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Sorry if it sounded out of place. The context is that Dan's team does so much impactful work thanks to powerful software. But for various reasons, a lot of the

Sorry if it sounded out of place. The context is that Dan's team does so much impactful work thanks to powerful software. But for various reasons, a lot of the required knowledge is esoteric. (Do you know how to write an emacs library to provide proper indentation for arc? If not, are you ready to dive in and learn, without extensive supervision?) It's also crucial for HN team members to be trustworthy and effective. I'm pretty sure that access to the core HN infrastructure is limited to very, very few people – it has to be. For example, pg used HN to keep notes on startups he was meeting with during office hours. And that's just one of dozens and dozens of sensitive areas. For obvious reasons, no one can have access to those except extremely trustworthy, capable people. Worse, you can't grant access to code related to those things without also revealing the purpose of those sensitive areas. Abuse detection is possibly the mildest example, but I imagine the standard deviation on surprise is extraordinarily high for a random HN feature. Those two things (esoteric knowledge requirements + {competent,trustworthy,motivated}) means that Dan and his team are often short-handed. I am speaking from ignorance here, but it would be remarkable if they somehow weren't. The YC software team also covers a huge amount of territory as of today, from maintaining ycombinator.com's Rails codebase to keeping "Work at a Startup" infrastructure running smoothly. Some of it needs HN integration, like the ability for the YC application to cross-reference the HN usernames of each founder, which seems to use some sort of oauth token that I'm sure wasn't effortless to get working in Arc. The most well-placed person to do all of this work is Dan, but Dan himself has to spend a majority of his time moderating HN. Yet through all that work, he still finds the time to create megathread indexes like this one. So, knowing what I know, when I see that, I can't help but take off my hat for a moment and say something. Apologies for the confusion. Dan also helped design Lumen, a Lisp that bootstraps itself entirely in Javascript or Lua: http://github.com/sctb/lumen http://github.com/sctb/lumen I fell in love with it around... five years ago? Something like that. And to this day I still write code in it all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804484 (I've been meaning to ship a Tensorflow/Pytorch code generator, one of these days.) The last aspect of it is that I once had an opportunity to work on getting him some desperately-needed tooling back in 2016, but I totally blew it. The first thing he asked for was an Arc indentation plugin for Emacs, which I had never touched till then. Unfortunately my life was in complete chaos at the time (https://gist.github.com/shawwn/3110ab62fa027c7811578f167fa5a3a0 https://gist.github.com/shawwn/3110ab62fa027c7811578f167fa5a...) and various things were happening that made me turn bitter, to say the least. ("Crazy-seeming dickhead" might be a better phrasing, depending on who you ask.) I ended up delivering nothing, when I could have improved his workflow substantially. (I myself have been using some Arc vim indentation plugin I found somewhere around a decade ago, and god bless whoever wrote that; it's been so lovely. So I know how important that kind of thing can be.) Once I got my life in order, and have had several years to reflect, I realized what a unique and cool opportunity it was that I squandered, and I've regretted it ever since. So that was the middle paragraph talking. But! I had my shot, and you might be able to get one too. If you (or whoever's reading this) happens to have a unique combination of skills, a lot of free time, and are willing to work extremely hard, then I encourage you to email hn@ycombinator.com and tell 'em you're willing to lend a hand with whatever odd jobs they need. They'll probably appreciate it. Or maybe they don't need anything. That was 2016, this is 2021, and HN has been running fantastically well all this time. That's why I shall settle for the cheerleader role. :) Anyway, this is all entirely off-topic, so if it's inappropriate then please feel free to collapse or detach it, of course. But in my opinion that whole infrastructure hemisphere is one of the more interesting places in the world, a bit like Hogwarts, so I wanted to ramble a little bit. Back to ML!

sverhagen 6y ago
Wow. Just wow. I like Hacker News like the next person. In fact, I'm here all the time. But it's a business expense for Y Combinator, is it not? That's not a charity. These folks may do great work, and I like it a lot, but isn't it also just their job that they get paid for. There's people that go above and beyond in a lot of companies, many of them sadly less visible, while you make it weirdly (to me) sound like something special, which I just can't see. It's a great website, though, and a major part of my internet diet. So, thanks to all involved, community included.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  It's definitely not a charity. Dan offered to pay me a contract rate, but I was such a mess at the time that – and this an impressive fumble – I managed not to say "Yes, thanks! How do you feel about $x?" and instead launched off the deep end somewhere. (I was working on Emacs indentation in between Uber rides, since I was a driver at the time; much hacking ended up being done in a Best Buy parking lot under the actual moonlight. So at the time I was a little, uh, "eccentric" is probably the nicest way to phrase it.) If I made HN/YC sound weird, it's only because I'm weird; sorry about that. My path through life was nontraditional. At the top of my salary history (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109946) is "unpaid intern for a year" – I still think that unpaid internship was the best thing that ever happened in my life, especially at 17. (Incidentally, I was paid a few hundred bucks under the table; the problem was child labor laws, which are somewhat onerous in America.) A lot of people would feel that that's unfair. I say that in exchange for them putting up with a sometimes-goofy 17 year old, I was able to learn almost as much in that first year as I have in all subsequent years. HN is similar in that there's an astonishing variety of interesting, unintuitive infrastructure tasks that you'll be exposed to. (I still rely on Emacs occasionally; that skill wouldn't have been in my arsenal.) One reason I said anything at all is because Dan has been saying for several years that one day he might open source the moderation browser extension he uses; think of it like an IDE for HN. I was thinking perhaps someone could show up and say "Hey, I'd be willing to help package it up for release!" or something, because I personally think that it would be Hella Cool, as they say, to have some kind of power-user mode for HN. But since it has possibly sensitive moderation features, trust is of course a crucial issue, which takes time to establish remotely. The other aspect was that Scott Bell (a former mod) was basically my only friend at that time. "Associate" is probably a better description, since he had an almost Vulcan-like detachment; nothing seemed to phase him. He was so cool that he was ice cold when it came to work, yet friendly and interesting when it came to life in general. Much of my present style was influenced by him. I think he put in a good word for me, and I ended up wasting a lot of their time instead, which I've felt badly about for years. So some of those feelings were coloring my writing a bit; I'm certain that the HN team is a well-oiled corporate machine, as you'd expect. It was interesting that an opportunity like that was even on the radar for me at one point, since as you allude to, it's somewhat unusual. But it's due to a confluence of factors, and they've likely had an influx of help (and business expense) since then. But of course, business expense means business priority. And that leaves no time for interesting yeoman work like open-sourcing a neat HN browser extension. (It's pretty rad: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20browser%20extension&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) So if work like that sounds interesting, email 'em and say something. But a word of advice: go into it with a chill mindset, and realize that it'll take time to earn trust. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20176460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20176460 mentions factoring out moderation-only features, so it's understandable that they can't simply say "Here's the code!" to anyone who shows up and asks. "Hacker News" definitely lives up to the "Hacker" part of the name. It's not too often that such impactful infrastructure is written in Lisp. I think that's super neat, so maybe someone else will too. EDIT: Oh yes, I should probably mention Numen. If you do end up needing to learn Emacs for random esoteric jobs, Dan's old Node.js debugger is an amazing resource: https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el It stopped working after Node 0.6 I think, when Node dropped the old debug API. But I got it working once, and holy moly it was cool. It was like Indium (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) in that it was a JS debugger on steroids, and IMO had nicer features than even Chrome. It was even superior to Indium in a certain aspect related to cross referencing function names in the debugger with the actual files/lines they were defined at. I don't remember why, but the new Node debugger system made that super difficult for some reason. Numen's a great example of the type of work that you'd be in a position to do. Much like Lisp itself, Numen seemed to have an extraordinary amount of power, yet few people noticed. Neat code.

sverhagen 6y ago

Wow. Just wow. I like Hacker News like the next person. In fact, I'm here all the time. But it's a business expense for Y Combinator, is it not? That's not a charity. These folks may do great work, and I like it a lot, but isn't it also just their job that they get paid for. There's people that go above and beyond in a lot of companies, many of them sadly less visible, while you make it weirdly (to me) sound like something special, which I just can't see. It's a great website, though, and a major part of my internet diet. So, thanks to all involved, community included.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
It's definitely not a charity. Dan offered to pay me a contract rate, but I was such a mess at the time that – and this an impressive fumble – I managed not to say "Yes, thanks! How do you feel about $x?" and instead launched off the deep end somewhere. (I was working on Emacs indentation in between Uber rides, since I was a driver at the time; much hacking ended up being done in a Best Buy parking lot under the actual moonlight. So at the time I was a little, uh, "eccentric" is probably the nicest way to phrase it.) If I made HN/YC sound weird, it's only because I'm weird; sorry about that. My path through life was nontraditional. At the top of my salary history (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109946) is "unpaid intern for a year" – I still think that unpaid internship was the best thing that ever happened in my life, especially at 17. (Incidentally, I was paid a few hundred bucks under the table; the problem was child labor laws, which are somewhat onerous in America.) A lot of people would feel that that's unfair. I say that in exchange for them putting up with a sometimes-goofy 17 year old, I was able to learn almost as much in that first year as I have in all subsequent years. HN is similar in that there's an astonishing variety of interesting, unintuitive infrastructure tasks that you'll be exposed to. (I still rely on Emacs occasionally; that skill wouldn't have been in my arsenal.) One reason I said anything at all is because Dan has been saying for several years that one day he might open source the moderation browser extension he uses; think of it like an IDE for HN. I was thinking perhaps someone could show up and say "Hey, I'd be willing to help package it up for release!" or something, because I personally think that it would be Hella Cool, as they say, to have some kind of power-user mode for HN. But since it has possibly sensitive moderation features, trust is of course a crucial issue, which takes time to establish remotely. The other aspect was that Scott Bell (a former mod) was basically my only friend at that time. "Associate" is probably a better description, since he had an almost Vulcan-like detachment; nothing seemed to phase him. He was so cool that he was ice cold when it came to work, yet friendly and interesting when it came to life in general. Much of my present style was influenced by him. I think he put in a good word for me, and I ended up wasting a lot of their time instead, which I've felt badly about for years. So some of those feelings were coloring my writing a bit; I'm certain that the HN team is a well-oiled corporate machine, as you'd expect. It was interesting that an opportunity like that was even on the radar for me at one point, since as you allude to, it's somewhat unusual. But it's due to a confluence of factors, and they've likely had an influx of help (and business expense) since then. But of course, business expense means business priority. And that leaves no time for interesting yeoman work like open-sourcing a neat HN browser extension. (It's pretty rad: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20browser%20extension&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) So if work like that sounds interesting, email 'em and say something. But a word of advice: go into it with a chill mindset, and realize that it'll take time to earn trust. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20176460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20176460 mentions factoring out moderation-only features, so it's understandable that they can't simply say "Here's the code!" to anyone who shows up and asks. "Hacker News" definitely lives up to the "Hacker" part of the name. It's not too often that such impactful infrastructure is written in Lisp. I think that's super neat, so maybe someone else will too. EDIT: Oh yes, I should probably mention Numen. If you do end up needing to learn Emacs for random esoteric jobs, Dan's old Node.js debugger is an amazing resource: https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el It stopped working after Node 0.6 I think, when Node dropped the old debug API. But I got it working once, and holy moly it was cool. It was like Indium (https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium https://github.com/NicolasPetton/Indium) in that it was a JS debugger on steroids, and IMO had nicer features than even Chrome. It was even superior to Indium in a certain aspect related to cross referencing function names in the debugger with the actual files/lines they were defined at. I don't remember why, but the new Node debugger system made that super difficult for some reason. Numen's a great example of the type of work that you'd be in a position to do. Much like Lisp itself, Numen seemed to have an extraordinary amount of power, yet few people noticed. Neat code.