Ken Thompson on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Ken Thompson on GitHub

github.com

29 pointspknerd22 comments

Cool and he actually got "ken" as his username. Github must have been saving that username, unfortunately "https://github.com/rob/" is already taken.

One wonders whether Github reserved it, or whether the entire global community of developers knows better than to choose "ken" as a username.

Nice! I'd like to know too how was possible that "ken" was not taken.

It was already taken by someone else.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rhIBqhu...

Github seems to have moved their user account to

https://github.com/ken-zz

Ken Thompson could have my Social Security Number if he wanted it.

Is that a reference to this?

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

When you have created the very basis for all commercial and scientific modern computing, you just deserve your damn vanity username.

I'm assuming this is because Go was migrated to Github?

And he hasn't made a single commit yet, the bum!

And now that GitHub has replaced resumes... poor Ken. :(

Where is the proof that this is really Ken Thompson?

Tweet from Brad Fitzpatrick (of memcached fame) on the Golang team: https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/537699677596966912

But only one Tweet isn't really a proof.

"ken doesn't have any popular repositories"

you just know that somewhere there will be teen/20-something hotshit brogrammer startup CEO/CTO types who will refuse to look at his resume, go first to his GitHub, be totally unimpressed ("lame! just a talker, not a real hacker, etc") then skip over him.

Don't be ageist.

I'm not. I'm being observation-of-reality-and-making-humorous-reflections-thereof-ist. :-) Nowhere did I say all teen/20-somethings were hotshit brogrammers. There is however a subtype out there in the real world and both I and others have encountered them repeatedly. They are unpleasant and blindered, to everyone's detriment.

Those scenarios are far from implausible. Comments on HN in the tune of, "Lamport is so lame I can knock out a better markup language that runs on Node in 15 minutes. Did he do anything else" are not hard to find.

Then there would be those that go the other way, "Paxos may be nice and all for ivory towers LOL but can he write a line of code."

The other target is Dijkstra, "Dijkstra is an ass, did he do anything else other than that stupid algorithm that I could have come up with in my sleep. Proof of correctness is all fine and dandy, can he code ?"

These are not actual quotes of course but grounded enough in reality. As they say ignorance is bliss, or at least enough shelter from the irony of it.

I wonder what recruiting emails to ken look like

"Do you have at least 20 years of C experience?"

"Uh... actually, yes!"

and?

I know this is a joke but having public-facing code _should_ be a pre-requisite when you're applying for a dev job. Even if it's just a personal project, I'd put more weight on some good github repos than a coding interview.

Here's one take from a person who disagrees with your position. I've found it to be an interesting read. http://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv...

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