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Comment by gbog | Hacker News Reader

Wow, lost a lot of karma with this. Anyone cares to explain downvotes? Most links about SJ yesterday did not follow HN guidelines about intellectual curiosity, in my understanding, please clarify if I'm wrong.

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Take the downvotes (no, I didn't) as a read of how at odds your PoV is with that of, well, however many people took the time to downvote you.

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.

Thanks for explaining, but it is not to the point. I did not express any disregard for Steve Jobs, it would have been displaced. I did express concerns about the fact that during one day, HN had nothing else on the front page.

You ask to much. Maybe you can stay calm and read the 10'000th article on node.js while half of the world mourns one of the greatest visionaries of the last decades. I can't.

Consider then this:

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.

Steve was directly or indirectly responsible for a lot of people's lives and livelihoods here. Every mobile developer, everyone running Rails or Django on a Macbook, everyone interested in the aesthetics of product design...that's probably 90% of HN that's been shaped for the better by his life. It's appropriate that we give him a few hours on a homepage as a tribute. We're a virtual community so we can't do a 21-gun salute, but we sure can do a 30-post homepage.

Posted from my iPhone

Having a black stripe and a few hot topics is ok, but what we had yesterday was a bit beyond rationality, imo. Keeping one's mind when someone we love dies is very hard and very important.

Chances are you would not be posting this rationale online if not for Steve Jobs.

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.

This is most probably false, but even if it was true it would not be a receivable argument.

If this is in reply to Tim Berners Lee writing the web on a NeXt, it is not false. He also went to Paris to a conference to show Steve the stuff with his black NeXt. Unfortunately he (Tim) was at the end of the line and Steve had to leave before seeing his "web". Actually if I recall, since then, Tim never met Steve until very recently or perhaps they have never met.

I was replying to "no Steve = no web", which seem a good sample of irrational exaggeration I'd rather not see on hn, even on his death.

1. The standards of what makes it to the front page are basically `whatever this, a community of mostly intellectuals and entrepreneurs, likes at any given time'. The admins' role is just to step in when things get abusive.

2. Now is not the time for these meta-discussions.

3. You were off-topic. (So am I, admittedly.)

This whole thread/story is a meta-discussion. Otherwise, I completely agree.

Can you point me to the guideline you are talking about in 1)?

It's not written; it is just how these voting-based sites (HN, Reddit, Stack Overflow) work.

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.

I'm guessing that the community here was willing to make an exception for this unique and sad moment in time.

mourning somebody who is important to the community probably supersedes the general rules of posting to that community. at least in my opinion.

People are curious when someone like Steve Jobs dies. This is something that will never happen to you when your time comes.

I didn't see anything intellectually interesting in Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc. posts about SJ death. Maybe I'm blind... Oh, and please avoid ad personam arguments, they are useless.

No you're not blind. you're something else.

I'm stupid, that's what you think, right? So after creating a massive unisson over a dead body, we start insulting those who don't sing as loud as the others. In other thread they are asked to leave.

You show by the example that my concerns are grounded.

cold? clinical? inappropriate? Hey even intellectuals can grieve sometimes.

Well, I would not complain on a celebrity forum that the mourning of the next star fill up the home pages, this would be inappropriate. But in hacker news, I thought we would be more immune to these usually harmless and temporary but sometime dangerous loss of reason.

I don't think you're stupid.

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