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?

To be fair, Woz wasn't just a “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”, he was also the co-founder of one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. And YC is, in their own words: "The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.". They're not entirely unrelated.

Woz is a primary figure in one of YC’s essential texts. He has always been revered here as a founder and as a human.

https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...

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.

"Tech Cofounder" who gets edged out before the next funding round.

i guess you mean ycombinator and not ycombinator… the combinator, which is very much the kind of hacker ethos this site (and pg’s idealized version of the entity) is supposed to embody.

Since when was HN about venture capital?

  Hacker news is designed for and targeted at hackers. In the sense of the word that means people who write code, not people who break into things. Other people with similar tastes also like it.

  Since it's run by YC and the initial users were mostly YC founders, there is inevitably a startup spin to the stories that are popular here. In fact the site was originally called Startup News. But it turned out to be boring to have so much of a startup focus, so we changed the name and the focus to be more general.

Also: https://web.archive.org/web/20070624055731/http://www.founde...

Obviously familiar with Fabrice Bellard and his technical contributions but it seems like he is a pretty private person and he keeps to himself. I don't really know much about him as a person.

Agree

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.

Without Stallman there wouldn't be GNU, so the operating system used to host this site and the majority of the web wouldn't exist. The compiler used to build that operating system wouldn't exist. The free software movement that later birthed its little cousin "open source" wouldn't exist, neither would the free culture movement to some extent. The ideals of the free software movement inspired the architects of the World Wide Web to make it a freely available technology, so without stallman the net would be vastly different, likely staying fragmented between different protocols like it used to be. Plus, the operating system you're using likely has some GNU stuff in it somewhere

You used to have to pay for UNIX just like you pay for Microsoft Windows

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 - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.

This. When Woz created the Apple I and Apple II, the entire microcomputer market consisted of hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists. Had Woz been acting alone, the Apple I and Apple II would have made a splash at Homebrew, but they wouldn't have been products. Jobs made them products. After VisiCalc, this market expanded to finance professionals, but it was still a tiny market. It was really Raskin and Jobs who proved the viability of the Xerox PARC (and SRI before them) advancements around the GUI that propelled computing to a more general audience. Then, MS caught up, dominated the market in the 1990s, and Apple came back only when Jobs returned and began pushing industrial design and OS X. From the point until quite recently, most companies R&D could have just been attending Apple product launches and imitating as best they could (that's hyperbolic, but not entirely incorrect).

I admire both and I find the push to Pick a Steve Team really irritating.

true. woz made a $900 universal remote in 1987. it could control 256 devices via IR and was programmable via PC at a time when you probably had 1 device in your house (with 7 channels.) Maybe 2 if you had a tape player. He clearly made it for himself and his sick component system.

> 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 people.

Woz was perfect for those in the home brew club and Steve (basically vagabond) had a different perspective on users. It was the perfect combo in hindsight.

I have chosen to go by "Take no heroes, only inspiration", and take different inspiration from both.

There were/are countless engineers which are very like Woz. Just that engineers are worse positioned to reap the rewards of commercial success so you rarely hear of them.

Even 7 zeros is pretty much you can do what you want anytime you want. Ten million dollars sitting in a bank account earning 3% is 25k a month and nobody with those kinds of assets is leaving them in a bank account earning 3%.

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.

Flutter / Dart? It's compiled ahead of time and doesn't use an embedded browser so I'd expect it to be a lot lighter, though I haven't measured.

But the general lack of really cross-platform (desktop + mobile + maybe web) ecosystems is just as much as sign that devs consider multi-gigabyte Electron apps "good enough" as the apps themselves.

Both "works" and "reliably" are doing some really heavy lifting there.

If you are willing to ignore accessibility, your statement is right.

Reliable as in "exposes the same bug across all platforms"?

[dead]

>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 the number of developers on HN is small versus the total number of developers.

Edit: I was copying code out of magazines to get games running without understanding anything about it when I was young.

Heh, I assumed he was referring to "Scott the Woz" Scott Wozniak, a vintage-gaming youtuber. I assumed that the GP took a more literal attack on "only one 'Woz'", hile you took a more symbolic "only one engineer of such quality". In the context of Apple, sure "Scott" is Scott Forstall, but that's not necessarily the context.

Woz is not just "some guy at apple". He's a force in his own right to the point of being bigger than Apple in some ways.

"Woz" is googlable. His name doesn't need context. "Larry" could be Ellison or Page. "Scott" could be Forstall or Adams.

Who played Scott Forstall in the movie?

Anyway, other comments proven it's not just me, too.

That's crazy because I assumed they were obviously talking about Apple's first CEO.

For "Scott Apple" search string, Google agrees with me and the forstall guy is just a secondary mention.

My first computer was an Apple IIGS and everything since then has been a Mac. "Scott" doesn't bring anyone specific to mind for me. Maybe that connection is automatic for newcomers who immediately think "iPhone" when they hear "Apple."