The Redditors denigrate the Diggers, the HN people hate on the Redditors, though I think it's safe to say that the readers of Digg haven't heard of either ;)

I mean, I totally agree that on average, a user of reddit is less intelligent than a user of HN, and a user of Digg is less intelligent than a user of Reddit. But that's just a function of traffic - the more traffic you have, the more the average sinks. The earliest example on the web is probably when AOL users got unleashed on usenet.

The only thing is, while the average intelligence goes down, the maximum intelligence goes up. Reddit's top 10 smartest people are probably smarter than HN's.

Just because you're a user of Reddit, doesn't mean you're not a sitist. Black people are racist towards black people too.

Many of us also have reddit accounts. What's really different is the culture:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People want this to be a civil, interesting, and mostly serious site about hacking and startups.

Currently when I visit Reddit I expect a good laugh, some cute pictures, conspiracy theories, sensationalized headlines and the occasional good article and/or discussion. When I comment on Reddit I do so at my own peril, knowing all too well that it's acceptable in that culture to be rude and to offend other redditors, while hiding behind a monitor.

Programming.Reddit was the last subreddit where I had some sort of expectations left in regards to learning about, and commenting on, interesting subjects with other professionals. Sadly the mob culture has reached that subreddit too. Anything Ruby or Rails related is considered fair game, and if you hang out there, you'll see a lot of unjustified bashing and character assassinations. There are still good discussions, articles, and good people (like dons), but overall I've lowered my expectations of what I can get from, and offer to, that community. The "alanic" thing is that Python receives a lot of attention and respect in that community, and yet Python and Ruby really are not that different. Their communities may be slightly different, but I wouldn't trust anyone who highly praises one while drastically dissing the other.

I've simultaneously had my posts on the homepage of Reddit and Hacker News, including Programming.Reddit. The difference between the two groups of discussions was huge. For example, my post about a great math book generated a series of discussions about math books in general and other reading suggestions on Hacker News. On Reddit the top comment was a link to the Pirate Bay, plus other comments that essentially said "I agree". So while it's not a problem, I have different expectations from the two.

I can go to Reddit, Digg or even 4chan for a cheap laugh. But that's not why I come to Hacker News. I come to Hacker News, increasingly more often, in the hope of learning new things, sharing ideas and having nice conversations with like-minded programmers and hackers. Polite, civilized, mostly serious conversations. Conversations that don't require you to be juvenile and rude or that always degenerate into meme/pun threads. And I also expect to network with people. Guys, I'm in Toronto, if you want meet for a coffee, I'd love to. It is not elitism if I have different expectations from two communities that act so differently.

We also need to consider the danger of gradually evolving into Reddit. In its early days Reddit was like Hacker News. It was fantastic and addictive. But a lack of moderation, an increasingly wider audience and above all a lack of respect between people in the same community, led Reddit to where it is today. Reddit went from scientific articles and interesting discussions between experts to the mob-like virtual assassination of Joe Clark. Quite frankly, I was disgusted to see a respected professional be attacked so viciously by the community. That's not a community that represents me and that's not a community I have great expectations from or hopes for. And that's part of the reason why I'm pretty much leaving Reddit behind in favor of Hacker News. It's not perfect here, but there is a much better signal to noise ratio and sense of community.

Thankfully PG has a clear idea of what this community shouldn't be and as such there are explicit guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Stories get flagged and killed regularly when they don't belong. This, combined with a very clear intent to keep the conversation civil ("Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.") makes Hacker News the great, unique site that it is. In all fairness, I don't feel elitist for enjoying all this and expecting nothing less from Hacker News.

I wasn't trying to bash DHH, I even said that it doesn't matter if its a mistake or not but that others do not know its a mis-reference is the more poignant issue.

I am very well aware that everyone on HN knows that quote and that it was mis-referenced. The fact that it was ref'd to DHH just added some humor. And some of my closest friends have referred to me delusional at times... I take it as a compliment ;) There, more smileys for you ;)

Then as far as I'm concerned you wasted our time.

  Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do.
  The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

Oh, and OF COURSE I was quoting Alan Kay.

* dhh is actually DHH

* rms is not actually RMS

If DHH decided to tweak Alan Kay's quote (changing "invent" to "implement") and attribute it to himself, well, that's bullshit.

You can safely assume he didn't.

I could even be wrong about it being a Kay quote, but I think so.

thanks HN, I figure if someone here doesn't know, maybe someone can call Kay and ask him ;)

"We will live in a society where the best educated engineers are not designing anti-lock brakes. They are either managing comparatively poorly educated people who are designing anti-lock brakes, stitching up wounds in people who were injured by faulty anti-lock brakes, or defending companies that got sued for their anti-lock brake systems that didn't work."

from http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html

"I feel bad for some companies out there. The founders, who are these incredible engineers, are now directors of their departments doing management rather than engineering. At the same time most of the people they are managing are nowhere near as good as they were at doing the actual work."

David Heinemeier Hansson: [in response to a question]

I try not to predict the future. I’m not a big believer in fortune telling. The best way to predict the future is to implement it.

Since when was quoting a classic aphorism a source of "guilt"? Am I supposed to include a footnote every time I use phrases like premature optimization, or considered harmful, or half-implemented buggy version of half of Common Lisp in casual conversation? Or does the do-not-quote-others rule only apply to DHH, who seems to attract character assassins as honey draws flies?

But if you wonder why DHH seems to attract character assassins, look no further than how he signed off from his Christmas Eve post http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/36-work-on-what-you-use-an...

"So kumbaja motherfuckers and merry christmas!"

That's a great way to tick off a billion or so people.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/quotes

I thought that even one-celled animals had seen Die Hard by now. But perhaps it's more of a generational thing than I had realized.

At least see the first one.

Since he's a moderately influential person participating in an interview where he knows his statements will be reprinted as his own words.

Is this common? If so, then perhaps I'm wrong for assigning blame to DHH. Can you point me to some other interviews where the interviewee uses a well-known quote that's not his without some form of attribution?

Usually when people quote Greenspun's 10th Rule they cite it as such.

You quote Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and other Grecoroman philosophers all the time, and you don't even know it. Not to mention Shakespeare, Aesop, and even modern day people. (Inspiration vs perspiration, for example.) Many "sayings" have origins with a specific person who said or wrote it, in a documented fashion, even though they've slipped into common culture. Even new words, like "OK" and "bloodstained."

If people really want to bitch about David that much, there are much, much better grounds they can find than this.

who cares? Life is short. Choose your battles wisely.

A lot of people:

http://www.google.com/search?q=predict+future+create+-kay

And a number of sites have Lincoln saying it,

http://www.ehow.com/how_4415898_predict-your-future.html

I'm sure there are earlier varieties.

http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm

I highly doubt that DHH claimed to have originated this. The problem here is the proliferation of adspam quote sites that attribute whatever to anybody. This same quote is even attributed to Lincoln on a few of them.

Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sue/475/AlanKay.html

(Edit: I just saw that this was from a 2005 interview, so it can't be what you were referring to.)

"Meanwhile, how much has our nation's future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?"

http://www.worldofquotes.com/author/Theodore-Hook/1/index.ht...

http://www.archive.org/stream/choicehumorouswo00hook/choiceh...