And I mean "thinkers" in the broadest sense (eg writers, artists, bloggers, people in your field, etc.).
I think the HN crowd is super smart and would really love to learn about your influences!!
A list of multiple people (with explanations if you'd like) would be even better :)
He would say things like:
Doing something the right way is hard work, but not as much work as doing it again because you screwed it up the first time.
Or if someone, a farm hand or whoever (sometimes me) would be struggling to figure out how to do something (e.g. get the tractor engine going) he would ask if you wanted him to do it for you, if you said yes then he would call you a nutzloser scheist (useless shit) or something like that. The correct answer was no, please tell me how sir, or something along those lines.
He told me, if you hate farm work you better do good in school so you can get a good job, become an engineer, then you won't have to come back here and work like a dog all day.
He had a lot of them like that, it stuck with me. Sorry I don't have any famous people to name.
and the stoic guy marcus aurelius: don't sweat imagined horrors it's almost never that serious.
He would say things like:
Doing something the right way is hard work, but not as much work as doing it again because you screwed it up the first time.
Or if someone, a farm hand or whoever (sometimes me) would be struggling to figure out how to do something (e.g. get the tractor engine going) he would ask if you wanted him to do it for you, if you said yes then he would call you a nutzloser scheist (useless shit) or something like that. The correct answer was no, please tell me how sir, or something along those lines.
He told me, if you hate farm work you better do good in school so you can get a good job, become an engineer, then you won't have to come back here and work like a dog all day.
He had a lot of them like that, it stuck with me.
I realised that I have all the answers (regarding my own life) already right within me - I just need someone from the outside to dig through it with me.
I could name all the Navals of the world, and yes, these people do help. Still, I believe that very often, maybe more than ever before, we underestimate our own thoughts.
A variety of books and essays by Mark Poster [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Poster]. Fairly left on the political spectrum. Marxist analyses of technology and information technology specifically and how they can both benefit as well as oppress.
danah boyd [https://www.danah.org/] I enjoy her analysis & criticism of technology from a sociological perspective. She gave a great talk at one of the O'Reilly etech or web 2.0 conferences around 2009–2010 about how we were all building these great social media services with zero grasp of sociological implications. Like. By 2010 there was ~20-25 years of people being shitty online to one another in one form or another across The Source, Compuserve, AOL, Usenet, Fidonet, etc before everything shifted to the web. There were, and are, basic considerations to take into account when building an online "community" and yet time after time people are shocked, shocked to learn that people can be terrible online and that the services we build can amplify these behaviors massively.
I didn't find McLuhan nearly as useful as I was taught he'd be as the online world evolved into the web world. Prescient, yes, but I think moreso in a cheerleader for how great and wonderful the new world would be.