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Comment by postalcoder

11 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.

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postalcoder

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omnimus  11 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  11 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  6 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  7 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  3 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.

ABCLAW  1 hour ago

I feel like this was more accurate a long time ago when the first rounds of YCombinator hopefuls were all piling in here and nerding out. The vibe, tone, and content has dramatically shifted towards the finance and ambition side of tech over the years.

direwolf20  9 hours ago

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

  • postalcoder  8 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  9 hours ago

Maybe Fabrice Bellard could be a candidate.

  • jdefr89  6 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.

Imustaskforhelp  26 minutes ago

I just watched a Ken Thompson interview when he's 80 years old.

My god jolly, I feel like Ken's the person you might be referring to.

Wozniak is great as well. Perhaps we (or people?) might affiliate him more with Hackernews given he was co-founder of a company which many founders within HN might want to achieve (or replicate?)

But the other way I view HN is a place of curiosity, a place of tinkering. I saw the interview of Ken Thompson and I don't know about you guys, but Ken Thompson talked in his interview about how when he was in between houses at a hotel when he was in high school, and there were girls who he used to wave at so he was half-way through to making essentially a pixelated device through which he could write letters (from what I remember from his interview)

I personally have done something similar although from a software side and not with a hardware side. But I feel like after 70 years, the transition from hardware to software is one which is understandable :)

I mean... Ken's 80 year old and really sharp. I only saw him thinking about things literally 70 year old just once almost like loading things into his mind at the start of interview and he was effortless afterwards talking about it.

I don't know enough about wozniak to qualify him for this

But what I can say was that today I was watching the Ken Thompson interview and literally after 15-30 minutes of the 4 hour interview. I was like, this belongs on hackernews and submitted it here. (Not sure if this counts as promotion but seriously everyone just watch this interview of Ken Thompson!)

Video link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793919] Kenneth Lane Thompson, 1983 ACM Turing Award Recipient (Video Interview)

SO I don't know if there's a particular reason why my HN submission about got literally 0 response after 8 hours or if because of it, Ken Thompson wouldn't qualify for it. But I am gonna be honest and say that in my mind, Ken Thompson's the legend which really embodies the HN spirit. Not sure if other parts of HN community also feel so but I still feel that they do even though there was no response on the HN post (could just be the timing at what I posted and many other things) but yea.

I highly recommend everyone to go watch the interview if you have 4-5 hours of free time right now.

mrexcess  3 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!