Devastatingly he fell ill just before his trip and had to withdraw. Fortunately we hadn't announced anything however I still mourn over the missed opportunity to be able to introduce this living legend to our audience!
My other airline celebrity encounter was Pauly Shore, who I was standing next to at the baggage carosel and thought to myself, "huh this guy sounds just like Pauly Shore" and lo - it was the man (and his entourage) himself. I always thought the voice was an affectation but nope he actually does talk like that. Woz was definitely more exciting to encouter!
HN is a very strong net positive IMO. YC could easily monetize it into oblivion. They don't.
https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
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...
Woz has always carried a near perfect approval rate in our community. I've never seen anyone come close.
I realize that’s a normative claim. Like the blind men and the elephant, we’re each touching a different part.
And your argument is based on the fact that you’d like this to be true as well as the fact that the vc company behind this site said, “Trust us bro!”
How is that different from the cow saying, “The farmer told us we’re walking through a fun maze!”
Computer science and computing was taught and done at universities long before Stallman and GNU came along. I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.
Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.
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.
Money would be made by each person regardless but this combination not only got more units to fly off the shelf, it got the company off to a more above-average likelihood of future products doing well with growth from there.
The longer that structure can be maintained, the better.
Most of the time a miraculous salesman or marketing strategist has an average to below-average product to represent, and they will still do very well.
So well in fact, that they themselves may never find out what the full upside would be if they had a product that actually was above-average enough for it to be able to sell on its own one way or another. And then act as a multiplier to that.
Through the roof can be hard to avoid then.
Same business plan I had as a preteen, way before Apple got going.
Jobs went on to start NeXT (which became modern Apple) and turned Pixar into a the studio that released Toy Story.
Jobs wasn’t just a salesman, he was a serial entrepreneur. His footnotes would be most people’s whole career. His talent wasn’t just sales, but also building teams of talented people and selling them on his vision.
https://medium.com/packt-hub/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf...
People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative
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.
This kind of misses out on a hierarchy of devs here and the amount of work to make it happen. Electron took a large chunk from a multi-billion dollar endeavor to use to make all this work. Electron only worked because Chrome was there. Chrome worked because Google already had unlimited money from advertising, and getting advertising on every device possible was their goal.
Devs might want light apps everywhere, but seemingly none are going to dedicate the rest of their life and money to make it work.
My point was, if enough people really considered this a big deal then at least one huge tech company might have invested in a solution that provides a lighter weight solution that's truely multiplatform (desktop and mobile).
I don't have much visibility on how decisions are made to maintain massive open-source infrastructure projects, and no doubt there are significant business case inputs to them, but they must be at least partially technical. So, as I see it, the lack of such things give insight that even developers don't prioritise them.
As I mentioned, Flutter is almost there and maybe its lack of uptake on desktop is just enough to show that there really isn't demand (though I expect the main reason is its use of the Dart programming language, which is very nice but quite niche).
Having sat in many a meeting, partially yes, but these things are massively expensive. There is an equation, How much would it cost us to write a replacement that covers what we need versus how much does it cost us to use what exists that isn't efficient.
And this is where you miss the biggest part of the problem. It's the end users that bear the biggest part of the costs. Yes, there is an internal cost for their own developers, but that is comparatively small to the costs of their paychecks.
The next comes to management of the lightweight solution over time. If it's owned by a company at the end of the day companies are rarely interested in lightweight, they are interested in making the most money and quite often that means adding more and more features to accomplish lock-in.
Open source is more likely to keep a project remaining light, but to do that it's quite often by not accepting bulky features that would make companies more money. So you see where the catch-22 situation starts to arise from.
Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.
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.
Secondly, I am not talking about some abstract SWEs in a vacuum. This is happening to real people I work with, whom I know to be very capable. The lure of switching off the brain and just clicking "Accept" to some LLM suggestion seems too strong to resist. :(
> if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes,
I'm going to assume the vast majority of code written does not look anything like this, but is dumb little chunks of glue for other important chunks, that are quite often imported from other libraries.
As someone that is not a SWE looking from the outside, I think there is a disconnect between what a SWE is told they are getting paid for and what a SWE is actually getting paid for by (many/most) businesses.
You are under the assumption you are getting paid for writing code. But for the vast majority of business that is just the icky bits getting ground up in the sausage factory that nobody wants to know about. Management above you only cares about what gets wrapped in casings and is ready to sell to the customer (either internal or external). They do not care if the product is technically good as long as they can sell it. For each individual person in the company becoming a better programmer is hard to measure and rarely rewarded by the company they work for. Turning out tons of lines of code and applications that have at least some semblance of working is far more likely to get you a pay raise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJexQjoMtk
(found on the blog of Cabel Sasser: https://cabel.com/woz-vs-wooz/)
Sounds a bit like Jimmy Carter. His best and most influential work came after he left The Oval Office.
I think his Habitat for Humanity work was pretty damn important.
So I would also say... the kinds of things we learn from Woz are concrete and we get immediate feedback if we learned them wrong.
It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.
Anyone who knows Apple knows who “Scott” is referring to. Scott Forstall.
EDIT: reading this again, now thinking you are right and they are just being snarky about the “one Woz in the world” existing.
"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.
For "Scott Apple" search string, Google agrees with me and the forstall guy is just a secondary mention.
Woz invented the consumer personal computer.
That is one of the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest.
“It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.