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Oh, so this is why it suddenly popped up again in my twitter feed...
I'll say here what I posted there a moment ago: Seven years after making a fool of myself on Hacker News, I wonder if my epitaph will be "Yes, I won the Putnam".
The followup is the icing on the cake, "Only once?"
> Yes, only once. But I actually consider my first score on the Putnam (53, ranked 53.5th in North America) to be my most impressive performance on the Putnam, considering that I was only 14 years old at the time.
How does the Putnam winner Ravi Vakil fit into that thread? From reading the context it is about cpervica saying he's more competent than 90% of startup founders, and other people are saying that's arrogant. Where did Ravi come in -- was he a startup founder?
Remember that success comes from improving OTHER people's lives. All your achievements, while probably very gratifying to your mother, have not improved my life at all. - dbosson
Do you use OS X or Mozilla? Have you ever used their software update mechanisms? If yes, I've improved your life -- they use my delta compression work (bsdiff, originally written as part of FreeBSD Update) to reduce the size of updates which have to be downloaded. As of about a year ago, my work had saved users around the world well over a hundred years of waiting for updates to download. -cpervica
In general, if you read the comments from top HN'ers [1] you will find a lot of perls: that's the reason why they got the karma..
Sometimes you can find also great comments [2] from less visible HN'ers. E.g. I suggest a "niche" comment on the best way to negociate a claimed domain name [3].
+1 to patio11. When I'm skimming comments, I make sure to actually read his fully.
As much as we all say we're governed by reason, there's still some timidity and doubt and he has this great ability to call people on it in a constructive way.
I'm totally a ChuckMcM fan. Thoughtful, experienced, witty. I always look for his comments in threads I'm interested in and have yet to be disappointed.
I like a lot of tptacek's[1] comments, as long as he's talking technology / security and not politics. On politics we're pretty far apart, but there's no question the guy knows security damn well, and always has something insightful to say.
A parody of being a startup founder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166183