Ask HN: Who is the most positive impactful person you know?

Elon Musk

Robin Hanson

Jordan Peterson

Leonard Susskind, a theoritical physicist at Stanford.

He has open, free video lectures that cover an entire 4 year cirruculum of a physics degree in his personal website called Theoritical Minimum.

Richard Stallman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stallman

Steve Jobs

Sal Khan from Khan Academy.

Will MacAskill[1] for his contributions to launching the effective altruism movement, which has gone on to inspire many other people to take a much more rigorous and active perspective on doing good.

[1] - Many others were involved, but I know the most about his contributions.

Bill Gates

Christopher Hitchens. His impact on me is so powerful that for the last 4 years I have my ringtone and sms alert tone set to him saying "There are no final solutions. There is no absolute truth"

François Chollet

My high school physics teacher. She taught me the importance of being a good human being. And that being kind and empathetic to others is the best thing a person can do. That honesty and integrity are more important than winning. And she also taught me elementary physics.

Bill Murray.

Netflix has a new release about him, named "The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned From a Mythical Man."

Highly recommended.

John Carmack. First, by making one of the most memorable game of my childhood. Second, by inspiring me and a few of my friends via Masters of Doom [1], with his tweets, videos, by being a Craftsman, the embodiment of a great programmer. Masters of Doom helped one of my colleagues to ignite his passion for coding again, after a long exposure to mind-numbing corporate work.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom

Prabhu Ramachandran [1], author of Mayavi [2]

The amount of high quality work he does, all the while being positive, cheerful and friendly is a trait to imbibe and admire.

I am privileged to have him as a mentor, friend, philosopher and guide.

[1] https://www.aero.iitb.ac.in/~prabhu/

[2] https://github.com/enthought/mayavi

I'm going to change it a little to the people I've met that have had a sizable impact on the world.

I've met Sam Altman briefly last year. His involvement with YC the past several years and co-founding OpenAI have directly and indirectly touched thousands of jobs.

I've also met Michael Seibel. His involvement with YC the past several years has directly and indirectly touched thousands of jobs. His co-founding of Junstin.tv allowed it to exist, it is now evolved into twitch.tv which has allowed some creators and gamers to actually earn a living streaming and has created tons of micro-communities for video games and table top fans to both play and watch.

Aside from them, I don't really know (nor have I met) anyone else that I feel has directly and indirectly had as much of an impact on society as those two although...

I have very casually known, but never met, Kate Bornstein since our mutual participation in the Save Caprica campaign. She's certainly been a bastion of hope for many LGBT persons. She's semi-active on various social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Bornstein

Jon Kabat-Zinn

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat-Zinn

Richard Feynman. You could pretend to ask him questions and play sound bites of his interviews/lectures :)

Mom

Kent Beck and Andrei Alexandrescu.

Andrei is quite amazing to me...

Clearly capable of writing code that is wonderful... and incomprehensible to mortal man.... but wonderfully focused on not doing that.

On making it comprehensible, and producing facilities that are friendly and nice and doing so with a kindly attitude.

Kent, in addition to the stuff he has done on the TDD front... https://www.infoq.com/presentations/self-image/

Would love to hear your definition "impact". On a personal level? On a business level? On a global level even? I think it is really difficult to define what impact even means. Sometimes impact is realized even long after someone has died, think F. Scott Fitzgerald (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby#Legacy_and_mo...)

Derek Sivers

Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen - His company saved the lives of about 10 million people (my wild ass guess) with approximately one million water purifiers and something like 1 billion mosquito nets distributed in Africa. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestergaard_Frandsen)

Steve Gleason, former NFL player & ALS survivor & Congressional Gold Medal recipient: http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-360/0ap3000001010997/Steve-Gle...

Milton Friedman. Remarkable economist and very bright person. A noblr prize winner. Defender of the free market. What is remarkable about him is the simple way to argue bringing natural human behavior and historical examples.

Alon Geva: He has really practical and straightforward questions for spiritual awakening: https://www.youtube.com/user/awakeningrightnow

Kevin Adler of Miracle Messages. They reunite long lost homeless people with their families. I'm sure Kevin would be happy to do your podcast.

https://miraclemessages.org/

The urban landscape is changing from auto-centric to human-centric (pedestrian areas, bike-lanes, light-rail). Jan Gehl and Janette Sadik-Khan are two prominent examples, but there are many others.

Dr. Michael Greger. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Greger

Murray Gell-Mann

Scott Hanselman

Dawa Tarchin Phillips -- he teaches mindfulness and leadership skills in schools and around the world.

Read the question and was about to suggest Austen Allred when I read the rest of your post. :)

Ocean Whitehawk: Spiritual teacher who has completely changed the lives of her students.

www.oceanwhitehawk.com

Tim Ferriss

Spock

It won't be anyone that uses the word 'impactful'.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Jocko Willink

Tom Bilyue from Impact Theory.

My parents.

Paul Graham

George Washington

Sir Isaac Newton

Alan Watts

1) John Carmack

Jesus

I kinda like Warren Buffett

Edward Jenner & Louis Pasteur (vaccines)

Jesus