I had many lovely dinners with John back in the 90s (he loved Chez Panisse). While his public persona could occasionally be curmudgeonly, in person he was a warm-hearted, passionate computing enthusiast.

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barney54 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is exactly who it sounds like Dvorak was. I never got to know him like that, but being a public curmudgeon, but private warm-hearted person is a pretty great compliment.

	▲	mrandish 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For sure. I got to know John after meeting him in our respective roles as 'journalist writing about startup' and 'young startup entrepreneur'. As we got to know one another well enough to hang out after trade show hours, he gave me pretty invaluable insights and perspective on how to think about the evolving computer industry. 10 months ago, I actually posted on HN about how much John (and his peers) cared and helped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45076557.

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e40 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So many people who have big personalities on the internet are like that. My example is Erik Naggum. I spent a lot of time with him and the gulf between his in-person and on-line personas was vast.

Trivia: I took both the pics of him on his wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum

	▲	aidenn0 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Had he acted in real life the way he did on c.l.l, I strongly suspect he would have been punched a lot more often. Certainly one eulogy I read of him led with the sentence: "Erik Naggum was the first person I killfiled in GNUS." On the other hand, I have heard only good things from people who interacted with him one-on-one though (whether in-person or electronically). His technical content was almost always high-quality, but one would often need to first don one's Nomex suit to get to said content.