Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiloreux | Hacker News Reader

One thing still bothers me as a techie is that the death of Steve Jobs ranked first, and Dennis Ritchie 8th, I know that Hacker News is about business as it's about tech, but I just think that the contributions of Dennis Ritchie to our modern world compared to Steve Jobs are much bigger, I hope they both rest in peace.

View on HN

It's indisputable that Steve Jobs is more of a household name than Dennis Ritchie, even among techies, it's likely that Jobs and his accomplishments are more well-known. The other thing to consider is that Ritchie lived a fairly full life, reaching the age of 70. Steve Jobs died at 56. More importantly, he died while basically at his peak...Apple had surpassed Exxon to become the world's most valuable company in 2011, and by all accounts, Jobs still had plenty of ideas and initiatives. So there's a special amount of tragedy involved with Jobs.

There are a lot of unsung engineers and scientists who were happy to keep out of the public eye. One of the things that Jobs did well was publicize himself and make his ideas and opinions known -- and undoubtedly, his attitude and drive pushed Apple to success...coincidentally, such a characteristic gets more notice...so it shouldn't be a surprise that Jobs's death hits more people.

I'm a critic of Jobs, especially his legend, as much as someone respects him. Yet, your comment rings true to my ears. Good summary.

You are reading too much into votes/karma :-).

Or that either of them would likely have cared what their ranking was on HN.

Whether or not you agree with it - the fact of the matter is that Steve Jobs inspired many more people than Dennis Ritchie did. This comment is not meant as an affront to Ritchie, but simply as an explanation for why you should not be "bothered." Get bothered over poverty and disease, not pop culture.

Well, you can argue that a couple of ways. From the business side, Steve Jobs built the largest company in the world that brings together tens of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars to produce tech products used by hundreds of millions of people. That's no small feat.

Larry and Serge have done a similar feat with Google, for example. Hopefully, Elon is on his way with Tesla and SpaceX.

I really don't want to have a nerd fight over Steve Jobs, I just want to make the point that by being a business leader, one can have a much larger impact than by being the smartest nerd in the room.

Jobs did that by good marketing and design plus use of sweatshops, lockin tactics, legal attacks on outside innovators, and hoarding of most cash results. The latter are a common way to make lots of money. The great design and marketing let him make more than the rest. The only real impact, though, is in a few areas: inspiring people to put desktops into phones (big one); lockin of those (another big contribution); one company's, balance sheet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com