Who is your hero?
alexbowe.com
alexbowe.com
Also drafting the declaration of independence and being responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
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.
They need not introductions but I suppose links won't hurt:
http://hackerne.ws/user?id=dlsspy
I do know wheels and patio911 are always a good read though
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.)
If you search for it http://searchyc.com/hackerne.ws, there's more discussion.
You should also note the claimed owner of the 'hackerne.ws' domain left as an active user in a huff over 2 years ago:
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.
Here's a manifesto:
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.
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.
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.
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.