack dismay. Couldn't any computer group of people sitting around a coffee shop in Silicon Valley write an electronic escrow application over the weekend?

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Both of these quotes seem to come from a place of awe for computer science as if it is magic and only wizards can do it. "I might have been able to do it" is scoffed at because how could anyone say that! If you could do it you'd be a millionaire now! Only the guy saying it is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and that's a much bigger accomplishment than ebay. And all the justices are intellectual titans. Even the ones everyone hates.

Similarly the dismay of many in the industry thing. The author wants comp sci to be some kind of arcane lore that olds cant possibly understand because they're not hip enough. Tech stuff is also presented as kind of a black box that can't be compared to anything but itself, and if you aren't using silicon valley jargon 24/7 you just dont get it. The person who wrote the article in the OP is a tech cultist rather than a reasonable thinker.

Would you mind clarifying your intent? I can't tell if there is sarcasm there or not.

Your edit came after my other reply; I think it actually is the case that a group of computer people sitting in a coffee shop could sketch out an escrow system over the weekend. I guess they wouldn't want to run a business on it, but the shape of it could be there, no problem.

No sarcasm. I have plenty of objections to Roberts and Kennedy, but these are not them.

Sure, as long as it didn't have to have 99.99% uptime and scale to tens of thousands of simultaneous users.

But there are standard techniques for scaling and high availability. The patent simply covers the essence of the application itself. And I agree with you, demo-quality prototypes of auction and escrow apps are pretty easy to write.

It's emblematic of the style of the article. Roberts clearly isn't talking about building a huge corporation over a weekend, but that's the comparison that is made.

Similar to the complaint about Alito's comment about James Madison's views on video games. That clearly was a joke about Scalia's legal philosophy, not an actual misunderstanding about video games.

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