There is? He didn't write nginx, or the C libraries it uses, or the linux kernel it's running on, or the Xen virtualization layer slicehost is using, or the C compiler which was used to compile all of the above -- but each of those is far more sophisticated than the blog engine. What's so awesome about a very thin layer at the top of a very deep stack?
He didn't plant the seeds that grew into the vegetables he used. He didn't grind out the flour he used to cook. He didn't raise the cattle, or clean the meat. He just took some finished products and he made a meal.
Every step of any process requires an awesome effort. I'm just as impressed with the people who wrote those many, many laters. But in the end, design is that layer you're talking about, and Posterous is very well-designed, and when I use a web site that's all that I care about. That's the product of the Posterous team, and it's a pretty awesome one.
Why bother doing anything if all you're ever doing is building a thin layer? Could it be that any product is a result of lots of people working on something, and that each contribution is integral? Nah, couldn't be. We're all insignificant and nothing is awesome.
What happened to the ability of hackers to look at something cool and say "Gee golly wow"? I still do that all the time, and every time I do I get these little snide remarks. Why? What harm is there in thinking that lots of things are awesome? Lots of things are awesome! Life is so awesomely super-duper cool! Let's not ruin it by sneering.
To turn my question around: Ok, so the blog engine and all the underlying layers are all awesome; but why don't all the underlying layers get as much attention?
I think it's because a lot of that stuff doesn't get as much publicity. I'm fairly clueless about Unix: I know that Linus guy did something, but I am not well-versed in Unix's history.
That might actually be a fascinating thing: a publication or web site or blog devoted to exploring stuff like that, explaining why they're so huge and so important, and getting information like that out there. I feel bad* that I don't know more about my computer and about coding systems beyond that top layer, but at the same time I don't know where I'd start to learn about things like that. (The closest I got was with _why's explanation of why Ruby is neat, and even that was enough to inspire a real fascination with the language. I'm sure that sort of attitude could be more commonplace.)
*Specifically, something to do with Linux.
Normal people rarely care about the technology, they do care about little things that improve their live
I think it's cool that Guido van Rossum uses Python in most of his daily programming.
I think it's cool that thet Lighttpd website runs on Lighttpd.
I think it's cool that I use my own project for my daily websearching needs (okay, bad example, since I'm in Search UI and most of my job consists of putting a pretty web interface on the stuff the backend engineers do. I think it's cool that I use lacker's stuff that I slapped a frontend onto for my daily websearching needs. ;-))