6 ms·

Truly brilliant for sure. Reminds me of Anders Hejlsberg who designed Typescript, Delphi, and C#. Or Linus Torvalds with Linux, and just to prove he wasn't a o

by slackingoff2017 9y ago

Truly brilliant for sure. Reminds me of Anders Hejlsberg who designed Typescript, Delphi, and C#. Or Linus Torvalds with Linux, and just to prove he wasn't a one hit wonder designing Git. I've concluded that what people fail to grasp about technology is that Einstein types still exist. There are rare engineers worth hundreds of times more than average, only this time they're well paid by their corporate masters. More like Picasso's really. Technology is a fusion of art and science, free from the normal restrictions of physics it's an engineering discipline that embraces art and elegance to a degree not seen in harder, realer disciplines.

ijidak 9y ago
Throw in Jobs. Original Mac (1984), iPod (iconic music players), iPhone (nuf said), iPad (launch of tablets). Musk, Edison, Bell. Really a lot of the world changing in tech is concentrated in bursts of productivity for a relative few individuals like Einstein's golden year. Of course many make significant one off contributions. But it is amazing how some just have this ability to strike gold consistently. Making it look almost routine.
- syshum 9y ago
  Jobs was a Marketer of other peoples ideas... I love how you leave out Woz, and the Team of people that made the iPod/iPhone/iPad Edison is renowned for taking credit for other peoples work, notably some of the work of Nikola Tesla who you also leave off your list and was one of the rare singular geniuses on the level of a Einstein Elon Musk has a vision of his idealized world and the money to hire people that will attempt to make it happen None of the people you list (aside from Einstein) are singular genius working on their own creating the ideas and products and I think we do a disservice to everyone when we say "Jobs invented the iPhone". That is not to say their contributions to the projects are not important but I do believe there is some amount of Hero Worship and over inflation of their value/importance and an massive under appreciation for the 100's or 1000's of other people that actually make these ideas or products a reality
  - AlphaSite 9y ago
    Wiz was never involved with a lot of the more interesting bits of Apple, he gets a lot of deserved credit for his early work but also plenty of credit for things he never worked on.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      Woz is the Mozart of 8-bit computer design. His design is surprising, even breathtaking at times, but the kind of magic he did then cannot be done these days of billions of transistors per chip.
  - sjwright 9y ago
    Funny, I was reading another HN thread where someone said: "Pretty reliable rule of software is: if you think it's pointless you probably don't understand it well enough." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14987634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14987634 I think that applies to your understanding of Steve Jobs. I don't think you understand the point of Steve Jobs well enough. A product like the iPhone isn't special because of its ideas — science fiction authors had already envisioned products like this — it's special because it actually got made. He had a vision for what the product should be. He was able to coalesce a set of human resources into making it a reality. He took raw ideas, found the best of these ideas, insist these best ideas still suck and need to be further improved. He made people, regardless of their particular discipline, do the best work they were capable of. Calling him a marketer is a sad joke.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    > Jobs was a Marketer of other peoples ideas That's an oversimplification. He was a marketer, true, but he also was fanatically pushing people towards standards higher than anyone else in the industry. If there was nothing special about Jobs, how can it be Apple came up with the Mac (a somewhat just-right version of the Lisa ideas), with the iPod, the iPhone, computers that actually look good (starting with the bondi-blue iMac, which he had little to do with)? To say he only could sell other people's ideas ignore how many of these people voluntarily worked for someone with the reputation of being an insufferable asshole and pull off miracle after miracle.
alamiftekharx 9y ago
Let's not get ahead of ourselves there on git. _Have you tried using submodules?_ :P
- tripa 9y ago
  I don't think submodules were designed by Linus.
- FatalBaboon 9y ago
  I actually like submodules, maybe it suffers from the awkward-at-first perception people have about git in general.
pjmlp 9y ago
Git was helped by Github, and being a requirement for Linux development. Otherwise I might be enjoying Mercurial nowadays.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  I AM enjoying mercurial these days. It's a joy to work with. For most git tasks I can just clone it using hg-git, and work with it just like that, and push it back to github for a PR/CI.

ijidak 9y ago

Throw in Jobs. Original Mac (1984), iPod (iconic music players), iPhone (nuf said), iPad (launch of tablets). Musk, Edison, Bell. Really a lot of the world changing in tech is concentrated in bursts of productivity for a relative few individuals like Einstein's golden year. Of course many make significant one off contributions. But it is amazing how some just have this ability to strike gold consistently. Making it look almost routine.

syshum 9y ago
Jobs was a Marketer of other peoples ideas... I love how you leave out Woz, and the Team of people that made the iPod/iPhone/iPad Edison is renowned for taking credit for other peoples work, notably some of the work of Nikola Tesla who you also leave off your list and was one of the rare singular geniuses on the level of a Einstein Elon Musk has a vision of his idealized world and the money to hire people that will attempt to make it happen None of the people you list (aside from Einstein) are singular genius working on their own creating the ideas and products and I think we do a disservice to everyone when we say "Jobs invented the iPhone". That is not to say their contributions to the projects are not important but I do believe there is some amount of Hero Worship and over inflation of their value/importance and an massive under appreciation for the 100's or 1000's of other people that actually make these ideas or products a reality
- AlphaSite 9y ago
  Wiz was never involved with a lot of the more interesting bits of Apple, he gets a lot of deserved credit for his early work but also plenty of credit for things he never worked on.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Woz is the Mozart of 8-bit computer design. His design is surprising, even breathtaking at times, but the kind of magic he did then cannot be done these days of billions of transistors per chip.
- sjwright 9y ago
  Funny, I was reading another HN thread where someone said: "Pretty reliable rule of software is: if you think it's pointless you probably don't understand it well enough." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14987634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14987634 I think that applies to your understanding of Steve Jobs. I don't think you understand the point of Steve Jobs well enough. A product like the iPhone isn't special because of its ideas — science fiction authors had already envisioned products like this — it's special because it actually got made. He had a vision for what the product should be. He was able to coalesce a set of human resources into making it a reality. He took raw ideas, found the best of these ideas, insist these best ideas still suck and need to be further improved. He made people, regardless of their particular discipline, do the best work they were capable of. Calling him a marketer is a sad joke.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  > Jobs was a Marketer of other peoples ideas That's an oversimplification. He was a marketer, true, but he also was fanatically pushing people towards standards higher than anyone else in the industry. If there was nothing special about Jobs, how can it be Apple came up with the Mac (a somewhat just-right version of the Lisa ideas), with the iPod, the iPhone, computers that actually look good (starting with the bondi-blue iMac, which he had little to do with)? To say he only could sell other people's ideas ignore how many of these people voluntarily worked for someone with the reputation of being an insufferable asshole and pull off miracle after miracle.

alamiftekharx 9y ago

Let's not get ahead of ourselves there on git. _Have you tried using submodules?_ :P

tripa 9y ago
I don't think submodules were designed by Linus.
FatalBaboon 9y ago
I actually like submodules, maybe it suffers from the awkward-at-first perception people have about git in general.

pjmlp 9y ago

Git was helped by Github, and being a requirement for Linux development. Otherwise I might be enjoying Mercurial nowadays.

rjbwork 9y ago
I AM enjoying mercurial these days. It's a joy to work with. For most git tasks I can just clone it using hg-git, and work with it just like that, and push it back to github for a PR/CI.