Hacker News Reader

Comment by pk-protect-ai | Hacker News Reader

Why not Wozniak (probably still alive), or Shannon (I'd vote for him), Convey, Knut, Reed, Solomon, Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, etc?

Why it is a CEO? Why Jobs and Edison?

It is just how it is...

View on HN

Well Jobs repeated it ~3-4 times without Wozniak (and arguably being a part of making Apple II a huge success was not even his greatest achievement).

What did Jobs actually build himself? My understanding was that man was technically inept.

Products? I mean at the end of the day (as long as you consistently pick the right people/tools for the job) technical part is just an implementation detail.

Saying "no" to off-topic / dumb ideas in a consistent way is an amazing product development skill.

It's like carving away all of the marble that doesn't look like David.

Neal Stephenson wrote a really great Substack about art and how it's the end product of many small decisions. That's exactly what Jobs did on the hardware he worked on.

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/idea-having-is-not-art

Far enough, because I will even concede that after Jobs died, Apple has never been the same. Cook has been serviceable, but I haven't really been comparatively thrilled with anything to come out during his tenure.

Technically inept is acceptable as long as he could communicate well. The man consistently had clear vision and the ability to communicate that vision to those who were around him.

He told other people what to invent, all whilst leaving his Mercedes in the disabled parking spot.

That's an achievement.

I'd love to see Wozniak up there. From Al Alcorn, a pivotal computer scientist and electrical engineer employed in the early days of Atari:

"So, meanwhile, Steve’s friend Wozniak comes in the evenings. He would be out there during burn-in tests while these Tank games were on the production line, and he’d play Tank forever. I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t care. He was a cool guy.

I found that what really had happened was that Jobs never designed a lick of anything in his life. He had Woz do it [redesign Breakout].

Woz did it in like 72 hours nonstop and all in his head. He got it down to 20 or 30 ICs [integrated circuits]. It was remarkable… a tour de force.

It was so minimized, though, that nobody else could build it. Nobody could understand what Woz did but Woz. It was this brilliant piece of engineering, but it was just unproduceable. So the game sat around and languished in the lab."

I don't think you're allowed to have living people on a US coin

guess they can make exceptions

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/03/business/trump-coin-treas...

He is dead inside

Not so much an exception but a work around according to the guardian newspaper [1]:

[...] the law specifically says “no head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of any coin “created to mark the US anniversary”.

The proposed design features a wider illustration of Trump on the reverse side, a move that legal experts said would fall outside the ban on a “head and shoulders portrait or bust”.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/03/trump-coin-t...

On the US Mint Site I was just looking at the 'Medals', where you CAN have a living person minted onto what they call a medal. Unsure of if it's the same size as a coin, but if it is, you could conceivably try and circulate the medals of living ex-presidents (to great cost to yourself).

The main difference between a medal and a coin is that a coin has a face value issued by a country.

There is a law but there have been plenty of exceptions including President Calvin Coolidge on a 1926 half-dollar and Alabama Governor Thomas Kilby on a 1921 commemorative coin and Carter Glass on the 1936 Lynchburg Half Dollar.

Neil Armstrong (technically his spacesuit, presumably with him inside) was on the 2002 Ohio quarter.

Why not the inventors of the transistor?

Anyway, at least I'm happy the Nobel prize committee isn't based in the US. Otherwise we'd soon see the Nobel prize for advertising.

Or venture capital.

I'm thinking Elizabeth Holmes should either be on a coin or get some kind of Nobel.

(he said in jest)

But seriously, Lee de Forest (Iowa or New York), Chester Carlson (Washington, New York), Charles Martin Hall (Ohio), Philo Farnsworth (Utah)…

Who? that's why they're not on a coin.

There are many inventions and people from AT&T Bell Labs that deserve their own coin.

Wasn't he a mega racist and eugenicist?

Maybe, but that's the flip side of the coin ...

Each state voted on its innovation.

Had to consult an LLM about Kansas. I'm going to go with Clyde Vernon Cessna, George Washington Carver or Walter Chrysler.

Basketball (um, coaching), escalators (Jesse W. Reno, 1891), styrofoam, slushies.

George Washington Carver is already on the 2024 coin for Missouri.

Dolly Parton is the only person of value to ever come out my state (TN).

Grim take on your family and neighbors.

If you had some of knowledge and experiences I have had, I would hope you would agree with me. Things have gotten better over the years, but there is a lot of dark and grim history.

I don’t want to psychologize too much but when people have tough upbringing and then find a community in adulthood they tend to invert the morals and values of their upbringing.

I mean you did essentially give us the atomic bomb?

Cordell Hull, architect of the United Nations, who won a Nobel peace prize for his work, was from Tennessee.

(Mods, I am sorry if this is getting off topic.)

The KKK was founded in Pulaski, TN, which is about an hour from where I was raised. It wasn't until July, 2021 that the bust of the founder of the KKK (Nathan Bedford Forrest) was removed from the state capitol building. It's now been relocated to the 'TN State Museum' which was magically opened mere days after the bust was removed.

I could provide countless more examples of things I have heard, read, and witnessed, but I am certain you do not need any more examples, and honestly, even thinking about it all really depresses me.

Having shitty people from your state doesn't also mean that there are no good people from your state

Tennessee already had their coin in 2022. They featured the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

Oh no way? TVA is great. I went to college down the road from their HQ, and they were the main source of internships for my comp sci program. My university had a strong cybersecurity program that was partly DoD funded, in which many graduates went on to perform cybersecurity roles for TVA. After all, power plants are often juicy targets.

Al Gore and Elvis Presley are two prominent Tennesseans who immediately come to mind as a third-generation Californian. Don’t discount your state.

One neighbors growing up used to tell people to not believe any of the conspiracy theories about Elvis still being alive. He knew Elvis was dead because he was one of the paramedics to carry his body out of Graceland.

(Elvis is also from Mississippi, btw)

I'd vote for a Stallman coin and its him eating his foot flesh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com