Ask HN: Notable Hacker News Users

2 points by adj 13 years ago | 7 comments

I spend a lot of time reading Hacker News each day trying to learn as much as I can about startups.

However, one of the problems that I have is I find it hard to know what advice to listen too. There are so many opinions and comments and it can be very difficult to know if the author actually knows what they are talking about.

So my question is, who are the best people to listen to on Hacker News? I’m not necessarily looking for the people with the highest karma, I’m looking for the people who practice what they preach, people who run successful startups and who have real world evidence to back up their claims.

eddie_the_head 13 years ago |

Besides people associated with YC like pg, rtm, jl, paul etc, a good litmus test is often simply age of account and the person's background from their profile. People I know who have good backgrounds and make consistently good comments from their experience for years now are usually all I read anymore, since there are so many comments on HN now.

pcd 13 years ago | |

Is there an easy way to find these people? Or even to easily highlight their posts?

Need a twitter follow for HN!

eddie_the_head 13 years ago | | |

Well, there's people like dons and ibdknox who are famous from their open source contributions who make good comments and are worth following, or those who show up and make worthwhile contributions in their domain space like cynicalkane in finance threads, grellas in law threads, tptacek and daeken in security threads, or garbowza in patents ones. These days some these users don't comment as much however. Mostly it's a matter of lots of lurking until you come to hate the site.

There was/is a chrome extension for following hn users I used a few years ago that was useful, but I haven't bothered to reinstall it after a few OS moves since, mainly because it didn't sync the friends list across computers.

anonymouslambda 13 years ago |

adj 13 years ago | |

Haha, thanks :) I was waiting for someone to mention pg. I'm a big fan of both his writing style and advice. Any other suggestions?

pcd 13 years ago |

To get the more obvious ones out of the way. Any of the 37 signals guys always write pretty good stuff.