[tree_of_item]

This is only half-trolling. There are some very good ideas here. I think the author is absolutely correct when he says that the endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people, and that they aren't completely wrong in that assessment.

[stcredzero]

An example of a good bit:

"It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your computer’s clock. Even if while you’re doing that you’re learning about how computers work, you’re wasting your time and getting somewhere trivial very slowly."

This reminds me of "computer education" programs that just teach how to use MS Word. Yes, this will get you a job, but you'd be learning at a more fundamental level with Squeak eToys. Or some of this:

http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/

[plinkplonk]

If he said, "It is not productive for me to spend an hour learning how to change the font on my computer’s clock." he would be right.

He makes these sweeping generalizations about what is or is not productive for other people to do. By his definition all the people "tinkering with" open source Linux, Apache, etc would be "non productive" since perfectly good commercial alternatives existed (and still exist) for them.

[stcredzero]

You missed the point. Learning how one particular widget for settings in one particular app is neither very general nor fundamental. Playing around with Morphic and discovering that every UI widget is a little code browser, and using the unified environment to discover robotics, math, and physics on your own is very fundamental.

[plinkplonk]

"This is only half-trolling."

Would a half troll be something like a half elf with a troll father and human mother? :-P I believe such a player class exists in the game Arcanum.

More seriously, the author drowns whatever valid points he may have in trollish blather.

As to the "endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people," the value of tinkering is to the tinkerers.

Non tinkerers making vlaue judgments on its utility is irrelevant to its desirability to tinkerers. I think music is irrelevant so you shouldn't get to play your violin? A more viable argument is that I shouldn't have to subsidize your violin, not that my judgment about your musical tinkering being "a useless waste of time" is "not completely wrong".

[rinich]

If I want to play the violin, there are violins designed specifically for letting me play them with little restraint. There are books designed specifically to guide me through learning how to play. Most people would hire an instructor to teach me the basics.

That's all possible with a closed system. You can make environments specially designed to encourage tinkering, rather than leaving everything open for intrusion. You can write guides teaching people things that they wouldn't normally see on a closed system. It doesn't exist by default like it does perhaps on a system wherein everything is viewable, but you can still create it. So it won't kill programming.

It's not like Apple's declaring a holocaust on all other computers. If you're so obsessed with tinkering that you think it's worth fucking around instead of learning to tinker in more meaningful ways — though I must admit that from my biased point of view that always seems like the college graduate whose poetry reads like high school — the other systems are all available, and will be for a long, long time; it won't be long before somebody releases an open source equivalent of the iPad for stupid people to go around claiming is objectively better in every way and for ordinary tinkerers to buy and tinker with.

But I'd like to address this troll accusation, because I find it unbecoming. I am not a troll. I have been a productive and contributing member of this community for nearly two years; even though my respect for it has constantly declined, I come in here to debate with people all the time. I don't do it to fuck around with your head or to provoke people. I do it because I enjoy stating my point of view, which is frequently very different from the mass opinions here.

My blog is not written for Hacker News. My blog is written for the potpourri audience of artists and literati and young adults that enjoy long essays written about random subjects. It's not a coding blog, so even when I write about subjects that interest people here I'm not writing it in a way that'll appeal to readers here. This article was submitted three times; the first time I asked that it be killed and the submitter graciously killed it for me. This is not of a tone appropriate for Hacker News.

But that does not make it a troll post. I wrote a post last month describing fictional Listerine commercials. I'm sure if it had been submitted here people would have been boneheaded to announce the commercials were fake and I was trolling. There are smart people here, but there are not very diverse people.

[plinkplonk]

"So it won't kill programming."

Since no one said it would, you are knocking down strawmen. Nothing Apple could do, now or in the future will kill programming. That is obvious.

"This article was submitted three times; the first time I asked that it be killed and the submitter graciously killed it for me. This is not of a tone appropriate for Hacker News."

This is fair. And very gentlemanly of you to ask that a submission be killed for inappropriateness. I read it as a submission on HN and in the context of HN it certainly sounds trollish.

as is "If you're so obsessed with tinkering that you think it's worth fucking around ". On Hacker News, you call people who love to tinker with computers obsessive and label what they do "fucking around" and "non meaningful" (as judged by your Omniscient Wisdom?) and still claim not to be trolling?

Interesting.

[rinich]

I originally wrote this in response to Alex Payne; I emailed him an off-the-cuff response, then decided it might be worth revising a little and publishing. He wrote: Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. I disagreed with the sentiment. So, not killing programming, but killing the hacker era.

On Hacker News, you call people who love to tinker with computers obsessive and label what they do "fucking around" and "non meaningful" (as judged by your Omniscient Wisdom?) and still claim not to be trolling?

I'm in the community because I think people here know what they're talking about, not because I agree with their life views. In a past life (by which I mean last year) I got engulfed in a huge and marvelous debate here over that. I don't like the hacker mindset here and I think the entrepreneurial one we see here is sadly limited in scope. A lot of the things HN really enjoys I find a little disturbing and sad.

I'm not pretending my opinion is Omniscient Wisdom. Your saying it makes the both of us looks silly. I don't come from quite the background a lot of this community does, and my worldviews are slightly different, but I don't lash out at people that disagree with me — unless it's a debate happening about something I wrote, in which case I maintain the tone I started in the article to help and elucidate things.

If we want to make this a discussion of the worldview in question, and of exactly what I believe about what, then by all means we can have that, but the fact that your attitude's more snark than it is polite engagement suggested to me that you're more into shooting me down under false pretenses.

[trialcode]

And your point of view is that people who are passionate about hacking are obsessive-compulsive with an antisocial attitude. Nice one! My point of view is that you really hate the fact that the people you've always regarded as losers because of their introverted nature can play the technology game better than you. Your only hope now is for the rules to change to your advantage.

[rinich]

Look, friend, I was in the same umbrella as you. I used to like wearing black t-shirts telling people how conformist they were and how much better me and my friends were. Then I got older than sixteen and realized what I was missing in the world.

What the fuck is this "technology game" you're talking about? I've made one web site. It got lots of attention and registered ten thousand users in a month. That's as much of a technology game as I play, and I play it well. Am I losing the game of getting drivers to work on my Linux box? Yeah, but I don't lose any sleep over it.

The people driving technological innovation right now are frequently the people developing for the iPhone. The iPad's going to spark an entirely new wave of programmers that are slightly less pathetic. If we want to be juvenile and pretend there's a game here, my side's not the one that lost Wednesday. But there is no game, and you're free to continue staring ar your stupid little screen, and I'm free to continue telling you I think you're acting like I'm a dumb jock and you're the clever geek. That you continue to hold that delusions says more than anything I could say in response.

[fnid2]

They find it useless until that tinkering discovers something magical that they can't live without!

Tinkering is just play. Play has useful evolutionary purposes to the individual and the group. Consumers not finding such stuff useful isn't any indicator of it's actual value to society.

[rinich]

I love tinkering and don't think it's at all useless. What I hate is that the same things that make computers so tinkerable are what make them so frustrating for all the people that don't want to tinker. The iPad removes all those frustrations, and in the process closes itself to tinkering, and I think that's an acceptable switch.

Other machines will exist to tinker on. Moreover, the iPad itself is opening to tinkering. If I'm a young kid who finds out online I can download a jailbreaker and completely hack up my iPad, that's exciting for me! That gives me an opening into the world of tinkering and fiddling that you have with these computers by default. Or, if I have an idea for how to excite people into learning how to fiddle with computers, I make an iPad app or a webapp that teaches them all those things. As I said in the article: If nobody else decides that would be an awesome thing to do, chances are I'll make one myself, for my own sake as much as for others'.

I understand the criticism that the iPad's getting for being closed. I've been a member here for however long. And to some degree, I sympathize with it. But people here are fucking ridiculous. (Not just here; Reddit and MetaFilter are just as bad.) They jump from "I wish it was open" to "The fact that Apple's closed the system is killing computing forever and plunging us into the dark ages."

I wrote this to Alex Payne in a rougher, impromptu format. I just wanted to explain to him why I didn't think it was totally bad that the iPad was closed. When I finished writing it, I liked it, so I rewrote it for my blog readers and added that little smug "Programmers aren't permitted to feel my breath on their skin" character because I thought it was really fun and because I have readers who enjoy irony and tongue-in-cheek. Then it got out to a wider public, including certain venues where people didn't know my name or my writing style, and now we have this discussion going on.

I hope this will stop certain of the people here from jackassing themselves about. (Not you, fnid; your comment was a great response to an attitude I don't hold.)

[trialcode]

Fortunately it's not up to you or the vast majority of people to decide what is or isn't a waste of time for me or anyone else. If it wasn't for a lot of people investing significant chunks of their lives in something they were passionate about there would be no systems at all today.