Not OP, but I sense perhaps a limitation of HN; articles with comments where the comment is the submission get conflated with submissions about the article itself.
Reproducing the subject matter of the submission for discussion's sake:
dionyziz says:
I think Moxie decided not to be recorded for his acceptance speech. He said something very nice during his speech however, and I'll try to phrase it like he did:
If you watch videos of politicians giving speeches in the 1930's, you observe the fascist leaders who gladly accept an applause from the audience because they have earned it. They feel they are responsible for it, that they are the creators of history. On the contrary, if you observe a communist leader, they will applaud with the audience in every chance. This is because they have a different belief system, that of historical materialism, that history is a force of its own, unstoppable and inevitable, that drives what is happening in the world equipped with the momentum of what has happened in the past. These leaders feel they are simply the bearer of history, the tool that history chose to run its course, so they applaud together with the audience for history.
Similarly, today, we have a similar force, and that is technology. I once had the chance to meet Mark Zuckerberg. When I met him, a thought occurred to me: I could, right there... kill him. [audience laughs] I never thought I would get so close. But would that really change anything? Us technologists are the bearers of technological momentum. We make things happen, because the time has come for them to happen. And now is the time for strong encryption and crypto.
Applauding with the audience may have been meant as a sign of humility or marxist fatalism. However, by Occam's razor, it comes across as what it looks like: the speaker applauding himself.
Applauding with an audience is not a part of a communist leader repertoire. Neither Brezhnev, Khruschev nor Stalin applauded with an audience. They always accepted the ovations for themselves. I suspect it might be different in China, but even then it has less to do with a philosophical view on how history unfolds and more with demonstrating fake humility to the crowd.
You might have read it backwards: the message was very humble. Moxie was saying that he didn't deserve credit for what he had built, because if he had not built it someone else would have. So his work was best thought of as a product of history, rather than a product of Moxie.
On the contrary, while it conveys some difficult ideas, I find it quite humble to acknowledge that one's individual contribution to technology is not an act of genius but of inevitability.
I think we must have read two different speeches, because the one I read was Moxie stating that the invention of Signal was an inevitability, not him taking credit for it. But then it kind of sounds like you have an axe to grind on this topic?
The Levchin Award recipients are determined by the RWC Steering Committee, which this year was Dan Boneh, Aggelos Kiayias, Brian LaMacchia, Kenny Paterson, Tom Ristenpart, Tom Shrimpton, and Nigel Smart.
I think we can safely assume Moxie's popularity on HN had very little to do with persuading these people.
(EDIT: the submission's URL has now been changed from a particular reddit comment at https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin... to a different announcement about the prize. The rest of my post as it originally stood follows.)
Reproducing the subject matter of the submission for discussion's sake:
dionyziz says:
I think Moxie decided not to be recorded for his acceptance speech. He said something very nice during his speech however, and I'll try to phrase it like he did:
If you watch videos of politicians giving speeches in the 1930's, you observe the fascist leaders who gladly accept an applause from the audience because they have earned it. They feel they are responsible for it, that they are the creators of history. On the contrary, if you observe a communist leader, they will applaud with the audience in every chance. This is because they have a different belief system, that of historical materialism, that history is a force of its own, unstoppable and inevitable, that drives what is happening in the world equipped with the momentum of what has happened in the past. These leaders feel they are simply the bearer of history, the tool that history chose to run its course, so they applaud together with the audience for history.
Similarly, today, we have a similar force, and that is technology. I once had the chance to meet Mark Zuckerberg. When I met him, a thought occurred to me: I could, right there... kill him. [audience laughs] I never thought I would get so close. But would that really change anything? Us technologists are the bearers of technological momentum. We make things happen, because the time has come for them to happen. And now is the time for strong encryption and crypto.
[audience applauds together with Moxie]