Is there some kind of voting ring for all of the blog posts in this style? How is this lame-o piece at #2 on the front page? It seems that the posts with this theme have been on the front page a whole lot lately.
Bah. Hacker News is not some sacred vault. It is a news aggregator for gods sake. And I am glad to have seen this short, sweet blog post. So I voted for it, in the hopes that others see it and enjoy it too :)
(Eek, sorry to call your post lame-o. No offense intended! It's just.. well, you know what I mean. It's a quote from another page and link. But, yes, I see your point.
Dude, you gotta show some backbone - you started to apologize as soon as Dustin replied on your comment. If you think the post is lame, say it out loud, nothing embarrassing if you have your own opinion, and as far as I see, you didn't insult anyone.
It is lame-o, and you can say that to his face. It's this comment[1] and other distilled thoughts from the thread, essentially, in blog post form and resubmitted to HN. "Accomplished" just became "determined". PageRank at work, here, folks.
I also don't think this is because of new users or anything. This post is ranked 1 on http://news.ycombinator.com/classic, which supposedly only hosts links upvoted by users who joined HN in the first year.
I liked it. Sometimes you don't have to say much to make great point. Sometimes the scope of an interesting thing sparks great discussion. I up-voted it with the expectation that the HN discussion on this was going to be informative, but not yet.
Frankly, I have no idea who he is, and I tend to respect opinions more if they're based in real experiences rather than observation (not to say I don't respect well-argued opinions from observation, it's just relative). It's a mystery to dig into who he is, too, and the best I've been able to find is this:
Which just says, vaguely, that he's a neuroscience student who "put his degree on hold". Anybody know who this guy is, and why his opinion is this important to HN and 35,000 Twitter followers? Honestly, I'm just curious. Is this guy some kind of valley culture icon? I've noticed the same trend of all of his posts hitting the front page of HN.
[Since you're in this thread, now: Dustin, a quick "who I am" page which isn't a million pixels wide and describes more about yourself and your goals would go a long way toward credibility. Unless you're a pseudonym, and I respect that (look at my username), but your about page leads me to believe otherwise.]
The first time I heard of him was when he redesigned the American Airlines website. http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html
He's a good designer and I tend to read what he says because svbtle is just so nice to look at. I suspect that 99% of my decision of whether or not to read something has to do with how easy it is to read it.
This is a clip from a 60 Minutes interview. The amount of passion and determination in this clip, is absolutely breathtaking. http://youtu.be/H3u0IIQj6FY?t=11m13s
The fact that he chokes up and finds it difficult that Neil Armstrong has testified against his work makes him so human and makes me respect him so much more.
I really hope he gets an apology from Neil Armstrong and other critics if (when) SpaceX actually delivers on its promises. It must be very tough to even have your heroes root against you, and like you say it shows a lot about what you stand for.
SpaceX Dragon becoming the only US means of successfully delivering cargo to the ISS and moving the US away from dependence on Russia was not seriously significant?
I don't know. Maybe. But he doesn't seem nearly agile enough. He seems to be hellbent on a single goal: get to space on the cheap. I don't think he's ever going to be able to pivot away from that.
"The master isn't the one who knows all there is to know about a subject, but the one who has made a commitment to practice and improve his knowledge of the art every single day from here on."
/tinfoil hat