Comment by omnimus
10 days 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”.
10 days 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”.
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.
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.
He wasn't entirely unworldly though. He didn't like BASIC as a language, but he gave the Apple I and II a BASIC capable of running the programs from Ahl's BASIC Computer Games because that's what the market was demanding.
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.
My understanding is that HN is monetized e.g. marketing is explicitly permitted by founders etc.
I guess that's not conventional monetisation.
They arguably do. Just look at the valuation of YC. They are just being smart about it.
They do not monetize but may do probably something worse, infotize or narratize (just invented words). By using an almost neutral, altruistic platform to subtly control/constrain the narratives on certain tech overlords. As much as I love HN, I do not agree with their reasoning to flag some of the posts that are negative to the tech elites.
"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.