jleader, I am the author of this post and the 'programming languages who have driven past Boston' article. I literally laughed out loud when I read your comment. I was surprised when that post was on Hacker News myself (I knew it wasn't my best). I promise to do better :)
As a resident of Los Angeles, and graduate of Caltech, I'm completely sympathetic to trying to get the word out about tech innovations happening in places other than Silicon Valley.
