Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 166 posts

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#81

Post by Peroni »

simonh wrote: post #80
Peroni wrote: post #56

I once approached Woz about potentially speaking at Hacker News London, fully expecting my email to be completely ignored. A few days later, he actually responded enthusiastically and mentioned an upcoming trip to the UK. He loved the grassroots nature of the meetup and was really up for giving a talk (for free!) to the community. I then had multiple delightful interactions with his wife who managed his logistics. De…

I didn't know there is a HN meetup in LDN. How do I join up?

Unfortunately we shut it down when COVID hit. I think there's a smaller, less formal HN meetup still happening occasionally but I'm not affiliated with it.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#82

Post by al_borland »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #71
fragmede wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both, the sum is greater than the parts. Neither of them would be there without the other.

When you look at it squarely, Jobs could have sold any average product and made money, and Woz' product was so far above average it could have sold on its own (to a more limited extent), with each unit sold making money either way. Money would be made by each person regardless but this combination not only got more units to fly off the shelf, it got the company off to a more above-average likelihood of future product…

Woz took the Apple 1 to HP to see if they wanted it, since he was working there at the time. They passed on it. It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby.

Jobs went on to start NeXT (which became modern Apple) and turned Pixar into a the studio that released Toy Story.

Jobs wasn’t just a salesman, he was a serial entrepreneur. His footnotes would be most people’s whole career. His talent wasn’t just sales, but also building teams of talented people and selling them on his vision.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#83

Post by mghackerlady »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #2

Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend , and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.

To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#84

Post by checker659 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #83
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #2

Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend , and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.

To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way

Care to explain?

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#85

Post by aix1 »

pixl97 wrote: post #70
aix1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break. Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.

>without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break. You are living in a past, but one much farther back than you expect. People were copying code from SO since it became popular. People are including node modules blindly before AI. Most developers suck, terribly. Maybe being on HN is a type of filter that shows you're just a little bit better than the average, but th…

First of all, that's a very different sort of thing compared to blindly taking reams of code from an LLM. The amounts of code in a given SO answer or a magazine article are tiny and the code has undergone review of one sort or another. Similarly, if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, that's quite likely to be better quality than what I -- or most folks -- can code up in a comparable amount of time. It's also an opportunity to learn by studying the code and the method.

Secondly, I am not talking about some abstract SWEs in a vacuum. This is happening to real people I work with, whom I know to be very capable. The lure of switching off the brain and just clicking "Accept" to some LLM suggestion seems too strong to resist. :(

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#86

Post by pixl97 »

Tor3 wrote: post #45
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #21

It's kinda funny... In '89 a friend and I were talking about starting a startup like the two Steve's (we didn't know about Ron Wayne back then.) We both knew exactly what Woz did, but were a bit sketchy on Jobs role in the early days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jobs was a layabout, only that the strengths he brought to the table were more abstract. So I would also say... the kinds of things we learn from Woz…

Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do". It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.

At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other.

With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#87

Post by volkercraig »

checker659 wrote: post #84
mghackerlady wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way

Care to explain?

Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#88

Post by simonh »

p00dles wrote: post #34
Aloha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs. Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer. The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal…

They were both brilliant, but from everything that I've read, Jobs was an ass****, and Woz was the opposite, and that is a huge, huge difference. The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc. To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results…

I'm not sure what to believe. I know he was incredibly demanding, and I've heard the stories, but he also inspired a lot of loyalty and commitment from plenty of very talented engineers who were not short of other options.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#89

Post by microtherion »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #74
microtherion wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.

You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.

You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor.

Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.

Re: There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

#90

Post by pavlov »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #2

Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend , and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.

Woz is great, but I'd still go for Alan Kay.
Post reply on HN