I was so shocked that St Louis had anything close to resembling a "hacker scene" that I swore it had to be some SF event being overly clever with its name.

I live about 30 minutes from STL (or as the cool kids say: StL) so maybe I'll check out their monthly Code Til Dawn http://www.meetup.com/allnightlong/#past

There's some great high-tech, hacker, and startup stuff going on in Saint Louis:

Yearly

The Strange Loop Conference: https://thestrangeloop.com/

Monthly

Lambda Lounge: http://lambdalounge.org/

Saint Louis JavaScript Meetup (STLJS): http://www.stljs.org/ http://vimeo.com/stljs

STLRuby: http://stlruby.org

Code Until Dawn: http://www.meetup.com/allnightlong/

StartLouis: http://startlouis.com/

Build Guild in St. Louis: http://saintlouis.buildguild.org/

There's lots more too, those are just ones I'm either involved in or hear about frequently.

It is this Friday! I'll be there. It's an awesome event.

Swing by TREx sometime too (http://downtowntrex.com)

STL is the airport code and shorthand for St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

If you read the article, it's pretty clear that it's referring to St. Louis. While I agree that it should have spelled it out in the title, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to click through and RTFA.

> RTFA

It's not spelt out whether your intent here is to berate the guy or not, but I get the distinct impression that it is. Your response is rude and uncalled for.

I read the article and it's not clear to me that STL is supposed to be equivalent to St Louis, because it isn't spelt out, and furthermore, I don't intend on looking it up in a dictionary of acronyms referring to foreign places that I may never visit, without first knowing that STL refers to a place.

No. It's not "pretty clear". I read the article and I had no idea.

But then, if you'd have RTFA then perhaps you would have known that too?

The third paragraph mentions St. Louis in an unabbreviated form. I picked it up almost right away.

It's the Standard Library now. STL is the SGI precursor. People insist on calling it STL for whatever reason, maybe because it's the STandard Library.

Or it could be St. Louis? Or Seattle?

I think you mean Standard Template Library in that context. The C and C++ standard libraries aren't referred to that way (at least not commonly!).

Just as people call them "ATM Machines" it doesn't mean "STL" is the name of the C++ Standard Library.

The hackathon refers to the airport code for Saint Louis.

STL means St. Louis.

It's the location, St. Louis.