skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, the main reason I go to these hackathons is just to expose myself to a bigger network and places with stronger CS communities than the one at my really small liberal arts college just to see what I'm missing out on (which is a lot).It seems like a necessary evil and it has worked in a way since I've finally been able to get an internship interview from it.

Otherwise, I agree with his points. Not sleeping for 24+ hours really takes its toll, especially if you need to drive back to where you came from. Food is mostly junk, but this one other hackathon I went to had really well-made food, so there's that. They have been unrewarded since I always lose steam before I get to make an MVP and they do seem to be very commercialized and they're really trying to get groundbreaking stuff from us within a weekend, like the last hackathon had very specific prizes relating to using certain company's API as well has performing "health innovations".

I also like Brian's suggestions to provide more specific hackathons so that I know exactly what to expect from them. These events take up a huge portion of my weekends theI should be using on school, so it seems like a good idea to pick those which seem most useful at the time.
The worst is company hackathons. I will always remember the look on my boss's face when I told him I was quite happy to participate in the (mandatory) 24 hour hackathon, as long as he paid me for my time outside of normal business hours. Turns out it wasn't so mandatory.
Hackathons are a fundamentally unsustainable, bad idea that can only thrive on young people having more energy than they know what to do with.

I imagine they'll continue to drag along, like most conferences, like most people, who just don't know what else to do, so they do something that someone else said was a good idea and isn't intimidating.
For some people it just comes down to expectations, everything today is supposed to be trivial since everyone seems to be launching websites and startups all over the place and becoming gazillionaires overnight. Out of the off-the-self software systems out there, WordPress is pretty easy to use for someone with the right experience. However, somehow we expect two ladies who want to sell honey online to be able to set up a WordPress site.

The thing with content management systems isn't that it makes it easy for just anyone to use it, it makes it really easy for experts to use it. I.e. I've built countless on WordPress sites for clients over the years because they want to be able to maintain it themselves, but when push comes to shove, they update their site every 6 or so months which means they have to relearn how thing works over and over again. They just ask me to update it for them, and because it's WordPress, it's super easy for me.
The ones I go to are free and don't ask for ownership of the product, only pictures and screenshots where applicable to advertise the event.

It's like working in a hackspace for a night (which I often do when on the road) combined with a friendly competition.

I'd avoid a for-profit hackathon like the plague.
That's a peculiarity of the US system where the prosecution is heavily politicized and judges are elected. Other Western countries don't generally have that.
At least for myself and my best friend (we do hackathons together), we like the brainstorming that's borne out of it. We don't need the hackathons to do this, but it seems to have hit on just the right formula for the both of us to come up with some pretty cool project ideas. In fact, we work on our ideas far more often after the hackathons have ended than we do during the X hours of the hackathon.

But I think companies that try to wedge "hackathons" into their employees' schedules as some cool twist on getting more free (or very cheap) work out of them should burn in hell.
"I think that we need to hold the web sites accountable for the content that they display. If browsers get infected by ads at Forbes or people buy knock-off watches from ads at Yahoo, then we need people to sue Forbes and Yahoo. Remember: these web sites authorized the placement of the ad on their web page."

So effectively what you're saying is that we should eliminate ad networks. There is no reasonable way to screen every ad before it is shown when using an ad network. So in order to be safe from lawsuits, publishers would have to go back to directly contracting with advertisers for every ad. Certainly there would be some benefits to that in terms of reduced low quality ads. The problem is, the added overhead of doing so would put many small publishers out of business. Dealing with individual advertisers is a huge job, with massive economies of scale; it just doesn't make sense for websites that are orders of magnitude smaller than Forbes and Yahoo.
Don't know if it is an urban legend. They have tigers or hogs to dispose of the bodies. Source: I live in cartel land.
We're sort of out on one end of the bell-curve, really. For Joe Blow, average computer user, email and Word and YouTube works on their decade old hardware. Unless you're a gamer, there's not a lot of call to have the latest and greatest - and you can still run a lot of stuff on lower settings on old hardware. Long-lived console generations and the paucity of PC-first development have kept the minimum specs on even AAA titles pretty low.

For instance, my parents are happy as clams using a G4 Macbook and a second-hand HP Pavilion laptop
Speak for yourself. A power saw is dangerous; but I'm not going back thanks.

And nothing to say about the performance cost of these infallible tools? They are not free.
We are already at that stage. Apple is going to have to push out some very inefficient new software before my 5s is too slow and needs an upgrade.
On that note, definitely check out boringcc: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/boring-crypto/48qa1k...
Would you be okay with storing my genetic code, cyropreserving only my brain, and then growing me a new body in 100-500 years when we've got reanimation down cold (no pun intended)?

I'm fine with being stored in a robotic facility on Mars, the dark side of the Moon, or even at a Lagrange point; anywhere where passive physics can be used to ensure the appropriate temperature is maintained.
In Austin, we started running an event called "Finish Up Weekend" or FU Weekend - http://fuweekend.com/ ;)

We have some simple rules:

* you can't start anything new;

* you have to celebrate something being done - usually with a round of applause;

* there are no prizes - only the satisfaction of being done.

While there is plenty of coding, we've had designers finish their portfolios, screenwriters finish pilots, an artist finish his display, and even saw a sewing project completed.

And to top it off, we charge a nominal $20 for the weekend - with 4 meals, a great deal - and sell out every time.

We're putting together a howto doc to franchise the idea.. just need to finish it. ;)
Do RTG's need to be big, heavy and require large amounts of plutonium? I recall reading about plutonium pacemakers. Depending on power needs, could something smaller like this be used as a trickle charge to power limited essential systems ongoing or for bursts of access?

https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/Miscellaneous/pacemaker....
> ... no one knows how to reasonably test the additional code ...

wouldn't a simple 'ulimit -m' set appropriate limits on memory for the process ? and then use that to simulate failures, and hopefully see what breaks, fix it, and rinse-lather-repeat ?

edit-1: this is ofcourse predicated on the fact that you are using a unix like system.
Comparison of 15 popular programming language home pages
plus Zooko's team has started building as well
The "fun" part was a flippant attempt to point out that the US had, at enormous risk and cost, and with previous mistakes, launched an H-bomb into space over 50 years ago. The ICBM part is new to me -- any further info?
So you don't think the age of AI is just beginning? It seems to be to me, at least from the point of view of making money. We've got walking robots and self driving cars in development but not selling significantly yet. That will change. I daresay it could just get dominated by Google but there are probably opportunities for startups.
No. Not at all. The average age for our hackathons was closer to 35 than 20.
It seems like part of the disconnect is the idea of an "entry level job" that is not a permanent, lifelong career. This is (or at least used to be) a fixture of the US workforce: you start out in a non-ideal position to gain experience and prove yourself. You're not making enough to own a new car, buy a house, start a family, put kids through college, etc., but you don't expect that right out of the gate: you live frugally, with roommates, and invest in your career until you later attain a better-paying job.

But two ways that seems to be breaking down lately:
1. More and more people are getting stuck in entry-level jobs permanently, unable to find any opening to move up to a better-paying career that's sustainable for life.
2. Younger generations may have a growing sense of entitlement - increasingly appalled at the notion of scrounging for your first N years our of college, rather than immediately living a glamorous, 'Sex in the City'-style urban lifestyle.

I think part of the backlash against this post is that the author's words seem to place her firmly in the 2nd category - she's eating out and living in her own place (in the most expensive metro area in North America) while complaining that she 'feels' poor... and complains about having to work "a whole year" in an entry-level position before the prospect of a promotion.
> IDE's have some level of trouble with most popular Java build tools (Maven and Gradle)

Can't speak for gradle but Netbeans has worked excellent with Maven for years.

Idea seems to work nicely as well (I haven't used it much for the last few years but my coworker across the table seems to like it with Maven as well.)

As for eclipse I haven't used it regularly since 2012 so I don't know.
> This isn't about motivation. Its not even about study, rather how do you go about doing formal reasoning at all? Prove X has property P, what is even the first step? How do we get to the second step, and so on? Doing a proof is not a mechanical process, there isn't an algorithm for deciding what to do next to reach your goal!

Yep, there's no general algorithm for coming up with proofs. Practice, experience and good heuristics help, though. And if they don't, then you redesign the formal system until they do.

> Programming is a great example of this. Those lists and arrays don't appear out of nowhere. Someone has to write the code, how do they write the code?

Same as above. Just replace “proofs” with “programs”, and “formal system” with “programming language”.

> Why use a list to store those elements?

The desired invariants (see below) and complexity bounds for your code will tell you what data structures might be more convenient than others.

> Programs are generalized to operate on a wide variety of inputs to create a wide variety of outputs, but when you are writing code, you are thinking about just a few examples of those, you imagine them in your head and they guide the code you write.

I can't speak for others, but I really don't think that way. When I'm designing an algorithm, or when I'm trying to understand someone else's design, what matters to me first and foremost is its invariants - what the program preserves, even though the process' state is changing. Only if I can't see what the invariants are, then I might use some examples to generate plausible candidates, but the job isn't done until I have found and confirmed the invariants themselves. In other words, I don't conflate “works for these few examples” with “works in general”.
By and large. Major League Hacking (the link above) is sort of like the national group "in charge" of hackathons and one of the requirements to be recognized by them is to be a purely under-grad event (though sometimes highschool students are admitted). That said, there are plenty hackathons that aren't sanctioned by MLH and therefore are more open.

It's also possible that my view of hackathons is skewed by the fact that I'm a university student at a school with a very active hackathon culture.
This is a solid article. Steven Levitt & stephen Dumbner (of freakonomics fame) have done a 100 year look at the high end bivycle market in the surrounding areas of innovation hubs. They were able to predict a bubble witn a 97.3% confidence level.

The fed released new guidance for KPIs for the economy and it is inline with the article and the steves^2 research.

The data is pretty staggering, when you drill down on it. It would be one thing if it was just an arbitrary observation that was so insignificant it didn't matter while serving the authors main point of highlighting an inciteful and weird metric the public would disagree with to make them angry. This is not that.

Conspiracy theorists are chocking this up as just another "passing fad" and a "good way to promote teambuilding and health", one person even alleged it was good for the "environment" and "promoted jobs".

Startups are cutting down on these things because they are dead. VCs won't help you raise a series E round if you are spending over 50,000 on bikes.

It is important to realize all startups are doing poorly. If you look at google, apple, a bootstrapped mobile games company and stealthmode blockchain as a service company leveraging the gopher protocol with a fax caching layer, you will see that essentially:

1. All companys with a website are in tech.

2. All companies started after Alan Turing are startups.

3. Having a website AND having an email address at your domain means you are an Internet Company.

Also, the bubble is strictly tech, the "bike slowdown" is localized, we don't expect:

Insbility to correct economy with monetary policy due to a normalized %0 percent int rate.

Inability to correct fiscal policy due to no money.

To be an issue going forward.

Its nice to see these pieces of shit in tech get what is coming from them, an unnamed source qouted in the article from winterell, stated that winter was coming snd:

>The message of more caution is not lost on all start-ups. Some are cutting back

However, they did give this one helpful qoute:

> board meeting conversations began shifting significantly at their companies to focus on reaching profitability

The bubble is bursting. Companies that were likely to succeed and provide a net good to the world are over, tech culture is over, do you think there is a need for companies to even do accounting?

So in summation:

[ screenshot of bike ]

People are buying less bikes*

Tech companies forced to consider having a "plan" and "runway"

*possible correlation with 200 people in the world who have them don't need more.
this venture will not takeoff
Doesn't necessarily mean you're slow, it could mean you have a high threshold for worthwhile.

Seriously, I've seen what some people cobbled together in a week long hackfest and been completely unimpressed, having built something similar, and more robust in a day and a half- I did not consider my efforts (or theirs) worthwhile. To be clear, all efforts that you learn from are worthwhile, but I am meaning (and I think what you mean) worthwhile from the standpoint of, getting something production ready or having completed an idea or concept to the point that we can figure out what the heck to do with it.

I think the best things to come out of any hackathon setting are the ideas. The execution that actually occurs should be more of a fleshing out the feasibility and sparking iterative ideas. Anyone walking out of a hackathon thinking they've got actual usable code is just wrong.
A minor point on a great article, but "On the other hand, Java’s enum values are really singleton classes under the hood – so one can define an abstract method in the enum to implement differently in each value, something that would require a match expression (or hash-table, whose construction at compile time some enterprising Rustaceans have built a crate for) in Rust" isn't quite true -- you can implement methods on enums in Rust, too: http://is.gd/M3VJJR
I really dislike the corporate hackathon format.

It can be great fun as an informal community gathering of developers to work on random pet projects, but the reality of the corporate hackathon trends toward being company sponsored and promoted technical debt creation.

It often seems like the corporate hackathon is the clearest distillation of the "business" people not understanding how to create a mature, healthy culture and continuous process around engineering autonomy, ownership, and innovation. Instead relying on campy caricatures of basement dwelling Mtn. Dew & pizza fueled "hackers".
http://www.oocities.org/southbeach/1380/crmoon.html
I feel exactly the opposite. Life extension is unethical because it takes away the opportunity for new life to experience the world.
The older you get - the less patience you have for tight deadlines and 'forcing yourself to make a choice'.

That's just having more energy than you know what to do with.

The tragedy is young people have lots of energy and are scatterbrained and old people are sometimes wise but too tired.

The future is having older wise folk write out proposals to ambitious projects, and have young people fill in the necessary parts.

Too bad it's just not 'sexy', ambitious projects are long, boring and require upsetting other people who are old, boring and don't want to listen.

Modernizing the medicine field is one simple example of such an ambitious problem.
Surely you can't be serious.
Oh absolutely. That's why I've tried to make that decision ahead of time and plan the details so that it's almost an automatic trigger, hopefully before all insight is lost.

It's hard because I'm a very independent, stubborn person who never takes anyone else's word for anything. I can't think of much worse than being locked up, forced drugs and being told what to think, like 1984. But losing touch with reality and effectively abandoning my family and friends would be worse.

EDIT: I'm not saying that drugs are a panacea, BUT.. I believe mental illness often has a chemical/biological origin, which over time accumulates into physical, psychological and social damage. I think appropriate low-dose treatment at an early stage has the potential to limit this damage while avoiding the worst side-effects of higher doses.
Btw, if you're interested in hosting one, drop me a note. My contact info is in my profile.
Smalltalk is missing
The problem right now is that it can often be difficult for anyone to tell where an ad ultimately came from. A user will complain to a publisher about a bad ad. So the publisher gets a description of the ad, maybe a url that it points to. The problem is the url goes through various redirects, so the one that the user ended up on isn't the one the ad points to, so it can't be searched. But a bigger problem is where to even search. The unit housing that ad will probably be served by multiple networks, with an algorithm deciding which to serve from based on how many ads that user has seen, where they're located, and various other criteria. Then if that network doesn't have a sufficiently valuable ad to serve, they will either farm it off to another network (and so on), or pass it back to the publisher's ad server, which will find another network to serve an ad there.

This all happens in real time. So the point is, when you get a report of a bad ad on your page, it's almost impossible to even know what network it came from. The networks themselves don't know if they ultimately served you the ad, because maybe they got it from someplace else. And no one can search for it based on the url anyway.

Now, none of those things is unsolvable, although it would take significant new regulation. For instance, when an ad is served through a network, there should be a standardized way to add metadata to the ad to state that it was served via that network. In cases where it is passed through several networks, it would carry each of their metadata, in order from the original source through the various levels until the network that actually serves the ad to the publisher. That would at least allow savvy users to make an informed report to a publisher when they get a bad ad.
Something else to look at might be requiring that either 1) the target url of an ad points directly to the eventual landing page, or 2) if a redirect is made, the original url be encoded either in the new url (as a fragment id perhaps) or at least as metadata in the page. There are probably plenty of caveats there. But if a user clicks on an ad and finds themselves at some page, there should be some way to figure out what ad took them there. That isn't currently the case.

Identifying the networks an ad has passed through would be the responsibility of those networks (with a standardized way of doing so). Avoiding or identifying redirects would be the responsibility of the advertisers, but networks would have to be required to periodically test ads for compliance.
I'd like to point out that this formatting convention is not a widespread standard. "You should" is biased towards making life simpler for a small number of people who have used the format before, while complicating and bloating your API responses - for both the developer(s) and consumers of your API.

Consumers are now expected to add a full library to their project to parse/understand the JSON responses. Also, implementation overload for many languages: http://jsonapi.org/implementations/
Take X = all continuous well behaved 1-1 mapping f from [0,1] to R^3, with f(0)=f(1).

A knot is an equivalence class of such functions, equivalence defined as given two functions f and g, you can "morph" one into other continuously - i.e. if you can find a parametrized well-behaved (i.e. continuous, differentiable etc.) function h(x;t) s.t. h(x;0)=f(x) and h(x;1)=g(x) and h(x;t_ is in X for all t.

It's pretty much the definition you'd come up with too.
I could see the gist of the procedure i.e. representing it as globs which allow you to break up the data into 2 so you can run it in binary tree like steps.

But the code was pretty useless. I didn't know that language and within the short time span that it was presented I couldn't understand the code.

Clearly this would be better presented as a paper so you could have time to go through it but I think if you ignore the actual code completely I still understood (or at least i think i do) the talk.
Where do you advertise them? How do people find them?
Signal is not new - this post is from 29 Jul 2014.

For me, it's nearly the perfect encrypted IM app, but it would be nice if you could use it without tying it to a phone number.
Anti-hackathon has been in full swing for a few years now, but I think it makes sense to recognize that for some people it has social - and some times professional - benefit.

It's neither inherently good nor bad, it's a chance to create with some new individuals over a short time period. Yes, it gets co-opted by corporate marketing, yes you eat pizza for a day or so. But these are minor issues if you find other benefit like learning of new processes, tools, technologies, etc.

More than anything, it just seems inherently "uncool" at this point, a proverbial pet rock for developers. Which is a shame, there is value there if you're willing to separate the concept from the aesthetic that surrounds the events themselves.
> If you want to compare languages, compare languages. If you want to compare particular implementations of languages, compare particular implementations of languages.

Well, to be fair, it says this at the top:

This post compares Rust-1.8.0 nightly to OpenJDK-1.8.0_60

I think it's pretty clear it's comparing particular implementations of the languages.
It looks like your extension behaves in a similar manner to

https://github.com/octo-linker/chrome-extension

Might be worthwhile to integrate your changes with it, as there will probably be collisions if both extensions are installed.