I'm not sure if that's because I have aspirations to submit to YC at some point and wonder how PG might view this (and whether it would affect any decision making one way or another). Or if it's just the general concern with unnecessarily putting myself 'out there' somewhat publicly.
So yes, I do smoke and code. I don't know if I would say I'm 'stoned' though; I find that if I have just a wee bit I'm more focused and on point. It's similar to when I play music; not for the 'creative release' often claimed (though seldom experienced by me), but rather for this deep-focus aspect.
If someone chooses to consume a drug of their choosing and still create in a way that fulfills them and their customers -- it is a grave injustice to shackle someone, wag a finger and tell them no. You inspire on many fronts.
I look at pot and people the same way. I've had friends who smoked and were the laziest people you ever met. They were lazy pre-pot and only became lazier. I've had other friends who smoke and they became super successful, quality people.
A girl I dated in college occasionally smoked with her sister. I would give them grief about it, but turns out in HS they smoked every day with the eventually valedictorian of their school. Oh, and they both finished college with 4.0s in finance.
I wouldn't recommend doing most of your coding high, but if you do so every now and then it might help you think about things in a different way.
I started taking a Guarana supplement with my morning vitamins; guarana is similar to coffee beans but has a higher concentration of caffeine. So far I've been amazed by how it's working.
Every morning before work, he'd make a pot of the nastiest, strongest coffee you could imagine, pour himself a cup, and drink it with his morning bong hits. He'd then drive myself and our other roommate to work in his beat up Volvo station wagon. Once he got to work he'd shut himself in his office, crank up his stereo (no headphones) and start reading his email.
"I'm just wondering if it's a regular part of the lifestyle of many successful hackers"
I think it does not matter if you're a "successful" hacker or not, it matters if you understand how it effects you and your work, successful or not. I know some that cannot work without it, but I also know some that cannot think straight while stone
I didn't used to do this when I was younger (I'm 32 now). In college I found that while I could do homework high, it usually resulted in me correcting a bunch of errors the next day, so I reserved pot (and alcohol) for when I was finished with my work. But these days I'm so compelled to work on side projects that having used pot (and sometimes alcohol) earlier in the evening just doesn't stop me from putting in a few hours before bed time.
As a side note: I gave up regular usage of caffeine after I got out of college. I found I no longer needed it once I was able to get 7-8 hours of sleep every night instead of 4. But I very occasionally have caffeine and yes, as others have said, pot + caffiene is a good combo.
I've found it to be more or less true for mental tasks. When I (and some classmates) have been lightly buzzed, we seem to work better (in certain respects). For example, when solving physics problems, we become much better/faster at coming up with solutions (granted, we'll probably end up making more calculation errors).
This led me to doing all my assignments first buzzed, and then recopying them out and rechecking the calculations (my writing is horrible, the recopying was required anyways) later when sober.
Of course, when finals rolled around, I had to spend 3 solids days practicing physics while sober again. It was weird.
There are many coding tasks it's not that great for for me, primarily those that make heavy use of longer-than-short-term memory :P