skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are trying to get more efficient power supplies..
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/26/2039213
I'll break your 5 hero limit, as did pg, our local demihero. ;-)

My list is heavy on scientists and philosophers, since I especially admire the ones who changed the way we think (for the better, IMHO).

Socrates

Epicurus

Diogenes the Cynic

Sun Tzu

Shen Kuo

Machiavelli

Leonardo da Vinci (the Shen Kuo of the West! ;-)

Galileo

Kepler

Hume

Darwin

Swift

Franklin

Jefferson

Nietzsche

Sun Yat-sen

Wittgenstein

Feynman

Sagan
Technology and Courage [pdf]
what about the Auctomatic guys?
roger verbal kint or kizer zoze although he is a totally fictional character .
Haha, awesome post! Indeed, acceptance or no, hopefully we're all in this to start startups, not just on condition of YC's approval. It does sound like a totally amazing and unique experience though, and honestly what seems coolest about it is the community aspect.
Really a personal list like this is impacted by a number of factors especically your childhood experiences.

So from my perspective, Jane Austen brings me nothing but disgust. Her novels were piss poor from my perspective. However, this was me at 15 working at a library and skimming books as I put them away. Austen books were a slap in the face to me at that age dealing with my parents divorcing during the same time.

I really enjoy this article though, but my list would be substantially different. I should write it up.
Darren Aronofsky - magnificent artist

Abraham Lincoln - for his brutal honesty

Mahatma Ghandi - for changing the world

Steve Wozniak - for solving his own problems

Ford Prefect - always knows where his towel is
Sweet, thanks! I ended up with "The Most of PG Wodehouse" just 'cause it seemed a good place to start. Sounds like I'll be happy with it either way!

From the sound of it, this'll be quite the welcome contrast to the last book I read: Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. Great book, but not a happy read at all...
Richard Branson - for a hugely successful business man, he has done things right. He truly seems to care about his employees, customers and profit in a respectable way. That isn't common for a billionaire.

Barack Obama - The game of politics forces the players to be tireless self promoters, but somehow Barack manages to come off as genuine, honest and more concerned with civic duty than personal gain.
I think this is why it's so valuable to know and be friends before the relationship of "non-hacker" and "hacker" begins.

then, everybody will most likely be on a equal footing and not be worried about revenue, equity, and such.

btw, all hackers do not do the same amount/quality of work, so will we now institute a weighted system of value for hacker vs. hacker as many people here have for hacker vs. non-hacker
> Lets say your startup needs talent to work part-time (maybe even just 10 hours a week) in exchange for shares. How do you find people to accept that?

That's easy. Just make sure the the "shares" you're offering them are shares in Google! ;-)
Maxwell!
at least they're not evil
Sorry, but I feel the one line limit changes this from a potentially interesting and insightful thread to an endless sea of lists of names.

Richard Dawkins: I remember when I first saw the link to his documentary "The root of all evil?" on reddit. I was quickly enchanted by his ability to beautifully relate ideas and convey their wonder and simplicity. (Although I had heard of Richard Dawkings before, I didn't learn who the captivating narrator was until after watching.) Later on, I was impressed with his ability to attack the core of arguments and sidestep being pushed into a corner by misrepresentations and side-arguments.

Ayn Rand: After being taught for a decade that "morality" was synonymous with obedience to authority and a repressive code of social behavior, in middle school I began to quietly rebel and privately switch the meanings of moral and immoral. Then, I was introduced to Ayn Rand. Aside from the uplifting nature of her demonstrations of the positive nature of selfish and egoistic concepts, I was greatly relieved to find that I did not have to submit to quietly seething against society's oppressive definitions of the terms; I did not have to mentally wander without a way to think about what I deep down considered truly good.

Ron Paul: He showed me that politics could be more than something for citizens accepting of the status quo to squabble over and disenchanted, apathetic souls to cynically joke about. In addition, I am always impressed with his ability to never be backed into a corner, to turn the tables on those attempting to cast him and his ideas in a negative light, and his honesty and ability to get back to the core issues.

Jared Diamond: While I do not know too much about the man himself, I am nevertheless extremely impressed with the ideas presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel, especially his emphasis on chasing ideas to their root. With its emphasis on patterns in history, it has completed changed my outlook on history, the importance of individuals, and human nature. Furthermore, what is perhaps the most important idea in the book, that all useful technologies and other inventions over areas and good periods of time if and only if political homogeneity does not preclude adoption, has changed my views on government. I strive to share the same emphasis on searching for the root cause, which I suppose goes along well with the hacker's focus on abstraction and elegance; many essays I have written, including all of my SAT and ACT essays (practice and real), have traced simple questions about life back to either behavioral psychology, evolutionary psychology -- or ideas present in Guns, Germs and Steel (or some combination thereof).
I never comment on Paul Graham essays, but I'll make an exception and say that I really liked this one. It felt like it came from the heart.
Not definitive, but hard to beat:

Isaac Asimov - filled my teen years with fun, promoted friendliness, humanism and wonder

Captain Beefheart - incarnated ineffability, inestimable artistic genius and influence

Leonardo - the archetype of the universal man

George Orwell - bravery, promotion of liberty, damn fine writer

Lao Tzu/Buddha - kinda hard to put into words ;) showed me a different way to see things
William Godwin
Sounds like paradise. Where's it at (which state)? Also, is it private?
The same way a non-expert should hire a good sailor, mercenary, sommelier, writer, butler, lawyer, guide, pilot, surgeon, mechanic, etc.

Find out who's regarded as knowledgeable and effective within their fields (preferably by people who know firsthand), be prepared to pay them well, tell them what you want done, and stay out of their way. Expect a certain measure of mild disdain when you clumsily tread on their domain, and listen to what they have to say.
My asian religions prof. spent a bunch of years of her life studying the text and she was telling us this. Apparently some people still think it's an esoteric text, but they are in the minority.

Unfortunately I don't have any references to back it up, and none of the translations I have sitting in front of me mention it in the forward. And of course it's impossible to find anything via Google only because there are so many parodies of the Tao Te Ching itself.

There must be academic journals on the study of taoism, but I am having trouble finding any just searching online. I can try emailing her and asking for a cite if you'd like though.
Mohammed (PBUH)

Marvin Minsky

Thomas Hardy

Rtm/PG

Henri Petroski
You can already single-step and highlight the piece of code you're stepping (assuming you use Slime/sldb). You just need to proclaim a debug level 3 before compiling your software.

http://www.sbcl.org/manual/Debugger-Policy-Control.html#Debu...
What makes a product 'better' is more than just the qualities intrinsic to it. A product is 'better' if it is more useful to the consumer, and in tech, more widespread apps are preferred.

For example, take Oracle. Its not that much better than most of its competition, (DB2 SQL Server, etcetera) but nearly every enterprise DB app works with it. (I know, I worked on an enterprise app at IBM, and we made it work with Oracle before DB2.) This is because Oracle has the greater market share, and the greater market share leads to a better product ecosystem, which in turn leads to better market share. In many situations, being on top is all it takes to make your product 'better' in the eyes of the customer, and to do that, marketing and sales are very helpful. (Especially with B2B)
CSS is very difficult to replace with an abstraction because it's too quirky. Compiling a high level language down to CSS without human intelligence is so difficult, it's completely impractical.

HTML, on the other hand, is easy to abstract. I'm glad I did it in Weblocks, it saves me an enormous amount of time. ASP.NET uses this strategy (use the DataGrid control for a while, and then try coding without it).

JS is somewhere in the middle.
If it isn't too much trouble, I'd be very interested to hear more about that. I'm no scholar, but I find Taoism and the Tao Te Ching fascinating. I would understand it being partly satirical of prevailing thought, whilst being esoteric, but it being a simple satire would be quite amazing to me. Perhaps the esoterism is an artifact of translation/interpolation ;)
John Carmack.
K and R for unix/c

Darwin
you can imagine how horrified I was to read all the people who are just dripping with contempt for people like me

Don't take it personally. It's a reaction against a tendency in the industry to undervalue hackers and treat them as interchangeable drones. Because good hackers are rare and what they do is incredibly creative, this tendency can't last, so eventually it (and the emotional reaction against it) will pass. (Some of it's also just immaturity. Also some programmers are themselves arrogant - avoid these. Everything we're saying about respect cuts both ways. Besides, they're usually not very good.)

Pay attention to the comments here (aggieben's replies to your questions are worth their weight in gold) and change your thinking accordingly, and you'll be in a better position.

Speaking for myself, what I would want is: a significant share of ownership; an interesting and challenging problem; freedom to work in the best way I know (including freedom to choose my tools and find the best designs); full participation in important decisions; complete mutual respect; the feeling that it is fun to work together (this is a chemistry thing that has nothing to do with stupid motivational tricks); the kind of team where everybody puts their ideas on the table and hammers at them until the best one is agreed on, and nobody cares (or even remembers) who contributed what.

It absolutely has to be "we". I would always give credit to the person with the original idea and expertise (you, in this case), but if I ever felt I was working for that person or that they regarded me as "their" hacker, it would gnaw at me until it ruined my feeling about the thing. It's hard to explain how deeply this goes. I don't want higher status than anybody else; conversely the thought of being pegged at a lower status is intolerable, partly because it's degrading but more importantly because such structures inhibit creativity and that is what I care about most.
The question is whether it is more effort for a lazy professor to sue someone or to write tests designed to flunk students who buy those notes.

I know which one I would do, and it doesn't involve any lawyers.
I'm asking ;D
REST: Nouns and Resources
I could list my heroes, but they're basically the same set of people that I already quote here constantly. Mostly people who have made major contributions to the philosophy and culture of the Internet, plus a few others from the social sciences and education theory.
Not to barge in on Jason's thread, but if anyone else is looking for roommates in the area, please contact me (email address listed in profile.)
In no particular order (note that Jesus is after two programmers):

Knuth

Stroustrup

Jesus

W.F. Buckley

John Piper

wow. 5 is so few; I'm pretty sure I could go on listing names for a while...
if what you want in novels is more info, you might give Stephenson's Baroque Cycle a try.

Regarding the Spitfire, have you ever watched the 1942 movie 'The First of thew Few'?
I just picked up Henry Petroski's book, To Engineer is Human. Anything else you recommend by Petroski?
Interview with Gerald Combs, Creator of Ethereal/Wireshark
Jose Rizal
Ask YC: Software Engineering in Startups
I have been taking a Software Engeneering course at college. I gotta say, it looks like a bunch of bureaucracy that complete rips off the programmer freedom. Althought I'm kind of a newbie in the subject.

So, my question is, are software engeneering techinques often used on startup projects? If so, what kind of techniques? Is it worthed? Or is it stuff for big companies to do in order to manage all the people they have working?
Roald Amundsen --- The first man to reach the south pole. It's not the accomplishment itself, but the way it was accomplished. If interested, read "The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole."
Technically that's semi-bluffing.
Not interested, but out of curiosity, which part of the valley are you looking to end up in?
I like P.G. Wodehouse's stories; I'm quite a bit less impressed with his activities during World War 2.

Wodehouse was in France when the Germans invaded in 1940. He was interned as an enemy alien by the Nazis for a year. The Germans were able to persuade him to make some light-hearted radio broadcasts intended for American (but not British) consumption, in exchange for his release from internment. Many Britons (including A.A. Milne) never forgave him for this, though Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell defended him.

After the War, Wodehouse found that he could not live in England and moved to the U.S., where he became a citizen in 1955.
Why Do So Many People Freak Out When They See 'Free' As Part Of A Business Model?
I also usually don't comment because the other comments are often so biting. I really enjoy reading about what influences people and their histories. Opinions about subjects without clear answers can be interesting to read, but always leave one feeling slightly at odds with the writer. Its almost that if written correctly, opinion pieces should have at least something that you don't agree with. In good situations, this initiates a discourse around that point, but often online this just leads to trolling by commenters - which never leads to good things.
I can't believe no one has mentioned Jira. It beats the tar out of bugzilla, trac, and mantis. It's not free, but it's by far the best product I've used, with the largest plugin development community, and a great list of sibling applications you may want to try later on. It's not open source, but you do get the source code when you buy an enterprise license.

Jira is also great for managing project work internally.
Kaiser Soze.
Poorbuthappy - Free, detailed travel guides written by travelers.
All of my heroes are fellow New Zealanders:

Ernest Rutherford - Discovered the proton and originated the orbital theory of the atom. Director of a lab that launched the careers of many other famous physicists.

William Pickering - Director of NASA's JPL during the moon years. Held the position for 22 years.

Peter Jackson - Created a movie industry out of nothing in a country thousands of miles away from Hollywood.

Sir Edmund Hillary - Helped build hundreds of schools and hospitals in Nepal. Climbed Everest. Crossed the Antarctic in a hacked together tractor. Jet-boated up the Ganges.

Charles Upham - Won the Victoria's Cross twice during WW II.
Bugzilla is pretty nice.
I was hoping to see Feynman on this list (especially after reading the two qualities that these people had in common). Good read, though.
"He then proved the existence of black holes and the notion that time passes more slowly the faster you travel."

Einstein didn't believe black holes existed, let alone prove it. In fact nobody has "proven" it, so to speak.
Well played, Google. Well played.
I feel like the core idea is pursue your passions intensely and revel in any opportunity to do so. But maybe I'm over simplifying
They already make over 100 million+ a year of revenue, and have minimal costs (and only 25 employees). That's quite a chunk of money to live really really well.
Even if this is a shot at the bow of AWS, it only solves one piece of the puzzle.
Ask YC: What editor/ide do you use to hack javascript?
I've used emacs so far, though it's good at syntax highlighting. I would like something that can show glaring mistakes, like calling a function with the wrong number of arguments, or referring to a variable which hasn't been defined. Thanks.
We just lack the courage to acknowledge our own lack of courage. Ironic.
better title might be "unreasonable effectiveness of c"
John Lennon - turned songcraft into the most powerful political tool possible

William Shakespeare - will anybody ever reach greater heights of understanding about the human character?

Terry Fox - when was the last time you ran across Canada with one leg?

John von Neumann - there wasn't a ground-breaking field in the 20th Century he wasn't a part of

Wayne Gretzky - he dominated his sport like no other, even though he was a small man playing a large man's game. He was put on this Earth to play hockey, and he followed his passion.
Slowly Grasping Online Advertising Model
I didn't downmod you but I think that the reason people did wasn't the legal warning (which is certainly valid and relevant,) but the tone. Insulting people just doesn't get them to listen.
Bertrand Russell

Thomas Paine

Giordano Bruno

Norman Borlaug
Hi. I'm the original author.

As far as I can see, the reason why C++ has never really taken off for OS design is both historical and technical. When I was working at a major telecommunications firm, our C++ coding manual dated back to 1985--any features that weren't stable in C++ as of '85 simply could not be used in modern code in '99.

Large scale engineering shops are very, very slow to change. Right there's one major reason why C++ hasn't caught on in the OS level.

The other major reason has to do with the way C++ implements inheritance. The fragile base class problem is a killer for OS level design. If you want to dodge that, then your best bet is to write your kernel in the C subset of C++ and eschew C++'s object model.

Finally, there's the issue of portability. C++ didn't even standardize until 1998. Compilers lagged substantially behind the Standard until about 2003. Using sophisticated C++ features like the STL tended to lock you into one particular compiler vendor. That's not something an OS designer especially wants.

I know of several engineering shops that write their code in C, precisely to get around vendor quality-of-implementation issues in their C++ compilers. However, despite the fact they write their code in C, they make compiling it with a C++ compiler part of their software engineering practice, in order to take advantage of the C++'s compiler's much stronger type checking.

I have yet to see the tool chain be an issue in C++ development. That's not to say it can't be an issue or that you haven't seen it--only to say I've never seen it become a substantial issue.
Um.

Why not use Chicken: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/

or Bigloo: http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/

or Stalin: http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~qobi/software.html

or Gambit: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P...

And for those of you who think that this would be cool if it was mature and stable, GIYF.
In real MVC, you want to put everything related to your business rules, storage access, etc. in your model. Then you wrap the View and Controller around that as a very thin web <-> model glue. That's all a web framework should do, web-enable your model classes. Things that should not happen in the Controller include touching the ORM (or SQL queries), validating input, any business logic, etc. Just pass the request to the right model, see if the model did what you asked, and display the success page or the error page.

Here's a short talk I wrote on the subject:

http://www.jrock.us/fp2008/catalyst/start.html
Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’
At the moment...Ernest Gallo. We'll see how that pans out come morning.

EDIT:

My real list:

1. Nietzsche. Some others have mentioned him. Too often he's thought of as a proto-Nazi, and maybe he is, at least in terms of attitude. But every reading lends to the belief that above all else he's an endlessly untapped pool of thought.

2. Debussy. I'm increasingly convinced that he is Beethoven/Bach/Mozart's superior. Each among the latter wrote endless meadering or cliche'd passages. Debussy produced consisent note-by-note perfection, combined with experimentation. He, however, has no "great works". They all stand about the same, even La Mer.

3. Rachmaninov. Reached some of the greatest possible heights, though he is full of mistakes and lapses. The Paganinni variations sits on a pedestal along with the 9th, Brahms' requiem, and Bach's Bm mass.

4. Chopin. A composer of limited scope and a laughable arranger, still has the incomparable distinction of writing the world's greatest melody, in the E flat major etude. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-idMTyc0AY

5. Rochefoucauld. The perfect man.
You can start by not calling them 'hackers'. Only hackers get to call hackers hackers.
That's just what I was thinking.
I could use some suggestions as well. I'm using VIM and doing most of the AJAX work manually (with JQuery). js is a pain though -- anyone know a better way to get this stuff done?
The Wright Bros

Steve Jobs

Phil Spector (song writer, producer)

Will Glaser (music genome project)

Miles Davis
Nietzsche

David Foster Wallace

Ted Kaczynski
Has anybody tried Supportcenter from manageengine. ( http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center ) . From their website, they seem to have a customer support solution with Email to ticket conversation, Account & Contact Management, Service Contracts, SLAs, Business Rules etc. Has anybody evaluated their software ? Any comments ?

Regards,

Daniel Sherman
Steve Yegge wrote a new js mode for emacs: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/js2-mode-new-javascr...
I think this will be once piece of many, however having using EC2 and experienced their support (which is great) it will take something for me to move over to Google. With Google their support has been less than great and if this filtered into this kind of product then I wouldn't use them. AWS have been pioneering and I'd stick with them if they continue to improve and innovate
I use VIM too. What exactly do you find is a pain?
For finding those kinds of mistakes use jslint (http://jslint.com), though it doesnt catch calling a function with the wrong number of arguments (which may be what you intended anyways). If you download the source you can easily write a custom command in vim or emacs to run the current buffer through jslint.
yeah, I thought it was a cool to find a football player on that list, and a Steeler as well
Ugh. Monroeville. Come for the Sam's Club. Stay for the Popeye's.
Computer programmers, then?
Luke Skywalker
Feynman: Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle
How's this different from wikitravel, which has a much larger user base?
Have you tried Aptana (http://www.aptana.com/)?. It's a full-fledged Web Development IDE. The JS Editor is especially good and allows for referenced js code lookups from inside html files. It's also available as a regular eclipse add-on.
I've been trying it out. Not bad, especially the error highlighting. The only downside is that you have to stop typing to get syntax highlighting.
on top of that I don't have a lot of confidence that google won't taketh away should it suit them (they have done so before). Amazon are more clear in that those types of services are the future of their business.