I still can't believe Steve Jobs is gone. I don't think I've ever felt this sad about someone I've never met.
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.
16-year Mac user here - I wouldn't go to the extent of saying Jobs changed my life. Apple devices influenced how I got my work done, which is non-trivial, but I won't idol worship him in an emotional manner. He's still only human just like the rest of us.
So you can't feel sad for someone dying without it being idol worship? And what about those of us whose lives he directly changed, is it unfair for us to feel a greater sense of loss?
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.
Perhaps it's a generational gap. I am under 30, so I only became familiar with Macs in the mid-90s. I can understand those of you who grew up in the late 70s - mid 80s and have much more nostalgic sentiments towards Apple and the Macintosh. It created industries and careers that didn't previously exist.
I can definitely say that he changed mine. My first WYSIWYG word processing experience was on an Apple //c (they loved those slashes instead of the Is for some reason), and I ended up in marketing and communications partly because Steve Jobs took that calligraphy class in college, and I loved the fonts I could play with...
You realize Jobs had almost nothing to do with the software running on the IIc, right? He'd been booted (driven out, quit in anger, however you want to interpret it) from the company already, and was very much focused on the Mac from 1983 onward.
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.
I feel the exact same way. This is the first time I've felt truly sad to see someone die who I did not know personally. I never had a chance to meet him, but I had always held out hope that maybe someday I would be able to simply tell him "Thanks" and shake his hand.
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!
I would like to see what happened to the traffic on this site yesterday. I spent considerably less time here than average because of the lack of tech news.
Has anyone else noticed the black band (actually a table row) at the top of HN? I only noticed it yesterday, so I'm assuming it's pg's way of signifying that HN is mourning the loss of Steve Jobs.
It's not just the HN crowd - I walked by the SF Apple Store today and the front windows were covered in post-it notes full of thoughts from passers by. I know we in the tech world followed his every little move, but it surprised me how much, well, regular people cared.
I've never seen this kind of reaction for the death of any famous person who isn't a politician/community leader.
"I've never seen this kind of reaction for the death of any famous person who isn't a [...] community leader."
< Fact is, he was :) ..at least sort of..
I found out while playing Doodle or Die. All of a sudden a lot of the drawings were apple based. At first I thought it was trolling, and then I opened another tab to check google news...
My MacBook Air broke on Wednesday night, so I brought it in to the Apple Store in Providence. A few people had left flowers at the doorstep. Inside, however, it was business as usual.
I don't actually see it. But, you might want to check out the Awesome Screenshot add-in for Firefox and Chrome. It lets you capture the whole page, as well as crop, annotate and blur.
For a community that takes pride in being intelectual, this is pretty sad and bordeline to religius worship. The black band and a single thread where one could express his appreciation for the deceased would be respectful and enough.
Actually, I had been offline all afternoon, and only learned of it when I opened up HN. I was stunned by the top story, and it was good 3 or 4 minutes before I noticed that the entire front page was devoted to Steve. At that point I got something in my eye and had to close my laptop.
screenshot is an image of homepage that was taken at a specific time, snapshot is a version of homepage that was at a specific time. (version v/s image)
This was the first time I have seen the entire front page consisting of articles on one topic. The snapshot is from 11pm PDT, and it is from a site that archives the Hacker News front page.
I suspect that this has something to do with the competitive nature of human beings. Publicly praising/endorsing a famous living person on one hand gives him more power, and on the other hand encourages antagonism from the detractors/enemies/competitors of that person because praising/endorsing someone is an act of aligning with that person.
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.
This is good to see - I don't think any one person has had more influence on the way we use computers/technology than Steve did.
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.
Yes. Any major operating system or computing device from the last decade or so (give or take a few decades) has been in stiff competition with the operating systems and computing devices that Apple produced under Steve Jobs, and they have all been strongly influenced by (modeled after?) those Apple products with which they competed. Even something as basic as his insistence that things should be easy to use forced everyone else to improve their products' usability, even change the way they think about designing software in order to make usability a priority, in order to catch up.
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.
It trickles down, particularly when it comes to someone as influential as Steve Jobs. You may not have used any of his products directly, but as shown by this snapshot, he has influenced an entire generation of great number of people, going beyond technology.
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.
However, there are plenty of people whose contribusions to humanity wastly exceed what Jobs did. Would they get this kind of coverage if deceased? I seriously doubt that.
It's annoying - I mean yes he made some excellent products and an arguably visionary ability to capitalise on consumers, but most of his products were hardly original - he just took existing ideas and made them more user friendly and pretty.
- 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).
I don't think encouraging activity is necessarily good. A lot of comments do not really contribute something useful to the discussion. I'd rather people just posted when they have something really useful or insightful to say. Less comments means less time wasted for the readers.
Actually this isn't very accurate. There are several posts higher than that, but they don't show up. Here are a few I remember being higher, I'm sure there are more. Granted one of them was about Steve Jobs too.
While this is obviously the post with the most points, I just noticed that something might be broken with this. Looking for posts with over 1000 points omits the following post with 1770 points:
There are several other high scoring posts that don't show up by that method, because it's meant as a filtering tool for stories on the frontpage and one page deeper. Obviously these stories tend to be far apart so don't see them all with that /over method, only recent ones that haven't fallen off the first two pages yet.
I took a screenshot of HN yesterday. I felt this was a great tribute to Steve — demonstrates how many of our lives he touched and the respect he commands.
I rather liked it too, and I especially liked it later on when there were just a couple of other links, like the first blades of grass poking through melting snow at the beginning of spring.
I am from India, and pg I have a question for you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
You're digging yourself a deeper and deeper whole. In fact, it was the right number of front-page submissions for various reasons, #1 being that it is what people submitted and voted on. #2, it was a legitimately monumental news story not merely because a pillar of our industry passed away but because he was only halfway through his career. Finally, it would be difficult to overstate the impact Steve had on the PC and consumer electronics industries. And film industry. And really the world in general.
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).
If you found it annoying, perhaps you should join another universe temporarily, instead of the one we're all in, in which this was a pretty important event.
Like many here, I've been feeling really down because of Steve's passing. At first, it was confusing ... I never even met the guy. Why am I grieving so much? Seeing all the posts on HN and FB, it is comforting to know it's not just me who never met him, and yet is profoundly sad at his passing. He was a personal hero to so many of us.
Steve's death just underlines how real his Stanford commencent speech hits home.
His life certainly had its ups and downs, but through it all he persevered and fought for that he felt was true and was worth it. Although his accomplishements went beyond what anyone would have possibly dreamed (aside from himself) there are so many people around us who are also heroes of the real world.
We mourn today a great man and in a sense we hold hommage to all of those people who strive to make this world a better place.
Rest in peace Steve, may God bless you and your family
This shows the incredible influence that Steve had on the tech community. Unlike others who have disrupted the world like him, we can at least be glad that he got to witness the incredible impact that he had.
Here is a PDF that I captured at 11:34pm EST, that also has 30/30 articles on Steve Jobs. I was going to post a link to this, until I found the snapshot.
I did a screen grab at ~10:00 PM PST. I never planned on posting it, but I felt it was the "where were you when you found out JFK / Elvis / etc. died" moment of the tech generation and wanted to capture it.
What is with the SJ worship on reddit/HN? Apple continues to make overpriced hardware (compare to T and W series thinkpads xD) which almost always sacrifices form for function. Want to put an esata/fibre/ port on your laptop? - only one MBP allows it. OS X is a toy os for people who don't want to run windows (excell/MSVS) or linux. Sure, put the iWhatever in the museum of modern art, but just about any business-clas laptop will run linux.
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.