[wolfrom]

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.

[tptacek]

Plenty of HN people are 'pg skeptics (it's getting harder to be skeptical about YC, though).

Here's a manifesto:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

[neilk]

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.

[philwelch]

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.

[younata]

"old sim cards"?

There are people who go through those things enough to make even a stick figure? I've been using the same sim card for the past 4 or 5 years.

[nopassrecover]

I had to change once in the last 10 years as apparently the standard (guessing file size) changed and new phones wouldn't support my old sim.