> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I would say the demographic of HN, being a plurality of American males, grew up watching football called by Madden or played videos games with his name on it.
There's a reason intellectual gratification is the bar and the goal for topicality, not emotional catharsis or pop-cultural notoriety. If simply being popular with American males became the standard, this place would degenerate into Reddit.
I think the occasional discussion of a notable person's death is an exception to the rule.
I think this would be a less controversial opinion if the deceased were a well known artist, but because Madden "only" is an icon to three generations of people by shaping the game of football and sports video games, it's too pedestrian.
I would argue John Madden is an important figure in tech history by endorsing one of the most popular video game franchises in the world, and moreover, one that brought video gaming into the mainstream.
It was one of the biggest things that put EA on the map in the 90s, and for better or worse EA is one of the most important companies in the game industry.
More specifically it was the lift off point for the entire EA Sports division which is notorious for its 2 decade aggressiveness in pursuing video game sports licensing.
no, it’s because he’s a white guy and kobe was not. note that it doesn’t require explicit racism, just implicit bias, to create such disparities (though it would be statistically unlikely that no explicit racists contributed to this state of affairs).
I'm a Black guy and very much of the activist mindset, but that's just not a reasonable comparison. The first John Madden Football came out in 1988, when Kobe was 10 years old.
Jordan vs. Bird came out that same year, which was a cool game. Michael Jordan had all the opportunity to be a better franchise maker, but AFAIK, the next effort he lent his name to was Chaos In The Windy City, and it simply wasn't a very good game, let alone a franchise. Jordan (and Shaq) were conspicuously absent from most NBA products, having negotiated video game rights prior to the NBA negotiating collectively. This is all from memory, so I may not be 100% on this.
I don't know if John Madden did anything particularly special or if he just got a bit lucky, but my point is he is embedded in tech history.
i wasn't denying that madden had a tech tie-in via a video game endorsement deal, but rather, noting that implicit racism plays a role in his memorialization being arbitrarily 'on-topic' and upvoted here as opposed to kobe, whose memorial posts were viciously suppressed. kobe had a tech investment fund in LA and was developing his own media/tech company, so he's arguably more connected to the tech industry despite he's notoriety largely coming from playing basketball.
madden indeed got lucky, as he didn't do much more than hawk his name & voice to EA. he wasn't personally developing or marketing the games, so his tie to tech is pretty tenuous.
