I had two motivations. One was to teach myself a language other than Fortran, and the other was to make a forum that was designed around thoughtful content and discussion. The first posters where friends that I talked into joining. I've been online since BBSes, and was a very early Redditor. Making a site that is fertile ground for quality interaction presents a lot of difficult and compelling problems. We are still working on it. The team is now comprised of myself, thenewgreen, insomniasexx and forwardslash. thenewgreen joined a few months after I started, and understood the goals completely. He also had the idea to incorporate the logo into the site's mechanics. (I first created the logo when spray painting it onto a t-shirt when I was 14). His passion has not flagged a bit. b_b and sounds_sound were early community managers. They still help. b_b tells us when our ideas are stupid, and sounds_sound often lends his design chops. insomniasexx crashed a Google hangout meeting we were all having, and after a short while, we had to make her part of the team. akkartik was the first coder besides myself. He knows Arc better than most anyone, which was a godsend. He still has commit access, last I checked. :) forwardslash joined shortly after akkartik left, and like everyone on the team, he was an active user beforehand. He now carries the bulk of our coding expertise. All of the current team members have day jobs/classes, and all the retired team members remain good friends. We are likely to be announcing a new member to the team soon. :) But that's only part of the story. There are numerous people on this site that have had just as much influence on its evolution. I am going to regret names that I leave out, but other early users that have influenced the site include: alpha0 theadvancedapes cgod NotPhil caio lil mike ecib steve minimum_wage kleinbl00 thundara lessismore JakobVirgil bfv Mindwolf zebra2 ooli and StJohn. Those are some of the earliest, I think all members for more than 1000 days now.
I think I lost the ability to ssh in to your server at some point when you switched servers. So I can probably commit if only I could get in to do so :) That reminds me: Are y'all maintaining an offsite backup of hubski data someplace? I used to have a script copy it everyday but I obviously haven't done so for a while.
When you say Arc, are you meaning to say that this site is written in Paul Graham's attempt at a new lisp?
How did you decide to move to Scala / Node.js in particular? I know the site isn't open-source, but if you guys have published any architecture documentation or other information about what's going on behind the scenes, I'd be curious to see it. I have a professional background in scaling large online services and I'm always interested in seeing how other people solve the problems that inevitably come up.
I am curious what would drive the choice of that language. When it was first released, and pg had built it up as something "for the next hundred years" — it was missing some basic things (like unicode support). I do not know if that has changed, or even if the language has improved since then.
Modern Fortran has some good things in it :-).