Hacker News Front Page Snapshot from Last Night
hhn.domador.net
hhn.domador.net
I always thought I would meet Steve eventually, especially since I finally moved to Silicon Valley recently. He will always be my hero and an inspiration to me in every aspect of my life.
In fact, it is his humanity that I respect and mourn the most: his drive to better himself and the world around him, an uncompromising vision in the face of adversity, and an unwillingness to give up.
One of the most frustrating things about his eulogizing (and yes, I'm no great Jobs fan) is the number of things attributed to him that simply aren't true. I saw a breathy news cast last night broadcasting from "outside the garage where Jobs invented and assembled the first Apple II", which really drove me nuts.
If it weren't for him and his team totally disrupting the phone market with a truly futuristic device, I wouldn't have discovered my passion for making games or be making a living doing so!
Influential role model is probably more accurate.
- This 100% Steve Jobs page was actually organically generated.
- Several members of the community took screen/snapshots yesterday when they discovered the frontpage like this.
Those things make me realize how like-minded can some of the members in this community be.
I've never seen this kind of reaction for the death of any famous person who isn't a politician/community leader.
http://cl.ly/3m3g1p2r1T0x1S172V0q
> Those things make me realize how like-minded can some of the members in this community be.
Communities gather around like-minded people and like-minded people creates communities of shared interests.
Like-minded indeed.
I remember at about 6:05PM there seemed to be a few threads about it, but when my eyes caught the first title...instant grief.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/hacker-news-filtered
I'll delete it after the weekend to respect PG (after the news-cycle finally breaks).
Really, the man made an impact on everyone. I wonder why it took until he died for everyone to realize it?
Mourning time is that time.
It won't last forever. Mourning doesn't, and shouldn't, last forever. Which is all the more reason to make it count now, when it is appropriate.
Giving power to others is not something human beings naturally want to do. Neither is inviting opposition. When the subject of the praise or endorsement is dead, the whole equation changes. Dead people have no power over you, and whatever enemies or competitors they used to have are usually no longer opposed to them.
Just my two cents. It would be interesting to have a way to test this theory.
Heck, I had been thinking about his impact this past weekend, and I've spent a grand total of two dollars with Apple (and own no Apple hardware).
It felt good to know that someone with his vision also had the power to create and guide new technologies and inovations within many industries. Now that singular force is gone. Hopefully Apple, or the other major players are able to continue to innovate and not just add better specs and more features.
Just wondering, if I don't use macs, smartphones and tablets, do I still owe it to him for the way I use computers/technology?
EDIT: oh, I really don't know about that. I spend my days using GNU/Linux, Emacs, C/C++ (GCC) and related free libraries/tools. Even my window manager is emacs-user friendly. If anybody, the most influential person wrt my computing is Richard Stallman.
Some of these people take bits and pieces of the design principles and apply it to their work. Some of them take lessons shared by Mr. Jobs in his speeches or interviews because they look up to him, and apply those in their work. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin says they looked up to Jobs as model. Windows improved by paying attention to what Mac comes up with. Steve Jobs helped propel the industry forward, so even if you never used any of his products directly, it's a good bet you still benefited from his innovations.
My thoughts:
- A log scale is far better than a linear one. While it's not top-end limited, it does tend to flatten the scale markedly.
- A decay function on older contributions is helpful. Especially if users start abusing the system. Bank karma, abuse system, run karma down slowly, with an eternal linear system. With a logrithmic decaying system, abuse degrades reputation far more rapidly.
- Other options are to rank users by percentile or other bases. Given the various problems of innate / explicit moderation / ranking (see A Better Wayto Rate Films: http://blog.goodfil.ms/blog/2011/10/07/a-better-way-to-rate-... ) an explicit percentile norming preserves meaningful distinctions (though individuals ratings may not be directly comparable).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2555349
Anyone know why?
Its almost 1 in the afternoon here. So it must be midnight in the US. I also see you replying to posts during the US day time.
If its not too personal, can you share you a brief outline of your schedule. I assume you do not procrastinate, but about the energy and how do you plan your tasks.
I'm not a Mac fanatic, I'm not a worshipper of all things Steve, I don't use any of Apple's products on a daily basis (though I work with a bunch of people who do).
And despite this, his contributions shape and influence my life every day. The WIMP interface, proportional fonts, WindowMaker (derived from NeXT), much of the Web (as others noted, Macs dominate both graphic design and much Web development), music, electronic books and media, movies, and probably a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting.
Look around you right now. Wherever it is you happen to be right now. Every human artifact in your presence was designed, marketed, and manufactured by someone. Every idea in your books, video, or music collections. The scientific concepts behind your electricity, plumbing, and communications. The artistic concepts behind literature and (again) music.
Some people's influence truly outshines the ordinary, and some of these people are even recognized for it. Occasionally you'll be fortunate enough to share time on the planet with such a mind.
Sure, they might be assholes in person or have other flaws, but their contributions are still real and recognizable.
We've lost a genius, a visionary, a creative force, and someone who's touched billions of lives.
As I said: I'm hardly among Steve's biggest fans. But I recognize his greatness and mourn his passing.
Maybe someday you'll understand. I hope so for your sake.
Steve Jobs had a huge impact across numerous fields.
Computing and tech, from the hardware side.
Business. Wall Street doesn't much like being told it's wrong, but there's one refutation that it will accept: taking a loser and making a winner out of it. When much of the world (myself included) was writing off Apple in the late 1990s, he lit off a rocket that's still burning bright.
Music: iPods, iTunes and more.
Movies: Pixar and Disney, as well as presentation on his devices (Macs, laptops, tablets, handhelds).
Design: much of the creative world literally couldn't operate without their Macs.
News: Apple's pretty well represented there as well.
Popular culture: Because of all of the above, and the huge success of his products, he's among the most recognized of tech/business leaders.
There are a few holes. He wasn't an engineer himself (though he had a very strong grasp of what good engineering was), and he wasn't publicly philanthropic to the extent some (notably Gates) are (though I don't know what he's done on a private front).
But across a large swatch of contemporary popular culture, he was recognized as a leader.
Again: the HN headline smash was organic. I think it's fair to say that it accurately reflected the interest of the day.
Posted from my iPhone
He brought computers down to the level of mere mortals (and others copied his vision leading to the explosion of personal computing globally).
No computers --> No internet. You should keep that in mind.
ps. Even the original protocols for the internet were laid down by Tim Berners-Lee on a Steve Jobs-conceived Next computer.
2. Now is not the time for these meta-discussions.
3. You were off-topic. (So am I, admittedly.)
You appear to be familiar with this: `On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.'
If a particular story meets that, upvote. If it does not, and is severely against it, flag it and move on.
As for getting flooded with Steve posts a couple days ago: we are humans here too, and many of the people here would say that they lost a hero of this crowd. A lot of people needed a bit of time of mourning; that's okay once in a while.
You show by the example that my concerns are grounded.
Responding to one of your other notions, I am actually pretty confident that the web would not be at nearly the stage it is today without Steve's contributions both in popularizing graphical computing and supplying a computer programmable by a mere mortal (TBL, in this case).
http://images.schedim.de/hacker_news_steve_jobs.png
(from Do 06 Okt 2011 09:15:01 CEST)
The only public figure death that really saddened me at the time was Miles Davis'. I remember that so vividly.
Unanimous, save for one story on Linux.
(Also, I think you meant to say "function for form".)
I apologize for inappropriately using a meme to make that point.