Hacker News Reader

kryptoson Ask YC: When can we expect to know our YC application status?

Would it be possible to specifically mail those who were rejected?I do understand it would be time consuming for you guys, it would be really helpful to all

kryptoson Ask YC: What's the most inspiring sci-fi book you've read?

Stanislaw lem.. i agree... Solaris was special.. and most purists seemed to suggest the translation from Polish was bad!... Olaf stapledon's last and first men, starMaker were both stunning... Ursula le guin also come to mind

kryptoson Happy Pi Day!

Has anyone seen the film 'pi'?If not, this would be a fine day to see it!

kryptoson What open source projects are you contributing to?

I did GSoc for Freenet and hopefully will find more time to contribute to it.If money werent an issue,i would be working full time on the kernel and Freenet, but unfortunately it is :P

kryptoson Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?

Quite a long list actually and hard to put in words.... Functional programming in general..especially its roots( halting problem, church's thesisetc...),reading about ENIAC .... small-world problem(miligram) and modelling such networks,beauty of primes and number theoretic algorithms,quantum mechanics. Several books have also influenced deeply...textbooks/sci-fi/cyberpunk...works of hofstadter,stephenson etc....

kryptoson Ask YC: What Is Your Favorite Board Game?

Same feelings... but its only recently i started playing GO more often( after a hacker gifted his GO board to me )so maybe i'll get better... prior to that, it was only CHESS

kryptoson Ask YC: Any hackers here ever in an online coding competition?

I finished my UG last year from India, but participated in several OPC's( Online prog contests) winning a few. I also represented my Univ in IBM-ICPC(Inter collegiate prog contest).. all of these were wonderful experiences.Trying out such problems really helps ... and increases your understanding of algorithm complexity and related literature... Google Summer of code during the last year of Univ was also fun.. albeit a different kind of experience...nonetheless taught me a lot. Both me,and my teammate during these code contests who was also a high performer in TC and currently work at different startups. I genuinely believe these experiences definitely made us better hackers.