YC news is still weird for praising Apple

Not really. Every entrepreneur has to worship the Steve Jobs handbook if they want jaded middle-aged Disney investors to open their wallets for $TECH_PRODUCT. It's not uncommon or surprising to see people in the startup sphere who are unnaturally defensive of Apple/iOS/MacOS.

Woz and Jobs started out building Blue Boxes (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-an...) They then created Apple as a hobbyist outfit in a garage, soldering chips together so they could demo a DIY computer programmed in Assembler at a computer club. As opposed to what, a company that exists to sell the equivalent of billboard ads on the Internet? Out of Big Tech, Apple has the strongest claim to any kind of hacker culture.

And when Jobs got the contract from Atari, he lied to Woz about how much it paid so he could take the lion's share. Fraud culture is unfortunately part of their blood too, something we ought to excise if we want the tech industry to be taken seriously in the long-run.

Everything I read leads me to believe that Steve Jobs was not a virtuous person, though I keep trying to find the silver lining.

How should one test for ethics? A reference check comes to mind, but it is not a test that you can apply fairly.

> How should one test for ethics?

You ask if that's how you'd like to be treated.

I think it's a lot less confusing when you understand that "hacker" doesn't describe a kind of politics, but rather connotes an interest in technology.

Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.

But I think the confusing aspect of HN and the VC influence is the number of folks here who happily conflate technology, business, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. If you see these as separable topics, you find that a lot of the confused threads here are different cohorts in the audience who focus on one of these topics and treat the others as ancillary.

> Depending on who you talk to, hacking doesn't even mean technology. It's more of an artful blend of craftsmanship and trickery in whatever problem domain you face.

Exactly this. I use the term hacker in its original form.

the fallacy you have is that all hackers are socialists or folks that dislike venture capital or capitalism.

I can assure you many hackers are libertarian or anarchists of some flavour (from mutualists to anarcho-capitalists). Many celebrate Apple because they want to build the next Apple some day.

HN has always slanted for the latter crowd, though certainly open to everyone.