Ask YC: Notable People On YC
Just a simple thread to post notable people in the industry and their usernames/ comment streams. My contribution: Fred Wilson
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fredwilson
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fredwilson
I've had the good fortune to know and work with some extremely smart people, and none of them is always right. How is it useful to be able to follow all of X's comments?
I've found that the moderation system here is fairly good at separating the wheat from the chaff. Far more so than identity is, at least.
Tech celebrities are a bit different from regular celebrities. It's (usually) not about what they look like and I'm sure most people you ask wouldn't know who someone like Joel Spolsky was anyway. With nothing else to go by, I would respect Joel's opinion far more than someone I've never spoken to before.
If Bill Gates started commenting here, I'd certainly be paying attention. :)
Marc Andreessen - Netcape/Opsware/Ning (appears dormant) http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pmarca
Aaron Swartz http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aaronsw
And you never know who is lurking.
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jzawodny (relatively new addition)
(Imagine losing a 7 figure deal a year from now because the investor found out you insulted him here.)
Paul Buchheit: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=paul
I would also be willing to bet that only an extremely small subset of those notable users would publicly reveal themselves.
However -- and this is a "feature" of HackerNews -- I have to upvote it to keep it in my list, and I am curious to see the answers.
So count this as a forced upvote.Simply because I am curious about something should not make me upvote it. Geesh.
Fortunately, twitter's front page and the 'next blog' button on the Blogger bar can supply a pretty much infinite amount of random opinions from strangers. I would be interested in how informative that is.
In fact, most of what people say -- even famous people -- is probably off-the-cuff and not exactly geared to your particular situation. Most all communication, in fact, is basically just chit-chat: obscure facts, disagreements based on partisanship instead of philosophy, pot shots at those out of power, praise for those in power, etc.
You can decide to listen to what "smart people" have to say, and that's probably a good idea. I'd just be really careful how I defined "smart people" -- it certainly isn't fame. In fact, I'd turn the equation around backward: I would judge the people to listen to based on their ability to have given me insight in the past, not their fame, fortune, or other crowd-based attribute.
There are many streams of data. Most are (in my experience) not worth the effort. I mostly listen to people who have said interesting things in the past, and I mostly hear about them through other such people. I inject a little randomness into that process by reading old and obscure stuff, but that's more to view my ideological bubble from the outside than to get a high-quality data source.
I read all the time. I take college lectures on CD and DVD. I love reading HN. But I don't think any of that consumption was based on the celebrity status of a person inside the community. Rather it was based on the perceived future value to me. Projected future value, as best as I can figure, doesn't relate to "notable people" Bill Gates made billions, but if he posted here on his opinion of functional languages I would give him no more or less consideration than if you did. In fact, if you and I had talked about functional languages in the past and I found your comments useful, I'd be more inclined to hear what you had to say over Bill. "Bill Gates" or "PG" or whatever is just a concept we have of people we've never met. I think you'll find once you meet them that they have to prove themselves like the rest of us. Life is like that: what have you done lately?
I read commentary to kick my belief system around. Lots of great commentators out there. But I don't have heroes, and if one of my favorite commentators were to post here, who cares?
I'm probably missing something. Apologies if I'm off-base.
And though it'd be a stretch to call them notable, people I at least heard of before they came here:
Colin Perciva (FreeBSD security officer; Putnam winner): http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cperciva
John Graham-Cummings (active in the anti-spam community; caused a firestorm when he submitted Reddit to Digg and got censored): http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jgrahamc
Doug Renert (partner at Tandem E.): http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=DougR
and I think ESR might lurk here occasionally.
It's all downhill from here. : )
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After talking iamelgringo and Xichekolas for 30 seconds, I felt as if I knew them for years.
I enjoyed debating browsers and screen resolutions with dcurtis. No one ever wins a debate like that, you just laugh and have another beer.
I learned more about 27 new things from kirubakaran is 1 day than in the past year.
Of course, it's always cool to hang out with wizards like alaskamiller, chengmi, and rms.
dfranke is brilliant. He can discuss the pros and cons of 3rd and 4th normal form in one minute and laugh like Albert Einstein the next. I have a feeling there'll be threads like this about him before too long.
My advice to noobs: Make friends here. And find a way to meet them in person (Startup School or even something local). This is not your usual crowd. (We're all notable in some way.) And who knows, you may even make friends for life.
"Notorious, yes. Famous, not so sure."
Anyone who ever had to maintain my code would probably agree.
(Aside: While I'm at it, a quick Myron Cope story...Myron noticed that Lee Flowers was coming off the disabled list with a high ankle sprain after only 2 weeks when the usual diagnosis was 4 weeks. He asked Coach Cowher why. Coach told him that the first high ankle sprain usually took 4 weeks to heal, but subseqent high ankle sprains only took 2 weeks to heal. This was Lee's second injury. Myron then asked, "Well then, why don't you take the whole team out in February and sprain all their ankles?")
jokes.