Exactly, I felt weird looking at the picture. It looks like someone totally stiffening up for a pose, so unnatural.

Turkish, living in Istanbul here. I absolutely hate the bargaining culture. Not so much in the blood after all :)

btw he did get accepted to MIT undergrad and chose to defer. I know from a common friend.

i would like to know if this is handwritten or printed? handwritten would be a lot more effective, print looks like spam mail.

The piazza forum is for berkeley.edu email addresses only; that's a shame, I would have liked to participate.

We'll invite everyone who fills out the form to Piazza.

I don't know about Stanford, but in several other schools, it stands for Operations Research.

I am a novice programmer and I am always put off websites that rank users (and programming competitions for that matter). Avoiding the competition seems better than putting my relatively crappy code out there for all to see.

Would more seasoned people out there agree that a clean slate is better than a low ranking on sites like InterviewStreet (or HackerRank if it gets big)?

Hi Ayla, we want to build something that has fun stuff catering to different set of programmers (hackers/programming contest enthusiasts/functional programmers, etc.) Whether it's for pride or for learning new things, we want to leave it to the user.

I agree, as someone that's still just getting my toes wet, as soon as I saw the leaderboard aspect I was like "Ah, this isn't going to be my type of place.."