Steve Jobs was not a "hacker". [‡] He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture, 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]). Steve did not contribute any original ideas or any important technological innovations. He claimed during his Stanford commencement speech that if Macintosh had not included eye pleasing typography, then computers would never have had typographically pleasing typefaces (because "Microsoft just copied Apple); this is ludicrous. In fact, Apple's software patents for digital typography added unnecessary difficulties. [3] Many people are unhappy about Apple culture of paranoia, litigation, and features that restrict user's freedoms that Steve created.

Steve is known for having a great sense of design, but it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others. Just look at the yacht he designed without Jonathan Ive's collaboration. [4]

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. I'll admit that directing such efforts is not an easy thing to do, and most breakthroughs are improvements upon others' ideas. But it is very rare for the original creators to be alive and ignored while the modifier is celebrated with maudlin elegies.

EDIT: The media's treatment of his death, President Obama's statement that he was a great "inventor", etc. was not his fault. 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. 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.

Perhaps I should add that I am being critical of Steve because of an abundance of articles that did not focus on what he actually contributed, or criticized only his behavior towards others. Steve did seem to be able to hire, attract, or motivate as many talented engineers as he did drive away. This is a very hard thing for a CEO to do, and he deserves a large amount of credit for doing this. The talent that he helped attract and the products they create are responsible for Apple's stock price rise and continued profitability since his death.

[‡] http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html (see definition of "hacker")

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/02/01/146206585/ste...

[2] http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

[3] http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

[4] http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-yac...

Although this is an extreme example, I sympathize and often have feelings like this. But it's not about the amount of work; it's about the constant internal struggle. Let me explain.

I have never had a problem about the volume or difficulty of work in any job I've ever had. In fact, some of my favorite memories of work have been sprints to finish something, whether in software, retail/distribution, or food service. I take great pride in delivering, sometimes with compromised quality, but always on time and budget. I imagine many here feel the same way.

My internal struggle is the constant questioning of whether or not I should even put up with illogical bullshit. I have no doubt that hard work, long hours, complex work, and difficult customers are occasionally part of my world. But every day, in my morning exercise when I would prefer focusing on the work of the day, I always find my mind drifting into anger over unnecessary bullshit like:

  - working for unethical people
  - watching others line their pockets while I work
  - choosing what's best for the company vs. the customer
  - busting my ass while others sit and watch
  - endless meetings about nothing
  - watching great stuff I built being scrapped by idiots
  - watching horrible decisions made by those for their own benefit
  - witnessing the functional taking back seat to the political
  - dealing with managers who don't understand technology (and don't care to learn)
  - dealing with people who don't understand the business/industry and (don't care to learn)
  - horrible working conditions for workers while managers get luxury
  - constant work-prevention structure imposed by people who have never accomplished anything

Some days I'm on top of the world, rejoicing when something I built provides great value to others. Other days, I feel like I'm digging holes on the beach only to see them filled up by the overnight tide of idiotic others.

My struggle continues. I only hope I have the foresight to take intervention before I ever become like OP.

When this is all over I hope there is a decent post-portem look at reddit and its relationship with the media, especially with the efforts to attempt to find the Boston Marathon bombers.

The story of 'internet wizards find Boston suspects' was too good to not publish. The media portrayed it as hackers using their intelligence and the resources of the internet to track down criminals, but it ended up being nothing more than some people flicking through photos and profiling based on race, appearance etc.

In total I saw over two dozen people marked as 'suspects'. I open Facebook and my non-tech friends are all sharing homemade 'WANTED' posters with full pictures of the people identified. Everybody was suspect until they were 'cleared' - the very definition of a witch hunt. Digital vigilante justice.

Nobody learned their lesson, because it was only a couple of hours later that the media were reporting that suspect #2 was the missing Brown kid. I switched on prime time news in Australia and the news that the Brown student was terrorist suspect number two was the top story!. Speechless.

I tried in vain to get the reddit threads removed and shutdown (IMO they violate the 'no dox' rule) but got nowhere. The privacy right of individuals are being torn apart by online mobs (I was told in a reply that if I have nothing to hide I have nothing to worry about). It depresses me to think that nothing will be learned from this entire experience.

This is exactly why the government feels like they should get involved in regulating the internet, because we aren't taking care of it ourselves. I can already see how a case will be put together next week using the reddit witch hunt threads as a reason why the internet needs censorship. Think about what our responses are going to be to that.

This is incredibly fascinating. If you are trying to figure out whether this is worth a read or not, I don't think you'll be disappointed spending an hour or two following along through the interview. For those of you that are tight on time, here are some heavily paraphrased notes I've been taking, referencing some of the more thought provoking parts of the interview. (And I'm only half way through! I'll need to finish reading this tomorrow):

- We should create human readable (memorable) hashes to map names to specific data, so people can trust the documents they have are not tampered with and so that such documents can't be removed from the public record. Sort of an immutable DNS system for data built on hashes. Readability is important so the keys can be transmitted independently of computer networks. Bitcoins may be a good reference technology for this. (See: "So this Bitcoin replacement" and passages leading up to that)

- We need secure, robust communication systems for medium sized groups of people (think revolutionaries) that don't need to rely on centralized (government owned) networks. Possibly use UDP to message someone (since without ACKs you can send to many hosts, and a listening host looks the same to the network as an unrelated host). More ideas about this in passage: "Right, so you send it to random internet hosts"

- The internet lets one hear their own beliefs echoed back with such force that it drowns out any other input. It reinforces (makes extreme?) the person's original thought. This creates a "radicalization of internet educated youth," makes us highly political.

- The US doesn't need to care as much about free speech since free speech won't change the fiscal outlook of those at the top (US is in a "rigid fiscalized structure"). China and Egypt are a more political society though, so they still need to control free speech. (See passage:"I am not going to say governments")

- "censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity, because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care about what people think."

- Censorers don't care what information exists in darknets. They only care that their bosses don't find out about the darknets. (See: "Even the censors in China" passage)

- There is a second type of censorship beyond overt government censorship: "Censorship through complexity." Harkens back to the earlier discussion in the interview about the 'self-censorship' pyramid for journalists.

- Journalists should give all of their source data, not just choice quotes, so that people can make up their own minds. (See: "scientific journalism")

- "Most wars in the 20th century have started as a result of lies. Amplified and spread by the mainstream press. And you go, well that is a horrible circumstance, that is terrible that all these wars start with lies. And I say no, this is a tremendous opportunity, because it means that populations basically don't like wars and they have to be lied into it. And that means we can be truthed into peace."

This is sadly a lot more common than people think. I have a similar story from a prior employer, a system administrator who was often asked to fix problems usually caused by bad managerial decisions of which he always flagged initially as being problematic but nobody listened to him, even after it turned out he was right from the start, he was one of those guys who knew their shit. He was a really nice, quiet and reserved guy but I noticed over the space of 3 or so months his attitude towards work and the manager at the time started changing.

Not many people knew of his Twitter account, but I did. He would post crude remarks about the manager not listening to him and how he should be the manager, often using the initials of the manager when he insulted him to be careful and not be accused of slander I guess. I would often hear him in the office talking to himself, swearing under his breath and mashing his keyboard. You could tell it was getting to him. He was on-call 24/7 but apparently wasn't adequately paid the amount he should have been for someone who was expected to fix something at the drop of a hat.

One day he came in and sat at his desk refusing to do any work. He just sat there and then the manager confronted him and asked why he wasn't addressing his list of high priority tickets that he had and then the guy lost it. He didn't get violent, but he started yelling at the guy and the manager was a well-built guy (sorted of sounded and looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger) who I wouldn't even dare cross. After yelling he just walked out and never came back.

Of course my manager reported the incident to some higher-ups and then it was revealed a couple of days later he was in a mental hospital as he had a complete breakdown (he apparently drove himself there). I didn't know him that well, but I went and visited him after finding out where he was. He told me that it all built up; he was being blamed when things went wrong and weren't done on time and not being praised when things went right and were delivered within unrealistic time-frames. His girlfriend had also left him the day prior to the meltdown, he said she was unhappy because he was never home and when he was, he was always fixing something remotely or had to come in to fix something.

I have a feeling this kind of thing is a lot more common than we can imagine.

Wow, that's the first time I've ever seen a 0-word article get the TL;DR treatment.