Fun Facts: Ben and Alyssa make appearances in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and in Sussman's supercool symbolic programming class: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/

"Alyssa P Hacker" is a pun on "A Lisp Hacker". She has a friend named Imelda Macros.

I feel like I should point out that Unicode is not being used correctly in the article. A better understanding of Unicode encodings might help in the competition. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

I wonder if this was inspired by my Tweet Compressor project:

http://tweetcompressor.com/

It got a lot of attention on Reddit last week (20k visitors).