+1 to patio11. When I'm skimming comments, I make sure to actually read his fully.

As much as we all say we're governed by reason, there's still some timidity and doubt and he has this great ability to call people on it in a constructive way.

I also like tokenadult's posts for anything biology-related.

I'm totally a ChuckMcM fan. Thoughtful, experienced, witty. I always look for his comments in threads I'm interested in and have yet to be disappointed.

Workaround: I add those names and many others to the list of words to be highlighted on HN (Pearls extension)...

Animats post on "Maximizing shareholder value", which had many responses, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709880

The followup is the icing on the cake, "Only once?"

Yes, only once. But I actually consider my first score on the Putnam (53, ranked 53.5th in North America) to be my most impressive performance on the Putnam, considering that I was only 14 years old at the time.

It's one of my favourite comments ever.

Oh, so this is why it suddenly popped up again in my twitter feed...

I'll say here what I posted there a moment ago: Seven years after making a fool of myself on Hacker News, I wonder if my epitaph will be "Yes, I won the Putnam".

cpervica == Colin Percival (via http://www.tarsnap.com/about.html)

I think Ravi Vakil was just given as an example of somebody with a lot of academic accomplishment.

Even better, further down the thread drew houston comes on to say that he is working on a similar idea and that he could email him to chat.

"when C, D & S (or cease and desist as I call them) come back home" was a great setup too.

One of my favorites from that thread:

  Remember that success comes from improving OTHER people's lives. All your achievements, while probably very gratifying to your mother, have not improved my life at all. - dbosson

  Do you use OS X or Mozilla? Have you ever used their software update mechanisms? If yes, I've improved your life -- they use my delta compression work (bsdiff, originally written as part of FreeBSD Update) to reduce the size of updates which have to be downloaded. As of about a year ago, my work had saved users around the world well over a hundred years of waiting for updates to download. -cpervica

Advice by sillysaurus3 on 'recommended reading' for programmers, mainly focusing on C and distributed systems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602457

Here's an old one which is still awesome:

"How I crashed HN" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976

Very nice list thanks for posting

Wow. That was long. It was also very good. Thanks for the link.

"You just have to figure out which part of the animal kingdom you're in" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940

The top response to "what's th best way to get 5% on a million dollars" is the best piece of investing advice I have seen on this forum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7028803

In general, if you read the comments from top HN'ers [1] you will find a lot of perls: that's the reason why they got the karma..

Sometimes you can find also great comments [2] from less visible HN'ers. E.g. I suggest a "niche" comment on the best way to negociate a claimed domain name [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603821

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9522459 on topic "Ask HN: How to talk smart?"

I like a lot of tptacek's[1] comments, as long as he's talking technology / security and not politics. On politics we're pretty far apart, but there's no question the guy knows security damn well, and always has something insightful to say.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek

A bit OT but this is quite funny and a bit related http://bradconte.com/files/misc/HackerNewsParodyThread/