

Who is your hero? - michaeltwofish
http://www.alexbowe.com/miscellaneous/hero-typing/

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justinmitchell
Richard Feynman: part hacker, part physicist, all work, and all fun.

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tae
Elon Musk (Zip2, Paypal, SpaceX, Solarcity, Tesla Motors);
engineer/entrepreneur, and inspiration for the film Iron Man's version of Tony
Stark.

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TheBranca18
At the risk of sounding childish I'd say Batman is my hero. One could even
consider him a hacker based on his technological prowess.

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nopassrecover
Thomas Jefferson would be pretty close to the ideal hacker. (if others
disagree I'm interested in why as I have very little opposing data so far).

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philwelch
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.

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hop
Add to that architect, champion of liberty, states rights, and freedom of
religion.

Also drafting the declaration of independence and being responsible for the
Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

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philwelch
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.

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jcsalterego
HN lurkers such as dlsspy, pquerna, and zedshaw are my hacker heroes.

They need not introductions but I suppose links won't hurt:

<http://hackerne.ws/user?id=dlsspy>

<http://hackerne.ws/user?id=pquerna>

<http://hackerne.ws/user?id=zedshaw>

~~~
michaeltwofish
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.

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whatusername
I'm not sure you can describe Zed Shaw as someone who doesn't draw attention
to himself.

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michaeltwofish
Fair point, though I was speaking more generally about heroes :)

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warwick
Willie Crowther. Worked on ARPANet, wrote colossal cave, caver and climber.

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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.

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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>

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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.

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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.

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ifesdjeen
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.

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hop
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.

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drtse4
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").

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alexbowe
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 :)

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crpatino
Yeah baby!!! Batman's more famous than Jefferson, Feynman and Socrates put
together!!!

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anigbrowl
Socrates.

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ganley
Dean Kamen, Danny Hillis, and Adam Savage (not necessarily in that order).

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joshu
Norman Borlaug

