First major North American proponent of the tomato, inventor of the swivel chair, father of archeology--there's a lot of stuff there. He was about as prolific as Franklin.
Yeah, but everyone knows about that stuff. (Maybe not the architecture.) He also founded the University of Virginia. But his more "hackerly" accomplishments are among the less historically noteworthy ones.
He was personally very disappointed in his presidency, despite all the accomplishments you note, plus winning the First Barbary War. He was in many ways a frustrated idealist, most dramatically in his moral disgust at slavery contrasted with his lifelong ownership of slaves.
I like that. A lot of heroes go quietly about their business of making the world a little better, without having to wear their underpants on the outside to draw attention to themselves.
FYI, the domain 'hackerne.ws' is registered by someone other than YC. Even if it currently resolves to the same machine, it might not in the future. Even if the current owner's intentions are pure, the domain could lapse into someone else's control.
So, better not to promote, nor login-to, 'hackerne.ws' URLs, unless it becomes the canonical domain linked from http://ycombinator.com.
(Why does it work? Seems the News.YC code doesn't care about the 'Host' header in requests, which it really ought to, so that people don't get into a habit of using sketchy URLs that could bite them down the road.)
I'm familiar with the history. Whatever eusman's original stated intentions with the domain, my points stand. Using/linking-to News.YC via a nonofficial 3rd-party domain is a risky habit.
You should also note the claimed owner of the 'hackerne.ws' domain left as an active user in a huff over 2 years ago:
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?
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.
Even Maciej concedes that pg knows a lot about certain topics.
I've noticed that pg hasn't been writing a lot of expansive, philosophical essays lately, like attempting to explain national characteristics of architecture. That kind of speculation is just asking for satire. Perhaps he's gotten the message.
I think pg is interesting for being a kind of working philosopher. He had various theories about business, programming languages, and youth, and actually tested them by experiment (betting his own money, too), and by most measures has won the argument.
I actually liked the expansive, philosophical essays. One of them was about the messages you get from cities and what kind of ambitions they arouse in you, and that probably explains the switch--when he lived in Cambridge (where being really smart was the ambition) he wrote wide ranging philosophical essays about what you can't say and how to predict presidential elections and how awesome dynamic languages are, and now that he lives in Silicon Valley, he only writes about startups.
At one time, PG was just an essayist and hacker who worked on interesting technical problems like writing a better Lisp and filtering spam, who occasionally wrote about startups. Now he's "just" the startup guru.
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.
I like the way Ezra Zygmuntowicz explains stuff, and enjoy reading his posts and listening to records of his speeches.
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.
Same thing about Yehuda Katz. I like the way he thinks and ideas he comes up with (most of time).
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 :)