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1401 points alankay | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
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_ayv0 ◴[] No.11939963[source]
Hi Alan,

I have three questions -

1. If you were to design a new programming paradigm today using what we have learnt about OOP what would it be?

2. With VR and AR (Hololens) becoming a reality (heh) how do you see user interfaces changing to work better with these systems? What new things need to be invented or rethought?

3. I also worked at Xerox for a number of years although not at PARC. I was always frustrated by their attitude to new ideas and lack of interest in new technologies until everyone else was doing it. Obviously businesses change over time and it has been a long time since Xerox were a technology leader. If you could pick your best and worst memories from Xerox what would they be?

Cheers for your time and all your amazing work over the years :)

replies(2): >>11940061 #>>11941800 #
alankay1 ◴[] No.11941800[source]
Let me both acknowledge your questions, and also acknowledge that this forum (the media authoring tools) are not in scale with the needed answers ...
replies(1): >>11942090 #
_ayv0 ◴[] No.11942090[source]
Perhaps a reddit AMA would be better? They have much more flexible/powerful comment system.

Edit: Not sure why I am getting down voted for making a suggestion. Oh well.

replies(2): >>11942174 #>>11942435 #
1. jensv ◴[] No.11942174[source]
Or maybe a Quora session.
replies(1): >>11942433 #
2. alankay1 ◴[] No.11942433[source]
A lot more good activity here than on Quora ...
replies(1): >>11942482 #
3. codinghorror ◴[] No.11942482[source]
Quora has some onerous policies, unfortunately: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/453958676529696769

HN is an excellent venue, but is necessarily text oriented, which is an OK tradeoff I think.

My next project after Stack Overflow, Discourse, is an 100% open source, flexible multimedia-friendly discussion system. It's GPL V2 on the code side, but we also tried to codify Creative Commons as the default license in every install, so discussion replies belong to the greater community: https://discourse.org

(Surprisingly, the default content licenses for most discussion software tend to be rather restrictive.)

replies(3): >>11944038 #>>11944253 #>>11944254 #
4. reitanqild ◴[] No.11944038{3}[source]
Still there seems to be only a sandbox install. Why can't we have discourse just like stackoverflow just with technical discussions allowed instead of attacked by both mods and the rules.
5. discordianfish ◴[] No.11944253{3}[source]
Could you afterwards build a discussion Platform to find (partial) agreement in various political etc topics? That seems like it would have huge impact and is really missing.. thought about starting something like that but never got to it.