HN lurkers such as dlsspy, pquerna, and zedshaw are my hacker heroes.<p>They need not introductions but I suppose links won't hurt:<p><a href="http://hackerne.ws/user?id=dlsspy" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/user?id=dlsspy</a><p><a href="http://hackerne.ws/user?id=pquerna" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/user?id=pquerna</a><p><a href="http://hackerne.ws/user?id=zedshaw" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/user?id=zedshaw</a>
I think a good question on HN would be to whom here is pg not a hero in some way? Isn't that why people want to draft him for Congress / get his advice on everything / build statues of him out of old sim cards?<p>That being said, I did enjoy reading "I like the way Paul Graham quacks". And I do wonder if there are other people in the startup/investor community who have the same positive cred as pg.
i'd say _why and zedshaw.
_why was a true hacker guy. he really dove into stuff. i liked the idea of writing a bytecode convertor to run ruby apps on google app engine, and tons of things besides that one.
Zed writes nice posts. what's cool is that even though he gets annoyed easily and writes quite a bit of angry posts, he seems to care about people who start, and explains things to people. that's nice.<p>I like the way Ezra Zygmuntowicz explains stuff, and enjoy reading his posts and listening to records of his speeches.<p>Same thing about Michael Klishin, who used to be in Rails Core. Actually, that's the guy whom i learned from the most. I had a pleasure to meet him in person, and he did teach me tons of stuff. Not specifically-technical, more of vision-sharing things. Those things did influence me as a technical person a lot.<p>Same thing about Yehuda Katz. I like the way he thinks and ideas he comes up with (most of time).<p>So, I'd divide it in 2 parts: technical stuff | vision / point of view.
Warren Buffett - Honest and successful, shares his wisdom, extremely independent thinker, wildly frugal, giving it all to the best run philanthropy to be spent entirely within a short period after he dies.
Just a little side note, if you haven't already, you should really read "The Passionate Programmer" (the previous edition was titled "My job went to India: 52 ways to save your job").
Thanks for reading the post, and Michael for posting it. I enjoyed all the comments. I only recognized Zed Shaw, Batman and a few others, so I've got some reading to do :)