Obviously posting that on Hacker News I would like to read your preferences about tech and start up people. But as the guidelines suggest any people/companies/organizations that are deeply interesting and relevant would work. At the moment I follow only linus_trovalds, peter seibel and pg.
@MoRocca is consistently funny, and often timely. Comedian celebrity.
@mattmight and @ccshan for serious CS, both professors.
Following "startup scene" types just filled my twitter stream with desperate, trivial minds.
You can also go see the people I follow, many of them are silent but it was a pleasure to see them on twitter. Names like Mitchell Wand, Dan Ingalls, Richard Gabriel, Scott McKay, etc. I will happily retweet whenever they decide to speak :-)
You can also follow me; I tweet mostly about programming, often drunk, and always aim to offend. @bigthingist
I saw from your comments that you're in Cambridge, MA? I'm in Somerville, so some area developers I can recommend to you are:
http://twitter.com/#!/bdarfler - Ben Darfler, senior software engineer at Localytics, Java / Scala / scalability badass.
http://twitter.com/#!/rseanlindsay - Sean Lindsay, CTO at Viximo, friendly and helpful serial startup developer.
http://twitter.com/#!/aaronwhite - Aaron White, founder of DoInk.com, skilled web developer & passionate about computer science education.
http://twitter.com/#!/dlouhy - Jeff Dlouhy, student developer w/ some awesome acheivements already under his belt.
What kind of people are you interested in following? I haven't recommended ruby devs or non-devs, but there are a bunch of great ones on twitter in the area.
Just to give an example of my test Norvig, Knuth, Stallman and similar people. I guess I am out of luck on these ones :)
@hotdogsladies - Merlin Mann
@rands - Michael Lopp
@mattlanger - Matt Langer