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

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

#151

Post by bigDinosaur »

chairmansteve wrote: post #68
omnimus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.

You are right. But the real world is a messy place. Good people do bad things and vice versa. Not many people are entirely good or entirely bad. HN is a very strong net positive IMO. YC could easily monetize it into oblivion. They don't.

My understanding is that HN is monetized e.g. marketing is explicitly permitted by founders etc.

I guess that's not conventional monetisation.

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

#152

Post by hobs »

mrexcess wrote: post #121
hobs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs fucked over a lot of people and respected the machines. Woz dealt with the machines and respected the people.

>Jobs fucked over a lot of people Oft repeated, and not untrue, but very incomplete. Jobs also made a lot of people. A lot of fortunes in SilVal only exist because of Steve Jobs. He also virtually single handedly and without much fanfare at the time or credit in the history books created the employee compensation model that came to define SilVal success, with workaday employees and especially engineering contributors…

Sure, but he was cruel for no reason to many people who did not deserve it, I don't even care about his tech problems. Nobody should park in the handicap stalls without a license plate because he keeps leasing new cars.

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

#153

Post by davnicwil »

Peroni wrote: post #81
simonh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how did you go about organising this in terms of getting the word out? Did you just mention it a lot here, or via some other platforms too/instead?

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

#154

Post by unsupp0rted »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #104
high_na_euv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, at least works relibly across all platforms and devices unlike desktop frameworks? People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative

Literally anything is a good alternative to electron. One should prioritize the quality of the product, and use of electron gives the lowest quality product.

No, one should prioritize the quality of using the product to achieve the user's aims. Those are separate things.

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

#155

Post by boh144 »

Miraste wrote: post #139
p00dles wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do wonder if it's possible to be a brilliant marketer, and reach the levels Jobs did, without being an asshole. The core of the profession is learning how to manipulate and use people better than anyone else.

I believe that's what Isaacson tries to write about in the Jobs and Musk biographies, indirectly. He seems to think that being an asshole has nothing to do with being brilliant.

Personally, I think it has more to do with having an emotional hole. Creators who do so primarily for its own sake, be they musicians, visual artists, or coders, are different from those who want to rule the world. The latter may genuinely enjoy the craft, but it's often subordinate to the deeper need for validation (see: emotional hole). It's this need that makes people assholes, imo.

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

#156

Post by auggierose »

chairmansteve wrote: post #68
omnimus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.

You are right. But the real world is a messy place. Good people do bad things and vice versa. Not many people are entirely good or entirely bad. HN is a very strong net positive IMO. YC could easily monetize it into oblivion. They don't.

They arguably do. Just look at the valuation of YC. They are just being smart about it.

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

#157

Post by Aloha »

mrexcess wrote: post #121
hobs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs fucked over a lot of people and respected the machines. Woz dealt with the machines and respected the people.

>Jobs fucked over a lot of people Oft repeated, and not untrue, but very incomplete. Jobs also made a lot of people. A lot of fortunes in SilVal only exist because of Steve Jobs. He also virtually single handedly and without much fanfare at the time or credit in the history books created the employee compensation model that came to define SilVal success, with workaday employees and especially engineering contributors…

You are correct that jobs made a ton of people - and not just wealthy, he created an entire ecosystem around Apple, which made a large number of people vast sums of money.

That last part however.. is not actually true - Fairchild Semiconductor did it, and did it far before Apple did. I'd like to say intel (and a ton of others) did the same thing.

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

#158

Post by Peroni »

davnicwil wrote: post #153
Peroni wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how did you go about organising this in terms of getting the word out? Did you just mention it a lot here, or via some other platforms too/instead?

We'd announce it on here and on twitter but we managed it on meetup.com so if you were a part of the HN London meetup group, you got emailed every time the next event got announced.

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

#159

Post by mrexcess »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #145
mrexcess wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs. He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad.

> Everybody makes mistakes, and this is definitely a huge one to have made, and a sad aspect of his legacy, but if this is all you know about Steve Jobs, you don't know anything about Steve Jobs. > He made up with Lisa - to the extent one can after all that - in the end. And he raised three other kids, after becoming older and wiser as a dad. So about this, I remember watching pirates of silicon valley when I was in…

>But in the movie, I really didn't understand the rationale behind what he did to lisa.

Jobs was, by the accounts of everyone who knew him, almost singularly focused on doing what he did in the computer industry, by the time Lisa was conceived. His relationship with Lisa's mom, Chrisann Brennan, had begun during his wild-seed-sewing hippie days. My read on it is, he looked at the relationship with Chrisann as a remnant of a past he wanted to leave behind, and the potential relationship with Lisa as a sink for his energies that didn't fit the image he wished to concoct for himself.

Steve Jobs was a flawed human, like we all are. And like all of us, his flaws were inseparable from his strengths and achievements. As someone who didn't have to experience any of those direct flaws, I feel incredible gratitude for how his achievements changed my life and the world generally, and hope that those people he hurt can forgive him.

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

#160

Post by DataSpace »

I’ll share one of the few encounters I had with the Woz:

At age eight, I attended Steve’s 40th birthday party. My father was his insurance agent.

Steve had transformed his house in Almaden Valley into a playhouse. The attic spanning the entire footprint of the house was carpeted and filled with arcade games, Nintendo Entertainment Systems, snacks, and any fun a kid could imagine. You entered and exited via ladders built throughout the house, in various rooms.

In one room, “The Ball-oon Room,” the floor was filled from floor to ceiling with balloons.

Steve had a dinosaur cave constructed in his backyard that integrated into his pool and a pond. Glass viewing ports peered into the depths of the pond. A television embedded into the wall playing archaeology shows on loop, fossils in the walls.

Why? To learn. To play. To inspire. That’s who he is.

There were many extravagances at Steve’s 40th, like a stadium-quality stage erected on the hillside that could seat a few hundred.

The most memorable thing for me was the party gift: burgundy sunglasses with built-in flashing LEDs. As a little boy, that blew my mind and inspired me for a lifetime.

Videos exist.

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