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 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 (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/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!