Da Vinci – Overrated? | Hacker News Reader

Da Vinci – Overrated?

bedelstein.com

11 pointsbze1236 comments

This reads almost as a parody of tech entrepreneurship and the modern age. Steve Jobs is more praiseworthy than da Vinci, because he "shipped" products for the consumer market, as compared to da Vinci, who was more interested in artistic and scientific knowledge for its own sake? Is this legitimately what the author thinks?

The post is also wrong/misinformed on a number of things. Da Vinci did intend to build a number of his plans, but was thwarted by the fact that he lived in conflict-ridden Renaissance Italy. For example, his design for a gigantic bronze horse never became a reality as his patron used the bronze for making cannons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_horse

Yeah, it's not like we have Steve Jobs' notebooks to be able to know and compare all of the projects he worked on that never saw the light of day. Apple is notoriously a very secretive company. We often don't find out about canned projects until a decade later.

Nobody ships everything they work on. This is a creators' myth that I don't know why keeps getting perpetuated.

I think the entire argument is absurd. Da Vinci did ship - he created hundreds of artworks and by any measure (other than money) achieved more than Jobs - and I say that as a fan of Steve Jobs.

Agreed completely. The proof is in the pudding. Da Vinci has had a massively lasting impact on human culture. 500 years later, we still talk about him.

Not considering the fact that Steve Jobs never thought about and never built something durable.

Da Vinci, among many other things, built some of the Milanese navigli which are still there for the people to enjoy almost 6 centuries later

I live on one of them (Naviglio della Martesana) and it's beautiful

http://www.aboutmilan.com/navigli-of-leonardo-milan.html

It seems like a thought piece meant to elicit consideration, and nothing more. People take these things far too seriously and immediately want to have a position.

“ It’s so commonly said that Leonardo was “ahead of his time” but that’s only because he didn’t let the world catch up to his mind. Leonardo never built the future, but we still exaggerate as if he did. Sure, his ideas had significant influence over future inventors, but there’s much more to innovation than sketches on paper.”

It seems a provocative piece looking for attention. We are talking about it because it’s extreme position, not for its insights.

I hope the author reviews his article and does a second take with a more informed and critical opinion.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_inventions_of_Leon...

I was going to say the same, that this was peak HN to even dare to make such a comparison. Then I saw the author is a kid just graduated from college in engineering and "entrepreneurship". Hopefully there is plenty of time for him to learn and mature.

And he wasn't a nobleman. Much of his letter writing railed about his being abused and belittled by the aristocracy for being a commoner. Hard to get any traction that way.

Comparing Steve Jobs to Da Vinci? There is no appropriate comparison here. You think Da Vinci should have 'shipped more'? So often people think they can pick and choose characteristics, why can't you be more like this, or that, or sure Micheal Jordan was good, but he would have been better if he was nice. It's the naive, arrogant picking apart of things that we just don't understand and it stunts our understanding of things. Try and learn from great artists maybe rather than believing we have some insight into how they could have been 'better', more 'productive'. I'm completely baffled at the idea that Da Vinci didn't contribute as much as he should or could have.

He left a lot of inventions in the design phase, but the truth is da Vinci shipped more than most of us ever will.

Some of his inventions couldn't be built during his time either, so it wasn't simply that he always lost interest. Seems a bit unfair to mention design flaws but not point out that he was designing machines that required materials that didn't exist yet.

It reads like a parody to be honest. I'm hoping it is one.

Of particular interest is the author's equivocation of Jobs' Reality Distortion Field. The author makes it seem as if it was Jobs' ability to distort the world to create something unexpected, but most of us use the term to describe how Jobs could make people believe all sorts of dumb things while in his presence (and the effect wore off when not in his presence, when people realized these things were indeed dumb). It's not a positive thing.

Leonardo did "ship" some of the greatest works of art. Some of those paintings took decades to complete. Which you happily glanced over.

Comparing steve jobs to Leonardo is a discredit to both steve jobs and leonardo.

A most sacrilegious article by a clueless author :-) This silliness where people just parrot platitudes like "execution", "implementation" without really understanding what it means is the bane of all Creativity.

The mark of a Genius is an insatiable curiosity about a wide variety of subjects and the willingness to jump into every one of them without regard to other people's expectations. Da vinci was unparalleled in that respect. The breadth of his interests is what makes him so great. Execution is always limited by circumstances like political climate, patrons, resources etc. Given the uncertain times that Da vinci lived through, it is an absolute miracle that he was able to do as much as he did. To dismiss it all by using platitudes like "Real artists/engineers" ship" is the height of ignorance and hubris.