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.
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.
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.
"Tech Cofounder" who gets edged out before the next funding round.
Maybe Fabrice Bellard could be a candidate.
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.
Do you believe all marketing and advertising copy that you read?
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.
Sorry, I was replying to the person who said, “Since when was HN about venture capital?” The answer to that is obviously since its inception. It’s like watching those weird flying contraption contests and asking, “Since when is Red Bull about energy drinks?”
[deleted]
Oh wait that was me. I mean, yes you're right that vc and startups are inextricable. But I’d argue their underlying spirit isn’t the same.
I realize that’s a normative claim. Like the blind men and the elephant, we’re each touching a different part.
> But I’d argue their underlying spirit isn’t the same.
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!”
I may have overthought this and wandered into territory I don’t actually have strong convictions about. My original impulse was simply to show some love for Woz.
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.
Jobs dealt with people and respected the machines. Woz dealt with machines and respected the people.
Jobs fucked over a lot of people and respected the machines. Woz dealt with the machines and respected the people.
The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.
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
I admire both and I find the push to Pick a Steve Team really irritating.
Both, the sum is greater than the parts. Neither of them would be there without the other.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
>at 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.
Reliable as in "exposes the same bug across all platforms"?
If you are willing to ignore accessibility, your statement is right.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I learned some very bad jokes from him.
Coincidentally one of the earliest Apple I prototypes ends its auction tomorrow if you have over $500K to spare:
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.
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.
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/...
"Tech Cofounder" who gets edged out before the next funding round.
Maybe Fabrice Bellard could be a candidate.
Woz may embody the spirit of hacking but does he really embody the spirit of venture capital?
Since when was HN about venture capital?
- pg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648199)Also: https://web.archive.org/web/20070624055731/http://www.founde...
Do you believe all marketing and advertising copy that you read?
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.
Sorry, I was replying to the person who said, “Since when was HN about venture capital?” The answer to that is obviously since its inception. It’s like watching those weird flying contraption contests and asking, “Since when is Red Bull about energy drinks?”
Oh wait that was me. I mean, yes you're right that vc and startups are inextricable. But I’d argue their underlying spirit isn’t the same.
I realize that’s a normative claim. Like the blind men and the elephant, we’re each touching a different part.
> But I’d argue their underlying spirit isn’t the same.
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!”
I may have overthought this and wandered into territory I don’t actually have strong convictions about. My original impulse was simply to show some love for Woz.
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.
Jobs dealt with people and respected the machines. Woz dealt with machines and respected the people.
Jobs fucked over a lot of people and respected the machines. Woz dealt with the machines and respected the people.
The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.
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
I admire both and I find the push to Pick a Steve Team really irritating.
Both, the sum is greater than the parts. Neither of them would be there without the other.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
>at 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.
Reliable as in "exposes the same bug across all platforms"?
If you are willing to ignore accessibility, your statement is right.
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.
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.
> 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.
he's also not afraid to speak out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-f3qZVcWM
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.
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.
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.
I learned some very bad jokes from him.
Coincidentally one of the earliest Apple I prototypes ends its auction tomorrow if you have over $500K to spare:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605420
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 find it amusing people still port in WozMon for modern 6502 trainer hobby machines. =3
Woz is the man
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.
[dead]