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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the reactions on HN in general have been kind of underwhelming compared to Steve Jobs for reasons I can understand although for me Ian's death has hit harder than Steve's. My guess is that many here are young, mostly devs that have been using Mac all their dev life and before that windows. For the older folks who do dev ops or were around in the 90's and early 2000's and who cared about free software, Debian really had a huge impact on us and so we feel more sad about Ian's death than the rest.

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I don't know. I'm only 26. Still it hit me harder than Jobs' death. I used to own a PowerBook in high school / first uni year. At that time I was already using Debian on my servers. Since then I also use it on my laptops.

I chose Debian because it is technically awesome, and also because it is politically awesome. Be it the Debian manifesto, Debian's social contract, Debian Free Software Guidelines, the way the Debian project is organized (e.g., the use of the Schulze/Condorcet method for electing the project leader), etc. All of this is the result of the work of the many people in the project/community that Murdock created with his ideals.

I thought that would count for something for everyone, especially among HN folks.

I worked closely with him at Progeny, and I've long admired Apple and Steve Jobs. Both deaths hit me pretty hard.

Ian reminded me a bit of Steve; he had a similar ability to look a few steps ahead, anticipate technology trends, and he was quite charismatic.

Orthogonal to the above: I remember when Ian first got an iPod and started downloading music from iTunes. He was astonished at the convenience. "How has no one done this before?" is nearly an exact quote.

Steve Jobs is more famous and thus known by more people. I use Apple products on a daily basis and I use Debian only once in a while. Yet I feel more sad about Ian's death.

And while many Mac users attribute their OS to Steve Jobs, I bet most Ubuntu users never heard about Ian (or Mark Shuttleworth for that matter).

Looking at the subthread spawned from this comment, I'm partial to flagging all of it. Some of your responders may end up later regretting the things they said.

Seriously, comparing two deaths like this is not a good idea, not when it's so fresh. Both Ian and Steve impacted the computing world in a huge, if different way, and both deaths are tragic. We've honored Steve Jobs then, this is the hour of honoring Ian Murdock. Black bar be damned.

We can sort out who did more for the world later.

The very glue within the majority of HNers' effort here is money. Jobs represented $$$$$, Ian's Debian is free.

lots of money has been made on top of debian.

The development community still respects FOSS.

Therefore, HN does not really represent the development community. More like javascript hipsters.

Please hang out here for a bit longer and get to know the place before deciding what community does HN represent.

I had been a lurker for ~2 years and a registered user for ~3 years, so about ~5 years in total. I don't believe that HN adequately represents either independent developers, non-corporate FOSS community or web developers ("JS hipsters").

My only problem with representation here is that if you have differing opinions than one of the other groups, you get downvoted into oblivion. Hell, saying anything that goes remotely against the tide gets you downvoted.

I can understand what he means though, because most people that downvote me are "JS hipsters." Since these people comment the most, they have the ability to control the conversation, and thus leave a larger visible proportion of representation.

Everyone has this policing tone, too, and it's obnoxious.

Nah, one has to learn to stop caring about downvotes that much. You can very well express contrarian views on HN, and yes, you sometimes have to pay the price in blood^H^H^H^H^Hkarma. Like with all worthy causes. What matters is that people will engage your argument constructively, if you write it in a substantial and civil way.

Case in point: only yesterday 'miguelrochefort had the guts to post advocating a completely contrarian view on privacy[0]. That particular comment, predictably, got downvoted, but it didn't stop a thoughtful discussion from spawning. As long as this happens, HN serves its purpose.

Also, how do you know that people who downvote you are "JS hipsters" and not someone else? :).

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=miguelrochefort

My ultimate paranoia is that they are part Lua hipster like me. My own kind downvoting me.

I can imagine. Getting into a disagreement about programming with another Lisper is something that would break my heart.

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