Steve Pavlina has one essay, in particular, which changed the way I thought about my business and directly contributed to my later success. (The five-second version: improvements in your funnel are multiplicatively effective. Does that sound obvious? It wasn't obvious to me, and it set me down the road of A/B testing and other hillclimbing, and I climbed my way right out of my day job.)
Yes, he later went seven flavors of kooky... but no amount of kooky retroactively disproves good ideas. That's also a level of discourse which I'd prefer to avoid on HN.
Since Steve Pavlina makes something like a million dollars per year on his magical blog, he has credibility when it comes to making money.
The real question to ask about Steve Pavlina though is whether his blog posts are designed to help YOU make money, or to help HIM make money. He typically doesn't provide objective evidence indicating you will be helped. And if he wanted to, he COULD get this evidence.
So for instance he claims that using various magical powers you can make money. He could invest $50,000 in running scientific trials of these methods and objectively prove to his readers that it works.
THAT would be worthy of Hacker News.
But if Steve Pavlina is fair game to be quoted on HN, I am gonna start quoting Jesus. Cause they have about the same level of credibility.
If someone quoted Jesus (or their favorite spiritual icon) on HN in the same positive and relavent manner that Steve Pavlina is being mention in this thread, and nobody flipped out, it would come close to a watershed moment of maturity for tech forums everywhere.
I believe it was an article called "Shareware Amateurs vs Shareware Professionals". His old Dexterity is no longer available, but he released the copyright on all his material so I mirrored it (and all his old Dexterity articles) on my site:
Yes, he later went seven flavors of kooky... but no amount of kooky retroactively disproves good ideas. That's also a level of discourse which I'd prefer to avoid on HN.