The negativity is disappointing. Anyone who shows interest in development, even those that don't code, should be encouraged as we wish to be encouraged. When we see products launched here on HN they are sometimes developed by other people than the heads of those companies. Do you attack them as well? A familiar one would be Digg. If someone had an idea for an autism app but not the skill and paid for its development would you be negative about it as well?<p>Yes I'm ranting, the older discussion linked herein was really ugly.
My dad (edit: now 76) went from a computer illiterate to someone that got completely sold on home automation through a couple of raspberry pi's. He has done lots of python stuff, and recently a bit of F#. The python is spaghetti code, but the F# actually looks better than what my colleagues write :D
I am if anything a critic of Rumsfeld and have called him the most overrated minister (his SID project is just one example of his unrealistic ideas) and it's easy to point fingers at the many damaging decisions he made in the Bush jr. administration. In other word I have nothing good to say about him.<p>But I have no idea what kind of problematic (and wrong) decisions I would have to do if I was in power and so isolated from that (which I have no problem with) this is just a fantastic and wonderful thing to read. I wish more of the older generation would enrich us with games, apps and other perspectives to counter what seems to be a very youth centric avalanche of location based dating apps and other young generation issues.<p>So props to Rumsfeld for never feeling too old to try new stuff.
If the author of this article were "Bob Smith", the HN readership reaction would be tepid at worst. Instead, everybody has brought political baggage to this discussion.<p>History will fairly judge Rumsfeld long after he (and most of us) are dead, and not on his app-creation career. That his new venture into a technical field can't be objectively judged (without involving his unrelated past) on a technical site is sad.