I once approached Woz about potentially speaking at Hacker News London, fully expecting my email to be completely ignored. A few days later, he actually responded enthusiastically and mentioned an upcoming trip to the UK. He loved the grassroots nature of the meetup and was really up for giving a talk (for free!) to the community. I then had multiple delightful interactions with his wife who managed his logistics.
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!
Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend, and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.
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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
Woz may embody the spirit of hacking but does he really embody the spirit of venture capital?
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...
I believed all the marketing and advertising copy that made me want to buy an Apple ][.
Look at the questions I'm replying to. They, in one way or another, asked me to draw a line between Woz and Ycombinator. That's what I did.
Woz has always carried a near perfect approval rate in our community. I've never seen anyone come close.
Maybe Fabrice Bellard could be a candidate.
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.
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=309siTvApbY
Hackernews discussion I submitted (Currently zero response after 8 hours tho) [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.
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!
To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way
Care to explain?
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.
Provided to whom ?
Most of that stuff was made available to universities and colleges as institutions, but not to individual students. Once you graduate, you have no effective (or legal) access to it anymore ...
Sure it was free (as in beer) but was it free (as in speech?) Could you modify and improve the compiler? If you did, could you redistribute it? Knowing bell labs, the answer is a definite no to the last one
That said the previous post.
>> remained in the domain of universities and industry
> I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.
Was the source available, and possible to modify it?
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
It's not revisionist. The entire NeXT codebase was literally compiled with GCC.
Linux is at most 88 percent of servers, since windows is only estimated to be used on 11% of servers and the other unices aren't used outside of very specific circumstances
It was developed on a proprietary system (free software can be commercial) and yes, various implementations were made on said proprietary systems, but there were always free ones like lynx (the oldest browser still in development). Plus, Tim Berners-Lee was likely inspired by the GNU and BSD projects when he made the protocol royalty free
You used to have to pay for UNIX just like you pay for Microsoft Windows
Woz is great, but I'd still go for Alan Kay.
Great mention of Alan Kay - however I enjoy hearing from them both. Both have an infectious enthusiasm for teaching and making things so dang simple. I enjoy coming back to their talks and learning something new
Everyone chooses the wrong Steve to worship.
If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs.
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.
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.
I do wonder if it's possible to be a brilliant marketer, and reach the levels Jobs did, without being an asshole. The core of the profession is learning how to manipulate and use people better than anyone else.
Jobs fucked over a lot of people and respected the machines. Woz dealt with the machines and respected the people.
You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.
As a person he didn’t want to recognize the daughter, if I remember correctly.
And still, when it comes to built-in accessibility, Jobs is pretty much famous for his "fuck ROI" statement. He set precedence around 2007, which eventually forced other players like Google and Microsoft to follow. These days, Talkback and Narrator are builtin for both OSes, which is mostly because Apple went there first. This move changed the lifes of a a few million people.
You need both though. You have to accept there are a certain amount of psychopaths in the world, and learn how to manage them
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.
When you look at it squarely, Jobs could have sold any average product and made money, and Woz' product was so far above average it could have sold on its own (to a more limited extent), with each unit sold making money either way.
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.
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.
I have chosen to go by "Take no heroes, only inspiration", and take different inspiration from both.
> 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.
Worshiping Woz is cool, but like the article says, there's only one Woz. And chances are you're nothing like Woz or Jobs. But Ballmer? That's someone I can look to emulate.
https://medium.com/packt-hub/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf...
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.
People who worship Jobs helped make sure of that
You could argue that Apple would exist without Wozniak, but it would definitely not without Jobs.
I worship both thank you very much.
I was behind Woz in Heathrow security a few years back. I was taken aback he’d just be in the regular airport security line given he’s probably worth 1B+. I asked him if he was who I thought he was (he was wearing a face mask, but it was printed with a picture of his own face on it so I wasn’t sure). He said yes and asked if I wanted to take a selfie. Very humble dude.
I think his net worth is probably a couple of orders of magnitude lower https://swipefile.com/steve-wozniak-co-founder-of-apple-on-h...
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%.
My dad was Woz's RA in the Berkeley dorms. He often tells this story:
One night, dad was on duty, probably smoking pot with his student residents.
The phones all stop working.
So dad goes down to the maintenance closet, opens it up... and sure enough, there's Woz digging around the building's phone wiring. Woz immediately says "I'll fix it, I'll fix it!!".
He was down there installing one of those phreaking devices for free long-distance phone calls for everyone in the dorms.
My dad let him do his thing.
It’s a stark contrast to today's mindset where we often just throw more resources at the problem. His obsession with elegance over features is something I try to keep in mind, even if it's harder in modern web dev. " Let's make it shorter and punchier. "Woz's floppy disk controller design is still the gold standard for doing in software what competitors needed a whole board of chips to do. That kind of obsession with elegance over brute force is exactly what's missing in modern engineering.
modern engineering is launching an electron to-do list app that uses 2gb of ram.
Which, at least works relibly across all platforms and devices unlike desktop frameworks?
People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative
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.
VS Code is a fantastic Electron app
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.
True, not every dev has the power of a multi-billion dollar company behind them. But a few do.
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).
Both "works" and "reliably" are doing some really heavy lifting there.
Reliable as in "exposes the same bug across all platforms"?
Probably not much about Electron itself, but it seems to lead to buggy applications.
If you are willing to ignore accessibility, your statement is right.
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What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.
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.
>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.
Really what you're saying is it is an issue of quantity.
> 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.
Created by an llm using a super computer cluster haha.
Then they justify it because they vibe-coded a proof of concept in Tauri, and it was even worse.
Had to let this here: A TV clip on YouTube of an episode of “That’s Incredible”, featuring Apple co-founder Stephen “Woz” Wozniak (aged 38) running through a maze and nearly winning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJexQjoMtk
(found on the blog of Cabel Sasser: https://cabel.com/woz-vs-wooz/)
It's kinda funny... In '89 a friend and I were talking about starting a startup like the two Steve's (we didn't know about Ron Wayne back then.) We both knew exactly what Woz did, but were a bit sketchy on Jobs role in the early days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jobs was a layabout, only that the strengths he brought to the table were more abstract.
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.
Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do".
It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other.
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.
> his post-Apple life has mattered in ways that have nothing to do with money or power.
Sounds a bit like Jimmy Carter. His best and most influential work came after he left The Oval Office.
Maybe best, but suerly not most influential.
I guess it depends on people’s priorities. He won that Nobel for some stuff he did in office, but probably more for his peacemaking efforts, afterwards.
I think his Habitat for Humanity work was pretty damn important.
he's also not afraid to speak out
I learned some very bad jokes from him.
That “but” needs to be an “and”.
Only one Woz? What about Scott?
As someone who never heard Steve Wozniak being called "Woz", Scott was the only Woz on my mind.
There would be no Scott were it not for Woz (or even Avi.)
The fact that you have to be more specific than "Scott" says a lot.
That’s more likely just you.
Anyone who knows Apple knows who “Scott” is referring to. Scott Forstall.
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.
I could be wrong then if that was their reference. I was in the mindset of foundational Apple leaders, not other Woz’s outside the Apple hemisphere.
EDIT: reading this again, now thinking you are right and they are just being snarky about the “one Woz in the world” existing.
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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.
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."
It would make sense that people on the inside would be a lot more aware of him. Forstall was obviously a pretty big name in the community but not to the point of getting a shorthand name like that. And he was mostly forgotten pretty quickly after he left.
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.
For me he will always be “Scotty”. “Scott” at Apple will almost always imply Scott Forstall.
Coincidentally one of the earliest Apple I prototypes ends its auction tomorrow if you have over $500K to spare:
I find it amusing people still port in WozMon for modern 6502 trainer hobby machines. =3
People are crediting Woz here with great things but not going far enough.
Woz invented the consumer personal computer.
That is one of the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest.
Well, that's a highly contested claim. There was quite a bit of prior art.
>Woz invented the consumer personal computer.
Definitely had a hand in it. If you want to dime out the singular technical innovation that Woz contributed that really changed everything, IMO it was figuring out how to make the Apple II do color on the cheap. That was the real competitive differentiator at the time that made personal computers attractive to consumers, and cheap enough to contemplate for folks without a garage full of electronics equipment.
Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote
“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.
As far as I know, Don never had a computer and the Mark-8 used LEDs.
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For me, anyone who is involved in FOSDEM in any way deserves more respect (regarding revolutionary things we can learn)
You can just go to FOSDEM, it's open entry. If you're in Brussels this weekend.
I saw him at a meetup in the south bay years ago. Definitely kind spoken and generous in answering questions. It was a highlight for me after moving to the bay area.
Woz is the man
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I sat next to him in business class on a flight back from Poland to the SF a few years ago and he was so gracious, talking with and taking photos with all his seatmates. I just wanted to sleep because I was coming back from a conference and I was actually annoyed with all the "fanfare" around him which was loud and kept everyone up! It must have been hard for him to constantly deal with. He was super nice though and made time for everyone who wanted to chat with him.
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!
I once had sushi (at a group table) with the man at a JavaOne.
They say "don't meet your heroes", but he was exactly as gracious, humble, funny, and knowledgeable as you would expect.
This was just after the first "Embedded Java" specs came out and we all had grand fun recognizing the over-engineering and dead-on-arrival of that architecture.
I didn't know there is a HN meetup in LDN. How do I join up?
Unfortunately we shut it down when COVID hit. I think there's a smaller, less formal HN meetup still happening occasionally but I'm not affiliated with it.