Comment by postalcoder

10 hours ago

I can't think of a single person who embodies the spirit of this site more than Woz. dang could replace the guidelines with a picture of Woz and we'd all know what it meant.

22 comments

postalcoder

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omnimus  10 hours ago

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”.

  • SkyMarshal  9 hours ago

    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.

    • al_borland  5 hours ago

      He was a cofounder because of his skill and Jobs talking him into it. Woz would have been perfectly happy as an engineer at HP, that was his plan.

      1 reply →

  • chairmansteve  5 hours ago

    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.

  • keeganpoppen  2 hours ago

    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.

direwolf20  8 hours ago

Woz may embody the spirit of hacking but does he really embody the spirit of venture capital?

  • postalcoder  7 hours ago

    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.

    - pg (https://web.archive.org/web/20070624055731/http://www.founde...

aembleton  7 hours ago

Maybe Fabrice Bellard could be a candidate.

  • jdefr89  5 hours ago

    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.

mrexcess  2 hours ago

While I adore Woz - Apple fanboy from way back - it's a bit unusual for an aggregator and discussion site to "embody the spirit" of a guy who says that he hates business and politics, and doesn't like participating in discussions involving disagreement.

I can certainly see why he would be the "model employee" of the new tech elite/political class, though, and what they desperately want all of us to be! Sit down, shut up, and get back to work!