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Hacker (n) "An enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user."

Ok, computer user then.

Steve Jobs built Apple 1.0 that popularized desktop computing & publishing.

Then on the side he bought a failing business, and turned it into the company that's become the future of entertainment with Pixar.

In between he founded NeXt where he demonstrated his understanding that integrated hardware design and supply-chain-management was going to be essential to the next generation of computing, and hired amazing people to help him realize this vision when back at Apple.

With these experiences upon his return to Apple, he bet on mobile and consumer products and turned a failing computer hardware maker into the world's most valuable company - out pacing even EXXON that's entire business is pumping liquid gold out of the ground.

He authored or co-authored 323 patents at Apple alone.

So I strongly disagree that he was not an "inventor", a "hacker", or undeserving of the media's attention and analysis.

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/ste...

The patents that have his name on them are design patents, not software or hardware patents. If he does have his name on a software or hardware patent, it is for legal purposes only.

I'm using the Jargon file's definition of hacker [1], which is :

"HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: "A SAIL hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker".

[1] http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

That definition of "hacker" is so flawed and half-hearted I can't help but wonder why you defend it so passionately. Does programming really define someone's life and meaning so much that it requires listing the same area of interest five times? I'm a coder and I find that definition pathetically short sighted. Ironically even despite that definition, Jobs still qualifies for 3-4 of the definitions you name. No one appreciated technical talent better than Jobs (see, e.g. Woz)

I could keep going, but your points seem entirely designed to throw rehashed cliches about Apple that feed some cliched narrative. Your argument about patent assignment is so oddly narrow I'm just curious why you'd drag it out absent a general dislike of patents here on HN. But other then that IP quirk, I'm quite familiar with folks who believe it's fashionable to hate on Apple/Jobs. For these types, unfortunately many of them short sighted programmers, Apple can do no good, and everything Steve did was based on stealing other's ideas — evidence be damned.

Never mind that Jobs is the quintessential malicious and inquisitive meddler, the one who helped grow a film company, a music company that single-handedly changed the industry, and one of the top computer firms that introduced the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, iPhone and iPad, the latter four two while battling cancer. Now you can argue what it takes to do that, but only one thing really matters: building passionate "A-Player" teams dedicated and willing to pour their best work into building great products. You admit this and then negate it's importance, when it's actually all that matters.

Jobs built these kinds of teams over and over again, and he was very good at doing that. Part of that was his often abrasive attitude. He didn't tolerate lots of things, no less faux "hackers" who would dominate the discussion about what it means to be hack while completely missing the forest for the programming trees.

Nor did he tolerate constant optimists, who believing in "playing, and build great things together with all of the talented people who are working so hard on your behalf." Sorry, but that's a load of bullshit, and I'd buy it from someone who worked on one of the rare misses from Apple in the mid-2000s, MobileMe. I'm sympathetic to the author, she seems to be talented (nice SproutCore shirt) and means well. But there's no arguing that even after an initial gestation period that MobileMe wasn't a steaming pile of shit. You can debate all you want about web technologies and who's fault it was at the beginning, but the idea of cloud services isn't some breathtaking impossible task and as an end-user it was bad. Equally talented folks down the road in Mountain View were doing it and after a certain point you should feel bad if you're working on a consistently shitty product.

> "Never mind that Jobs is the quintessential malicious and inquisitive meddler,"

So, the bad definition of "hacker"?

The given definition of hacker is correct.

Actually there are dozens of software and hardware patents with Job's name on them.

On the other hand, making funiture using an axe seems to be an useful skill. By the definition, we could reasonably post content about that skill on this site.

I am not sure the value of patent counting. It is pretty easy to get your name on a patent as the CEO.

I wouldn't disagree that Jobs was good at his job, nor that he provided value to society overall, but I would say it is really difficult to tell the technical skills of a leader (since they don't get much opportunity to show them off).

Making desktop computers mainstream destroyed hacker culture, and made this industry full of incompetent fools that work for big businesses and only care about making money.

I either do not like Steve Jobs, or I feel sorry for him. One of those two.

I do not like to speak ill of the dead, but I also do not like to sugar-coat things.

Steve Jobs was mentally ill. A lot of people don't like to say that, but that is what he was. I cannot diagnose his exact condition, but he shared many traits of the common sociopath -- all except that he was never very charming, generally speaking. [0] Steve clawed his way to the top, and turned himself into a god, when all of his talents were really nothing more than hiring the right people (Steve would have been an absolute nobody if he had never met Wozniak (or a man of similar talent) to flush out his ideas) -- in fact he probably would have turned out to be a homeless person (if you had met him at Atari, you would have thought so). Steve was a bag of ideas -- ideas that were not original but, to his blessing, very consistent. And as most of us agree, ideas are only worth the quality of their execution. A lot of people look up to Steve for this reason - he was a non-engineer who came to rule the tech world. If he could do it, so could they.

I have no real agenda against Jobs, and I would definitely say that his life was filled with interesting accomplishments (even if the only accomplishment was only swindling the world to pay 2x as much for his products). But this is one man I would never place on a pedestal, because he is not a model human being.

The only heros I have know humility. Steve Jobs, even in the face of death, never learned that.

[0] http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

>>> Steve clawed his way to the top, and turned himself into a god, when all of his talents were really nothing more than hiring the right people (Steve would have been an absolute nobody if he had never met Wozniak (or a man of similar talent) to flush out his ideas) -- in fact he probably would have turned out to be a homeless person

You can say the same of almost everyone that is successful in the world. Also, Steve didn't turn himself into god, people did. Ambition and determination play a huge role in successful people's lives (depending on your definition of success), but LUCK is always a huge factor.

For example...

0.) Lincoln wouldn't have become President if he had given up after a few election losses, and we could make an argument that slavery in America would have taken much longer to abolish or not at all without his leadership. Perhaps Lincoln was mentally ill to run so many times instead of gracefully accepting his loss.

1.) Elon Musk would never have cofounded SpaceX & Tesla would not be possible without him betting his financial future on the company. But you could make a similar statement that Elon wouldn't be who he is today, if he hadn't left Sooth Africa, if he hadn't stumbled upon SV, etc.

2.) JayZ would never have become what he is today, if he had gotten busted or shot in his younger years when he was dealing drugs.

3.) Nelson Mandel wouldn't be who he is today if he had given up on his ideals and dreams of the future while serving for 27 years in prison.

4.) Justin Bieber wouldn't be the most popular musician alive today if he(his mom) hadn't uploaded a video on youtube that resulted in his being recruited by some music manager and promoted just as social media and sharing where becoming the part of everyday life. He'd just be another guy that saw singing as a hobby or gained only regional fan following if he pursued his passion.

TL:DR -> Almost everyone you know, respect, admire or don't would have been an "absolute nobody" if it weren't for certain circumstances favorable/unfavorable in their lives.

On a more generic level, you could say if a person's biological mother hadn't consummated a relationship/fling/marriage with that person's biological father, that person and everything s/he has accomplished wouldn't exist.

Yep - if not x, than not y applies to every aspect of the universe. :) But what I am trying to drive home is that (IMHO) there is a huge disconnect between Job's actual talents, and the amount of respect he is given. Wozniak too would have likely been a nobody, sometimes it takes that pairing of people to produce enough drive to create a product (I know because I have experienced it first hand -- I used to work with what you might call a psychological clone of Steve Jobs, but he got me to work at a rate I never have before - only he was never abusive).

Anyway, all of what you say is basically true. :) But I feel like Jobs has stolen most of the respect from all the people who work so hard under him that really have made Apple what it is. I guess I kind of have the engineer's mind set, for better or worse - I admire people who can create things with their own two hands (or at least the people who get their hands dirty), and I don't particularly care for those who can't -- I can't really say that without sounding like an elitist prick, but maybe that is what I am. :)

So essentially, you're trying to say you're better than Steve Jobs because you can program?

For the record, I do not consider myself to be better than anyone - Steve was at least successful. My history is paved with failures.

Who is "JayZ" ? Somebody important, I assume?

me too.. i have never heard this name before. Then I googled. Here it is : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay-Z. He is a rapper.

Just to clarify why sgpl cited him: he is one of the (if not the absolute) most successful rappers of all time. Definitely top of his field. And married to Beyoncé (who is no slouch herself). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyoncé_Knowles (just in case)

This reminds me of the joke "How do you know if someone doesn't own a television."

(Searching JayZ on google yields About 123,000,000 results.)

I don't know the joke, could you explain? Googling it didn't give me any hints (the top result is an article at The Onion "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television")

The joke is:

- How do you know if someone doesn't own a television? They tell you.

The Onion article is just an elaborate version of the joke.

The joke here is people making a big deal about not knowing who Jay-Z is, to the extent they post comments about how they don't know it - rather than just google his name if they were curious. Which indicate that the do know who he is, but want to make a show of being the kind of guy who don't know who someone Jay-Z is.

There's a related joke: How do you know if someone thinks they might suffer from Aspeger's Syndrome?

If the question had been "Who is Justin Bieber?", I would have been a very happy man.

I honestly can't tell which is more tolerable. I might be a cynic, but they both sound like shit.

Dubmood OTOH, is excellent.

You're not a cynic. You're just a typical rube with unforgivably bad taste in eurotrash music.

We don't resort to ad hominems here. It would appear you're a fan of either Biebs or Jay-Z but not Dubmood and, as per the misclassification wrt genre, have been misinformed about said artists.

Steve Wozniak about Steve Jobs:

> Jobs was a good husband and father and a great businessman who had an eye for details. He said Jobs was a good marketer and understood the benefits of technology.

> When it came to Apple's products, "while everyone else was fumbling around trying to find the formula, he had the better instincts," he said.

> According to Wozniak, Jobs told him around the time he left Apple in 1985 that he had a feeling he would die before the age of 40. Because of that, "a lot of his life was focused on trying to get things done quickly," Wozniak said.

> "I think what made Apple products special was very much one person, but he left a legacy," he said. Because of this, Wozniak hopes the company can continue to be successful despite Jobs' death.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/steve-wozniak-steve...

While you're right that Steve Jobs would have gone nowhere without Steve Wozniak, the reverse is likely also true. Steve Wozniak had a big doubt on working on the Apple start-up; the security HP offered him was very tempting. I don't think the world would have known about Steve Wozniak if Steve Jobs didn't convince him to leave HP for the Apple start-up.

I agree Steve Jobs might have been a sociopath, but then again, aren't many higher-up people in other businesses either? I think what mattered for Apple is that Steve Jobs cared about products most of all - sociopaths at many other companies only seem to care about how much money they make.

Good points - I'd have to say I agree with you.

Woz clearly has a different definition of being a good father to me; I think spending years in court to deny responsibility for your child pretty much disqualifies one for that particular praise.

Steve Jobs said that he regretted his behavior during that time. He also later gave her daughter and her mother enough money to live on and became closer to her daughter.

I think that says more about Steve Wozniak than Steve Jobs. From what I've read about him he's an amazing person that is easy going and very forgiving. I think while his greatness may have been less visible he would have been great regardless of which path he took.

You have no agenda against him but you call him mentally ill based of what stories that you read on the internet did you know him personally? Go on a road trip with him? Bump into him a the coffee shop? To say someone is mentally ill and doesn't have humility based of of internet articles is pretty classless. To your first question.. I either do not like Steve Jobs, or I feel sorry for him.... I think its pretty obvious which category your in

To say that somebody is mentally ill is not an insult. Anyone can be mentally ill, just as anyone can catch the common cold. I do not know to what extent Jobs had control over his behavior, which is why I do not know to what extent I dislike him or feel sorry for him. However, between the experiences that everyone had with him, his book, and other sources, I think I can pretty safely say that to many people, he was not a very nice person.

I think there a huge difference between a common cold and a mental illness the effects on your life and the stigma that we as as society give it is impactful enough.I have a family member who is battling dementia its not something to be tallied about to describe "not very nice people" He was mean to someone people so what, If I where to interview everyone you've come across in your life ex coworkers, friends, girl or boyfriends there would be some people who said you where mean and a jerk too . 5 sides to almost every story

It's called jealousy. People love to cut others down without having invented anything on their own.

I read Steve Job's biography and a book about sociopaths and SJ was definitely not a sociopath, he was a narcissist.

Don't worry, the one who posted that Steve was a sociopath is apparently a 'hacker' which gives them qualifications in diagnosing mental illnesses based on 2nd and 3rd hand conjuncture without having met the 'patient.'

You seem to have taken this awfully personally. Is there a reason?

I don't think he was a sociopath, only that he shared many symptoms. Namely seeming lack of empathy, narcissism, apparent lack of guilt (he almost never apologized, if what people say is true), etc. Like I said I don't know his exact condition.

You don't listen to vinyl for the "audio quality" in the sense of getting the most precise reproduction of a recording. You listen to it because of the color that the playback process adds to the music. There is something charming about the occasional click or pop, not to mention that a lot of older music transferred to CD wasn't necessarily transferred well. And music targeting vinyl to begin with is usually mastered differently.

You can record the playback of a vinyl record and transfer it to a digital record without losing any information. The clicks and pops were consciously removed from some vinyl records when they were remastered. If you wanted to, you could transfer your own vinyl records to a digital format. I'm not sure what you mean by the "color" of recording, because color can refer to either noise color or tone color. You might be thinking of effects that a valve amplifier adds to the sound being played through it (distortions, not clicks and pops). In this case, you can get the same effects by using an file that has been transferred to a digital format from vinyl.

You could do a remaster from a vinyl, but it would only happen in cases when the original master tapes were lost.

Yes, you could record a vinyl losslessly and it would sound indistinguishable from the vinyl. But why bother, when you already own loads of vinyl and are familiar with that format? Plus some people enjoy the 'ritual' of vinyl, the sense of ownership not offered by digital music, and the way that medium places focus on records as self-contained works, rather than as a collection of songs from which people 'pick-and-mix'.

Don't get me wrong, I love all digital music has to offer, but I'm just saying there are still plenty of reasons to listen to vinyl too.

> Yes, you could record a vinyl losslessly and it would sound indistinguishable from the vinyl. But why bother, when you already own loads of vinyl and are familiar with that format?

I own nearly a thousand vinyl records, and I recorded them digitally and play them through my Audiotron (crackle and all). I bother because playing vinyl records is a bother. They need to be cleaned regularly, dinking around with the records is more work than just pushing a button. Some of them are warped and to get them to play ya gotta put slight pressure on the needle.

I did try various software to remove clicks, but it made the recordings sound muffled.

But I do like the smell of the turntable & records. It's analogous to the pleasing smell of an old paperback novel. Can't have everything.

Sitting down and listening to a vinyl is not 100% about audio quality. The aesthetics and interactions with the mechanical systems can be satisfying.

You lose the mechanical interaction which has random aspects. It's never quite the same way twice. Digital is the opposite.

You could go out of your way to try to simulate all the mechanical interactions, but why? What is so important about faking something?

The best example I can give would be like the difference between watching a basketball game live vs with an hour delay. You technically are watching the same thing, but they have a very different feel. The physicality of the vinyl is what gives it the variation from playback to playback which is somewhat akin to listening to it 'live'.

While there are audiophiles who listen to vinyl because there is in fact perceptable change in quality compared to mp3, most people listen to vinyl because the enjoy it, just like some people enjoy real books over kindle.

> You can record the playback of a vinyl record and transfer it to a digital record without losing any information.

No. Sampling truly analog data always involves approximating.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28signal_processing%2...

Notice how they use the term "theoretical ideal sampler".

The level of 'approximation' involved here would be like making a square that was .0001% too long on one side. You wouldn't be able to tell at all.

The page you listed also says: "There has been an industry trend towards sampling rates well beyond the basic requirements; 96 kHz and even 192 kHz are available.[1] This is in contrast with laboratory experiments, which have failed to show that ultrasonic frequencies are audible to human observers"

The criticisms of these sorts of things are often as unscientific as the original claims. E.g. the fact that humans can't hear 96 KHz doesn't mean that sampling at that rate doesn't make it e.g. easier to design the roll-off filter in the DAC. It doesn't mean it doesn't make it easier to do transformations on the audio like simulated surround. There are a lot of steps between the digital signal on a CD and your ears, and just because your ears can't hear 20 KHz doesn't mean it doesn't make the intermediate steps easier to build.

No. This is wrong. First, sampling need not imply quantization[1]. Second, the signal to noise ratio of the continuous signal source is important. With sufficiently many bits and sufficiently many samples, you can exactly reproduce any band-limited continuous signal above the noise floor[2]. Those last four words are important. Analog data never comes without noise, and a "sufficient number of bits" is nowhere near as high as you think (particularly with noise-shaping techniques like dithering).

Now, it is the case, as user rayiner mentioned, that there can be advantages to using more than the required number of bits and samples (though not quite for the reasons he mentioned). For starters, you do need an anti-aliasing filter between the signal source and your ADC. Increasing the sample rate reduces the complexity of the AA filter, and digital-domain math can make up for it (and increase the effective number of bits, to boot!). But when you go to reproduce the signal, there's no good reason to use more samples and bits than necessary. That was the whole point of the "Niel Young paper" that has been linked to so many times.

Vinyl does not come close to the limits of consumer-grade recording devices (except maaaaaybe in certain bands, but that can be dealt with by using noise-shaping techniques). Does that make those who like the sound of vinyl bad people? No. Just like those who enjoy sitting in front of a wood fireplace are not bad people. Gas fireplaces have a lot of advantages, but some people like the crackling of the wood and the smell it produces.

[1] Tektronix made a very nice set of (entirely analog) sampling oscilloscopes in the 1960's which used sampling techniques to measure high frequency signals (on the order of 1GHz when contemporary continuous-signal CROs could barely reach 100MHz). These oscilloscopes displayed discrete-time, continuous-amplitude signals, and deliberately excluded the anti-aliasing filter I mentioned above (though it wasn't true heterodyning as most RF people would think of it, because samples were taken based a delay from a trigger recognizer, and thus not necessarily equally spaced in time).

[2] Signals below the noise floor are outside the scope of this discussion and usually require some form of synchronous detection (like a lock-in amplifier) or frequency-spreading / -despreading (like GPS).

I can go out right now and buy a mazda miata. Its an amazing little car fun to drive handles well, all around its fantastic.

But give the ability I'd go back and get an old Porsche 356 Speedster.

The Miata is superior technically in every way. But I just love the old Porsche for its history, aesthetics and legacy, and thats the car I'd always prefer.

I don't think any of this is any sort of reflection on what kind of "hacker" I am.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_356

Another analogy: Mechanical watches. There are no good reasons to own them besides just liking them.

>and according to Neil Young, he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works (see [2]).

This is total and utter BS. I know how audio quality works. I've got a CS degree, have take information theory and DSP classes, have even written audio plugin code (VST/AU), and have worked with DAWs and samplers for nearly two decades.

Still, I like vinyl better.

What you said has nothing at all to do with "audio quality" and how it works. It only has to do with audio _fidelity_, at best. Quality and fidelity is not the same thing. And fidelity and human preference towards a sound source is not the same thing either. For example, people prefer (and enjoy more) colored sound over more neutral reproduction all the time.

Not to mention vinyl is also about the cultural experience (connection with the cottage era of the music industry, large cover art, etc), the tactile feel, and even the patina and fragility of the medium (which can even include the crackle). Consumption of art, any art, is not at all about perfect reproduction.

>But I think that when the deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as Steve are ignored, then the world is suffering from a serious case of myopia

Steve Job's work was important to the economy and the consumers at large in a manifest way (ie. building the company with the largest quarterly earnings of all time, for one).

Ritchie's work, no so much and in a much more roundabout way. And McCarthy's work was even more marginal. Those two are important for computer science, and the programming industry, but not for the economy, market, culture etc at large.

>Many of you may say that I'm missing the point; that his ability to convince others of what was important and his "vision" is what made him great. My contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other people implemented his modifications.

That's the very role of a good CEO.

You probably mistook him to be something like Tesla?

Ritchie's work not so much? Are you joking?!

No. One directly started a company (well, two and a half), and as a CEO and general supervisor, several of the best selling US exports (and huge domestic market hits).

The other worked within the confines of a established company and co-developed C and Unix. Both had other developers already working on them. Arguably both could be created even without him, by Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan et co. And the more widely used versions of both were released by other companies later, not AT&T (the UNIX vendors of the 80's, the C compiler companies, and later GCC and Linux).

He was a great of computer science and our Unix culture in general -- just not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, turns over whole sections of the economy, and dines with Presidents.

Whether someone starts a new company to do their work or works within an existing one is completely irrelevant to the significance of their work. You're focusing on the companies rather than the people, which makes no sense considering that we're comparing the relative economic significance of the people, not their companies.

Apple's entire product line is built on top of Ritchie's work. That's an unusually obvious example of standing on the shoulders of giants, and Ritchie and Thompson are the giants. Jobs just brought their work (and the work of others) to market successfully.

You're absolutely right that Ritchie's not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, but he and Thompson did turn over whole sections of the economy. They just did it by proxy. The people doing the actual work are the ones with economic significance, not the proxy that happens to sell a lot of copies of it.

>Whether someone starts a new company to do their work or works within an existing one is completely irrelevant to the significance of their work.

It very much is for the perception of their contribution though. One was a leader himself, the other was part of an established team (which could presumably do the same work without him).

>Apple's entire product line is built on top of Ritchie's work.

No, it merely uses C and Unix as very basic components at the very base of it all, a C and Unix that are many times removed from the origins at that PDP-11, and have had the contributions of thousands upon thousands of people (including tons of hard work from hundreds of Apple's own engineers).

And even C/UNIX weren't created by Richie himself alone. There's BK, Ken Thompson et al too. So, sure we can celebrate Richie as the co-creator of C and Unix but not of something as indirect and removed such as "Apple's product line".

Else, we might as well say "IBM's entire product line is built on top of the discovery of electricity". Which while true, it doesn't mean we celebrate Maxwell and Tesla for IBM's work. We don't even celebrate Turing and Von Neuman for IBM's stuff. We celebrate the company's engineers.

>You're absolutely right that Ritchie's not the kind of figure that grasps the public attention, but he and Thompson did turn over whole sections of the economy. They just did it by proxy. The people doing the actual work are the ones with economic significance, not the proxy that happens to sell a lot of copies of it..

I'm not so sure. There are people who have discovered great things that went nowhere without some proxy. I think this is the naive programming concept that "marketing doesn't matter, it's just BS". Then you go code the finest program, and nobody buys/uses it.

> Else, we might as well say "IBM's entire product line is built on top of the discovery of electricity". Which while true, it doesn't mean we celebrate Maxwell and Tesla for IBM's work.

Yes we do. We celebrate Maxwell and Tesla, along with all of the other great scientists back through history, because without them and their discoveries the things we create today wouldn't be possible. That's the entire meaning of Newton's phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants. We may not mention every link in the chain every time we talk about any given product, but it is implicit that the chain is there. Every new scientist adds on to what we already have, and if their contribution is significant enough, the next generation of scientists will learn their name along with the ones we learned.

Ritchie built C. He built on Thompson's work with B, but the C programming language is Ritchie's creation. He was also not “part of an established team” when building Unix. He and Thompson built and led the team after leaving Multics. Considering that he wrote the language they built the system in and was also one of the two leaders of the team, your presumption that the same work could have been done without him is a bold one.

Steve Jobs sold some products for a while, and he did a really good job of it. He had a significant economic impact, but it was a temporary one. Future generations are not going to build on top of his work, because he didn't create or discover anything to build on top of. He was a businessman, and history will remember (or forget) him as such.

Valuing great work and discovery is not a “naive programming concept”, it's an inheritance from the scientific community. We honor those who have gone before who make it possible for us to do what we do. Without Dennis Ritchie, my working life and the things that I create would be very, very different. Without Steve Jobs, they'd probably be the exact same.

At the time of his death, he had turned around a company that was about 90 days from death and turned it into one of biggest companies in the world, which made products used by hundreds of millions of people.

Now, I could go on debating what I thought he was but that would be pointless. Steve changed the world, with whatever combination of qualities and abilities that he had.

You know what doesn't accomplish anything? Debating on Hacker News if it's better to be like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, Steve's design ability, which of the ideas from Apple were his, why he listened to music on vinyl, etc.

If you can't understand why Steve Jobs was a household name and Dennis Richie wasn't, well, sorry... I guess you don't understand life. There really isn't any use in whining about it though. In 200 years, most of us will probably be forgotten, including Steve.

I think one important reason for a debate like this is that the leaders we choose as role models defines the direction we move as a culture. It's a moral question we're debating (or that we should be debating) - is it better to emulate Steve's leadership, or someone else's?

Shrinking from normative discussions like this is essentially abandoning the idea that there is any moral dimension to technology, which is more dangerous than any side you can take in the debate.

There is a difference, of course, between meaningful discussion and fanboyism. But whether or not Steve is worthy of the praise he has is definitely worth discussing.

No, I think we should admire people's accomplishments and not necessary look for role models. We should encourage people to aspire to do great things like Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, John Harrison, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison), etc. Endlessly debating what kind of a person they were doesn't accomplish anything.

At the end of today, ask yourself what you actually accomplished. Are you making forward progress on your goal or dream? You get about 30,000 days to accomplish it.

Role models exist for a reason, and that is that we can do our best to be like them. It's not like we're arbitrarily judging character just for the hell of it. I know that I would like a role model that could show how to be a good person and do well in life. The trouble is, exactly as it says in the article, people look up to Steve Jobs and act like dicks because he did the same as was successful. And that doesn't work. And those people will probably never see their dreams through because they have Mr. Jobs, or Thomas Edison, or whoever else as a role model. So it is very important.

How about simply try to find inspiration in different people for their talents and what they've done. Encouraging the idea of role models in the way that you describe "you should be just like him/her" is a little weak minded.

There are lots of not so famous people with great stories where I find inspiration. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

Steve Jobs was a product of Silicon Valley and he interned at HP at age 12, and then later he was later a worker bee at Atari: So your idea that he "knew almost nothing about computer languages and architecture" seems a bit misplaced. You wouldn't be building blue boxes and hanging out at homebrew meetings if you didn't know something about the field.

Also the "logic" that if you listen to vinyl records makes one ignorant about audio quality is silly. And honestly you can can like Steve Jobs and still appreciate someone like Dennis Ritchie.

True, but I think Steve was far more of a human psychology hacker than an inventive engineer. He got the internship at HP by calling the CEO and asking him for parts, and his crown technical achievement at Atari was getting Wozniak to design and build a game in 4 sleepless days and nights that he lied to him about to get the bulk of the payment from Atari: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/10-unusual-things-i-did... He didn't even know what FLOPS were when trying to sell Macs to academic scientists. He may have had good taste but was no engineer or inventor by a long, long stretch.

That link by james altucher gives him too much credit. This paints a more accurate picture of what happened at Atari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)

> But I think that when the deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as Steve are ignored

Steve Jobs was a media figure who was present up to the end of his life, whereas Dennie Ritchie has invented something extremely important decades ago and then kept a low profile. The respective amount of media coverage has nothing to do with who was objectively the more important human, only postings like yours claim to know the answer to this, and I think it's rather tasteless.

> but it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others

This was undoubtedly his best strength. It's a heck of a strength to have as a CEO, though.

The last 35 years of technology history is unfathomable without Steve Jobs. Jobs was the one responsible for getting the most influential early personal computer to market with the Apple II, driving the creation of the first viable GUI computer with the Macintosh, ensuring that CGI animation became the de facto standard with Pixar, founding a company that produced the machine that the World Wide Web was invented on, being instrumental in the introduction of PostScript and desktop publishing, and on and on. He may not be the sole inventor of these things, but ask Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Ed Catmull, Tim Berners Lee, John Warnock, et al where they and their inventions would be without Steve Jobs.

The thing is, he didn't do all that. At least not by himself. A lot of talented people built every single one of those things, and without them, Steve Jobs wouldn't exist.

As stated before, gathering those talents and driving them to make these things does take a lot of effort and he did that very well.

Behind that guy in the cover of the magazines there are tons of people that actually made those amazing things. Many gave ideas that in the end made that product a whole.

And finally, without Steve Jobs, someone else could have taken the spot. Or not. The thing is, you can't know what would've happened without him. So don't say that as a fact, it's at best a supposition.

>without Steve Jobs, someone else could have taken the spot

You could easily say that about the "true" inventors.

The point is Steve Jobs _was_ heavily involved in all of these major breakthroughs, spanning decades, industries, and personnel. He is an incredibly important and influential figure in the history of technology. Not sure why people feel the need to downplay his role when the very people he is supposedly stealing the spotlight from will attest to his genius (with the exception of Jef Raskin of course, who was a bit of a Svengali himself).

I think the difference is that the technologies Steve was so instrumental in creating were already being developed without him. The GUI and personal computer were pretty much already there, he just got to it earliest. Without him these things would have been created in just about the same time span with little difference.

This is distinct from, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, which was a solution from a direction which no one was looking. Everything Steve helped create was already underway.

I don't think that a concept computer costing tens of thousands of dollars that didn't exist outside of PARC's labs with an interface that didn't include dragging as one of its metaphors is "almost" the Macintosh, nor do I see much evidence for a industry trend toward a GUI outside of Apple's efforts and Microsoft's primitive attempts at copying Apple.

Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, only one year after the Apple Macintosh. PARC invented the idea of the WIMP GUI, not Apple. I think it's a little silly to say that the idea would have died within PARC.

Came out in 1985 after Microsoft had been developing Mac apps for two years, and was so awful as to barely warrant a footnote in computer history.

Th idea of WIMP really wasn't "invented" at PARC. That organisation gets way too much credit. They amalgamated several concepts that had been developed since the late 1940's. I'm not suggesting that PARC's work wasn't important, but to blithely dismiss Apple's contribution and suggest that it all started with PARC it ridiculous.

Go and learn about Vannevar Bush and Memex, Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad, Doug Engelbart and his contributions like the the Mouse and his oN-Line System. The history of modern computing is simply not as black and white as you are trying to portray.

Finally, anyone that has used both Windows 1.0 (and 2.0 for that matter) will tell you just how awful it was, especially when compared to the Macintosh. Microsoft didn't come close to the ideas presented in the Mac until 1990 with Windows 3.0, and arguably it was the 3.1 release in 1992 that was useable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Amiga

The Mac was hardly the only game in town at the time. History does indeed belong to the winners.

I wouldn't say smartphones were on the way to what iPhone was. In fact, if you re-watch the keynote where the iPhone is announced, the reaction from the audience is fairly muted, because people were clearly afraid that a phone with nothing but a touch screen for an interface was going to suck really badly.

You don't know that at all. There is no control to that experiment. What you have is an opinion.

Just like this statement that he was replying to: "The last 35 years of technology history is unfathomable without Steve Jobs."

True.

>without Steve Jobs, someone else could have taken the spot

Sculley, Spindler and Amelio all did, and all of them failed to various degrees, which illustrates just how facile that comment is.

And none of them could really continue what Jobs had started. They didn't even have to innovate. And did Sculley come up with Newton? No, others inside Apple did. Yet he couldn't even sell that (and marketing was his thing!). It took the Palm Pilot to realize Apple's ambitions. Just as it took Steve Jobs to realize the ambitions of Xerox PARC.

Great point....simple too!

> he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works

Lol, i've tried explaining this to soooo many people. (But to be fair, there are other reasons to listen to vinyl other than just 'quality'.)

Like, "I bought all these records in the 60s, why should I have to go out and buy them all again as CDs?"

A large percentage of the records made in the 50s and 60s are not available on CDs.

A large percentage of the records listened to on vinyl today are not from the 50s or 60s.

Exactly, it seems presumptuous to assume Jobs thought vinyl was better quality.

Actually... ridiculously presumptuous.

...and of course regardless of relative quality, CD and other digital formats seems to have encouraged producers to move towards some really bad production habits. The end result might be that while the media can reproduce better sound quality, the quality of the sound on a CD might be worse.

People listen to vinyl for its quality, not it's quantity on some technical metric.

> Just look at the yacht he designed without Jonathan Ive's collaboration.

Philippe Starck designed the yacht.

>>> he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works

Obviously you are ignorant of the difference between an analog music and digital music, many people still prefer vacuum-tube amplifier than solid-states amplifier because of the music quality it produces.

People listened to Vinyls because of their distinct sound it makes, for people who are as old as Steve Jobs and Neil Young, the experience listening to Vinyls is nostalgic.

A preference for vinyl does not equate to ignorance of audio technology.

Your article [2] mentions mastering issues. In many cases, the master for the vinyl edition of an album differs significantly from that of the CD or digital release; for example, the vinyl edition may feature less compression, preserving dynamic range.

http://www.soundmattersblog.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness-...

Upvoted for finally the only true explanation about why vinyls, despite being the inferior medium for audio signal storage, can still sound better than CD's or other digital sources.

Oh it's just so easy for people who have never carried the onus of a multi-billion-dollar company (or really a company of any size) on their shoulders, as someone like Steve Jobs does, to issue middlebrow comments like this one.

No organization/endeavor/enterprise rises to tremendous success without an extraordinary leader at its helm, yet many failures have had armies of smart engineers/builders/managers on their staff. There are underlying reasons for that but I'm of the opinion, of late, that absorbing them from a book or commentary is rather hard for most people - you need to actually experience/witness the right set of circumstances to really appreciate the true nature of what transpires behind success at the top tier.

Honestly, this description of Steve Jobs remined me of Machiavelli's The Prince. Because appearently he was feared, but not hated (within bounds).

He was not a hacker and that's precisely why he could lead the creation of great end-user products. He certainly did know a whole lot about programming : check his WWDC 97 address, in particular this sequence at 22' :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

he knew that coding isn't measured by the number of lines you write, and that providing a good environment to developers is absolutely essential. I don't know too many managers or CEOs who really grasp that.

"My contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other people implemented his modifications."

So what? Ideas aren't very special in and of themselves. I have lots of ideas every day that end up having no impact on the world, because I don't do anything about them.

Also, I think you underestimate the importance of editing. There is a reason writers have editors, bands have producers, actors have directors, and so on.

I would argue Steve Jobs is a "hacker" more than most people here. He knew how to add circuits to modify games when he worked at Atari. Most people here can't do that, let alone design and ship a classic game like Breakout.

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Articles.Deta...

It's a relative term, diluted by the fact the lived many decades. I would say he was more of a hacker in his earlier days, and less of a hacker in the later days.

He neither designed nor shipped 'Breakout'. He got Wozniak to design it and conned him out of the bulk of the payment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579311

Yes, you're totally missing the point, but you said it yourself:

"it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others"

That's all it was--a matter of taste, and his was the very, very best. He had an order of magnitude capability in expressing his taste into product visions that he forced into the world, sure on the backs of others, but nonetheless.

Steve Jobs was not a perfect man, but this criticism is just asinine. No great leader implements all ideas of their own. Ideas are one small factor in achievement. As you should know from hanging out on hacker news, execution with brilliance and competence matters far more than the non-existent notion of "original idea."

Right, because Apple would have been one of the most significant technology companies in the world under the apt leadership of Gil Amelio.

Secondly, the house metaphor about ignoring the carpenter and contractor is silly. Comparing Jobs to an interior designer is complete ignorance -- Jobs didn't "decorate" technology -- he saw what technology could potentially accomplish and pushed his teams to execute that vision. He wasn't arranging digital throw pillows -- he was reinventing how people interact and use their "houses."

That contractor and carpenter build what the designer/architect create. Contractors and carpenters, while certainly skilled tradesmen, are merely inputs to a system. Inputs are generally interchangeable. There are very, very few contruction projects that require one specific carpenter's skills. I can find thousands of carpenters (and hackers) who can built competently. But it's rare that you find a hacker (or anyone) that has the vision, and executive ability to create something like Apple, Google or Microsoft, just as a carpenter might be able to build a Frank Lloyd Wright home from a blueprint, most carpenters wouldn't be able to concieve of that final product, having never seen it before. Who can name the carpenter of a Frank Lloyd Wright home? Who cares? The person living in the house certainly doesn't care about the individual inputs -- they care about the finished product. The ability to take disparate inputs and create something magical, amazing, useful and functional.

Dennis Ritchie, while certainly the father or pretty much most of what we do on computers, doesn't matter to the general public. People love to also suggest that Elon Musk of Tesla as a visionary as well, but without Michael Faraday, electric motor technology might not have developed as it has.

Genius always stands on the shoulders of greatness, but let's also remember that simply inventing some technology or another doesn't make one a "genius" or even a groundbreaking figure -- it's the application of that technology into a form that benefits society. Theories of flight don't matter a bit until someone like the Wright Brothers actually build the damned thing.

The C Language or electric motors didn't matter one bit to the world (aside from academics) until some follow-on "genius" actually does something with it.

Steve Jobs, while maybe not a hacker under the definition used amongst a select group of disgruntled HN-snobs, did something bigger than simply "hacking" -- he turned a group of inputs (highly talented to be sure) into products and companies that changed the world.

> Ignoring Dennis and John while celebrating Steve is like fawning over the interior decorator with praise about the warmth of a house while ignoring the carpenter and contractor.

Which is exactly what people do!

Who cares! There are many skills that go into creating something. There is no reason to edify hacking over other skills and abilities.

>>> Steve Jobs was not a "hacker".

History was clear, Apple had delivered so many great products when Steve was their CEO, period. Even if Steve was not a hacker.

Do you mean if a person is not a hacker, he has not the right or he could not deliver great products or is not fitted to produce any products at all?

>>> He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture,

ditto

I tend to see him as a great product manager.

The audio piece is quite interesting, thanks for linking it.

So he wasn't a hacker, or a designer, he was something bigger - an ideas man.

Also, why was it necessary to troll vinyl lovers aswell as Jobsians?

The world would be dull and boring without legendary figures like Steve Jobs.

Summary: He created a status symbol using other people's ideas.

Jobs is a marketing genius though.