Ask HN: Which hackers do you look up to the most?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686242

by qqwerz • 10 years ago

38 37 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

(Hackers as in expert programmers or security researchers, not venture capitalists or anyone of that ilk.)

NetStrikeForce• 10 years ago

All the people involved in the Debian project. The world would be so different without them.

hello_newman• 10 years ago

For me personally, there has been no one more inspiring to me than DHH. Brilliant, a true hacker at heart, opinionated, entrepreneurial, and I also happen to share his stance on starting a business vs playing the startup lottery.

I'd also extend my admiration for the core rails team as well. A decade plus strong, and they still make beautiful software.

mindcrime• 10 years ago

Wow, so many to choose from. But I'd include folks like:

Bjarne Stroustrup

Dennis Ritchie

Rob Pike

Alan Kay

Alan Cox

Linus Torvalds

Margaret Hamilton

Kevin Mitnick

Richard Stallman

Paul Graham

Robert T. Morris

bryanmathew• 10 years ago

Out of these Linus Torvalds, Margaret Hamilton, Kevin Mitnick and Morris have some kind of extraordinary skills.

exolymph• 10 years ago

I like Steve Klabnik a lot.

jrcii• 10 years ago

Leslie Lamport. There are a dozen larger than life programmers out there, but reading his biography I was struck with a kind of resigned sorrow at the concrete expression of a certain ideal life that I always wanted for myself and know I'll never achieve. BS from MIT at an absurd age, math PhD, goes on to write TLA+ which is a marvel of sophistication. Turing Award.

The king kind of has to be Dennis Ritchie in my mind, I can't think of code that's more influential in general and definitely in my life than C and Unix.

I like Rich Hickey a lot, what he's done and judging from his talks his personality.

More obscure but this guy Fabrice Bellard is an animal, he puts out this insane amount of sophisticated code like, oh btw guys here's a fully working LTE stack.

pinewurst2• 10 years ago

Don't forget Lamport did LaTeX too.

dividual• 10 years ago

I respect any hacker who gave up playing the game years ago because they realized just how insecure everything was, yet became comfortable with this (Read 'everything is broken' by Quinn Norton, and watch some of Haroon Meer's talks).

It's a kind of comfort that comes with years of hacking, and the quality of their work is unmistakeable. Look at Vinay Gupta's work on Ethereum. He openly states how much he distrusts Intel and X86 and is doing public speaking to wake others up about this. Also any person working on open hardware, or Trusted platform modules are worth watching.

dewyatt• 10 years ago

I feel you. We're all building on a foundation that is so full of holes that security is like an inside joke.

I'm keeping my eye on TALOS [1], but I admit I haven't had time to research it. It's just one tiny piece of the puzzle though.

[1] https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

cloudjacker• 10 years ago

Geohot

Its impressive how such brash egoism has allowed him to monetize his hacks and general tinkering. Leaving modesty reserved for the poor and hobbyists taking up space in the garage.

reefoctopus• 10 years ago

I especially liked his sony rap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg

sgillen• 10 years ago

Steve Wozniak is a good one. He basically designed the entirety of the Apple I and Apple II. My favorite anecdote is that to this day he doesn't really understand how the Apple IIs color screen works.

EliRivers• 10 years ago

Greenblatt, Gosper, Woz, Draper (Captain Crunch), Roberta Williams, Stallman.

If you're reading this and you haven't read Levy's "Hackers", stop reading this and do so.

Also Brendan Gregg. He's really good at what he does, he clearly loves doing it, and everything he learns about doing it he tells everyone else as fast as he can. He's a demonstration of the hacker ethic.

noir_lord• 10 years ago

Rear Adm. Grace Hopper.

She wrote the first compiler which she was assured couldn't be done after already doing it, she rose to the top of a male dominated field and did it on merit, she took a leave from Vasser to join WAVES (womens volunteer corp during WWII) as a junior lieutenant, refused to retire and ended up a Read Admiral.

Ada gets a lot of respect as the 'first' female programmer but Hopper is at least as significant imo.

The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, 'Do you think we can do this?' I say, "Try it." And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir 'em up at intervals so they don't forget to take chances

DanBC• 10 years ago

Her description and visual aid for "nano second" are brilliant.

http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosecond

tropo• 10 years ago

Eric S. Raymond

terminals, version control, NTP... all ugly old things that MUST WORK

nekopa• 10 years ago

don knuth.

Besides from his talent, I love the fact that he is still working on a project that will never be finished -TAOCP.

I look up to him as a hacker, not an academic, in the way that hackers scratch an itch and write something cool. His itch was typesetting, so he just nonchalantly created tex. Using a methodology (literate programming) he created to scratch a previous itch.

Plus he likes to compose music (great hackers hack across domains)

fatimafouda• 10 years ago

Aaron Swartz, not just for his programming skills, but also for never giving up on his fight to make knowledge opensource (See the Guirella Open Access Manifesto)

Other programmers I look up to are:

Tim Berners-Lee

Linus Torvalds

John Carmack

mfalcon• 10 years ago

Gabriel Weinberg (duckduckgo) and Andrej Karpathy

pinewurst2• 10 years ago

Dan Bernstein

fosco• 10 years ago

Zero Cool and Alec Sadler.

swah• 10 years ago

Phiberoptik is also interesting!

xufi• 10 years ago

Dennis Ritchie. The father of UNIX. He's had a impact of how I've come understand UNIX to be today.

frou_dh2• 10 years ago

Then is Ken Thompson the mother?

probinso• 10 years ago

Moxie Marlinspike

frou_dh2• 10 years ago

I admire Rich Hickey, especially as a communicator of ideas about programming. After he released Clojure, he went on a rampage of one fantastic presentation after another.

erac1e• 10 years ago

Julian Assange.

herbst• 10 years ago

As DHH was already mentioned, i want to throw Aaron Patterson, Linda Luikas and Sam Aaron in the mix.

pizza• 10 years ago

Samy Kamkar!

Here is a video where he demonstrates how to open garage doors with a wireless Mattel toy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSSRaIU9_Vc

He also wrote that one XSS worm for myspace several years ago. Hi Samy, in case you happen to read this ;)

JustSomeNobody• 10 years ago

I'll note a few of the very first ones. There's a couple modern ones, but I think the ones that influenced me earlier are more important, so I'll stop there.

Jim Butterfield: The very first programmer I looked up to. I learned a lot reading his code.

Michael Tischer: PC Intern author. That book was very influential for me. I have this crazy drive to know how things work and that book explained a lot to me.

Michael Abrash: My assembly language skills owed[0] a lot to his writing.

John Carmack: How could he not be on anyone's list?

[0] Past tense; I don't write anything in assembly anymore.

decasteve• 10 years ago

Not sure if they'd be considered hackers but visionaries that have paved the way for hackers by enabling the computing we have today:

J.C.R. LickLider

Vannevar Bush

It's worth going back and reading what they wrote/said. Every hacker should know these names.

bjourne• 10 years ago

Martin v Löwis, Joe Groff, Thomas Nagy, Armin Ronacher, RhodiumToad and lots, lots, lots more.

mod50ack• 10 years ago

Bill Joy. Say what you will of what became of Sun, but the guy knew his stuff. Wrote the original vi, plus a whole lot of the rest of BSD, undeniably influential to anybody who uses a NIX system today (whether it be BSD or not)

romantsegelskyi• 10 years ago

Dave Cutler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler)

haidrali• 10 years ago

For me I look up to Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez is best programmer, he wrote Redis

dorfuss2• 10 years ago

Bisqwit, of course, but gosh, there is so much great talent around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y71lli8MS8s

dorfuss2• 10 years ago

and Larry Wall

Ask HN: Which hackers do you look up to the most?

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