Ask YC: Notable People On YC

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.

jgrahamc• 18 years ago

I'm notable? <blushes>

DanielBMarkham4• 18 years ago

congrats. You made it.

It's all downhill from here. : )

smanek• 18 years ago

It seems like that there is a reason that names are tiny/gray: we should judge what is said on its merit, not based on who said it.

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.

chris_l• 18 years ago

The point here being that these people are notable for a reason. I expect to find disproportionately more useful/insightful comments from them on their subjects than from the average user, including myself.

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

edw519 I do not know who he is outside of HN, but he sure is somebody here and I follow his comments/ http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edw519. May I also add the one and only http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmaroon

iamelgringo3• 18 years ago

Ed's an all around nice guy. We've met both online and in meat space at the last Startup School.

rokhayakebe2• 18 years ago

So can you confirm if he is PG or not? Just kidding ;)

whalesalad2• 18 years ago

Eeeeeez. Meat space just sounds sooo wrong.

edw5194• 18 years ago

As much as I love this community, it's even better when you get a chance to meet your on-line friends in person.

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.

edw5194• 18 years ago

In the words of a celebrity I once met, longtime Sports Illustrated writer and Pittsburgh Steelers commentator, Myron Cope,

"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?")

gojomo• 18 years ago

Obsession with 'celebrity' is not healthy.

aneesh2• 18 years ago

Healthy or not, it's human.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

So are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Saying "it's human" means "it's easy to do this," and is too often an excuse for not-so-excusable behavior.

dhotson• 18 years ago

It depends, there are certain people whose opinion I respect more than others.

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. :)

technoguyrob• 18 years ago

Eliezer Yudkowsky.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=eyudkowsky

yangyang42• 18 years ago

Great. When somebody puts me in this thread, I'll know I made it!

dcurtis• 18 years ago

I would be willing to bet that just about every notable person in the startup/programming industry uses this site and may occasionally post comments.

I would also be willing to bet that only an extremely small subset of those notable users would publicly reveal themselves.

whalesalad2• 18 years ago

Michael Whalen - http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whalesalad

jokes.

ovi256• 18 years ago

I heard Paul Graham comes around sometimes.

dawie• 18 years ago

He is here quite often actaully

edw5194• 18 years ago

I really like the idea that "notable" people may be lurking here. If only for the reason that we should all think twice before degrading someone else (or generally acting like an idiot). You never know who you're really talking to or who else may be witnessing it.

(Imagine losing a 7 figure deal a year from now because the investor found out you insulted him here.)

akd• 18 years ago

You shouldn't degrade other people on the Internet, even if they don't have 7 figure deals to revoke.

edw5194• 18 years ago

Right. But sometimes I'd settle for people doing the right thing even if it's for the wrong reason.

DanielBMarkham4• 18 years ago

I'd like to point out that I disagree with the purpose of this article -- I want to take submitter's comments on their own merits. I don't care if you are Bill Gates or the janitor.

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.

byrneseyeview2• 18 years ago

I'd like to do that, too. But there are many people with opinions. And many of those opinions are worthless. And many of the most interesting opinions sound worthless at first -- so I'd rather listen to what smart people say, knowing that if they sound crazy, it's probably because I'm dumb.

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.

DanielBMarkham4• 18 years ago

I'm not sure how you ever get around making a personal decision whether some idea is worthwhile or not. Simply because a person had one startup, does that make them a startup expert? Probably not. If I publish a book on model trains, does that mean my opinion on world trade is somehow worthy of five minutes of your attention?

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.

a10• 18 years ago

Jeremy Zawodny http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jzawodny

Ask YC: Notable People On YC

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