skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jorge ... thanks for your note. And I want to thank Foursquare for organizing the event. You guys didn't charge to let people in (unlike some other events), provided free food the entire day and were very helpful in answering questions. My main goal was to learn to use your API and I did. I appreciate this a lot!

My frustration wasn't directed solely at the Foursquare hackathon. Like I said ... I've seen this happen at a number of other events I've participated in. Clearly, since the hackathon isn't over yet, I cannot speak to the apps written by the participants (in the original post, I was referring to past events organized by others). Clearly some amazing coders are going to show great apps they've built in a short period of time. My intent is not to belittle that effort.
Maybe you just need to stop drinking.
The same can be said for any statically typed language. Any language that binds types as late as possible is infinitely more enjoyable to work with than one that fixes types at compile time. Short of developing missile guidance systems I don't think static types are warranted for anything.
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Why does it matter that it's a cooperative?
I agree on this one. Don't call it a "hackathon". Misleading solved.
I'm impressed with how they committed to it. I guess they couldn't ignore it, but still, opening an office in India and spending considerable amount of time there when they weren't familiar with the culture at all.
Yeah, I haven't had alcohol since last semester
Right. And under each such button there should be this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion
I find that one thing you can do in XML but not in JSON is comments. There isn't any equivalent of XML Comments in JSON. Frequently, my configuration files require comments to show what options are available, or to easily turn off an option temporarily by commenting it out. I don't see how to do that if my configuration files are in JSON.
Interview with Richard Stallman
Glad you enjoyed it. We should be doing it again this year too.

There were a couple with projects that were written a week+ prior but we factored that into the conversation when giving out prizes.
Google V8 Benchmark Suite
Re Mono:

Microsoft is not suing Google for patents on operating systems but instead pressures the handset manufacturers using Android.

Is there a guarantee that a customer can use Mono for commercial applications, without a shake down from Microsoft?
We probably should have a Wikipedia article for every office building in Chicago.

We probably should not have a Wikipedia article for every hackerspace in the world.

We may want more articles about hackerspaces on Wikipedia.

If we do, it does not help that almost everybody who has ever gone so far as to give their planned hackerspace a name has probably also added a (crappy) page to Wikipedia about their planned project.
I noticed Leeds Hack solve this by the judges going around all the teams in the morning and having a friendly chat about the hacks being made. Gives them a chance to better understand the hacks as hackers aren't always good presenters and they get to directly ask "Which bits of this did you write today?".
I have a distant friend who I might be able to stay with for a period of time. No money saved. All extra went toward tuition to minimize loans. All my experience has been from working on small projects here and there. For someone to hire me, I acknowledge that they would have to be taking a risk.
Defense Contractors
My thoughts:

- work on making your copy less verbose - let me get to the good stuff right away
- what will make people want to actually take action?
The fact that you can't parse it with standard parsing tools doesn't seem like a win on the parseability front either. Not its biggest problem, but nothing in this use-case made it necessary to define a syntax that tools like lex/yacc can't parse. The core problem is that matching up start/end tags can't be done in a context-free language unless there are a finite number of tags (it's isomorphic to the problem of checking for palindromes). You'd need a parser-generator that lets you do backreferences (which makes it not context-free), so you could write a definition along the lines of:

element = '<' + element_name + '>' + element + '</' + $1 + '>'
| nil

Either that, or a hand-rolled parser, which is in practice what XML parsers are.
Actually I loved the beginning of the welcome message (thank you for taking the time on your busy life ...) but passed a few sentences I scrolled down to find the link.

On the feed page, I think you could reduce the text on the sidebar. I dont care about the welcome message, if I'm registered why do you explain me the website again I should already had understand what Sparkmuse is about. I would delete that paragraph and replace it only by the "Create Spark" button (make it big and colorful, I didnt saw it the first time I saw this page)

You can also reduce the "We want feedback" block maybe you can install uservoice or something.

On the spark page the solution appear 2 times at the top of the page and on the sidebar. Why ? Maybe you should put the question and the solution at the top of the page like Quora/Stack Overflow or other discussions board.

Again it's only my PoV. You made a great job .
I'd consider going to a better school, if you can -- it's not that hard to transfer after 1-2 years to a place like Stanford. It might also be a function of freshman classes vs. upper division classes; you might consider trying to take upper division or even grad classes in areas you really care about, just to be around less worthless people. The only classes I enjoyed were grad classes in crypto, which I took by just blowing off many prerequisites with handwaving, and learned on the fly.

Of course, I dropped out of a top school to work on startups, and while I sort of regret not getting a degree, I also regret not dropping out earlier to work on startups earlier.

I'd be a lot more encouraging of "drop out for a year to work on startups" if you were a developer, vs. bizdev/product person. Spending a year more at college becoming a competent developer is probably the best way to use your spare time, then reconsider dropping out for a while to join a startup.
I used this app later to build an app for a local advertising firm. If you are wondering why so many questions start with "Can you recommend a good" ... then that's why. They use the same database.

http://apps.facebook.com/ylrecommend/

It's got a few cooler features like pulling possible answers from YQL as you type them.

But really, the questions can get much more interesting!
Can You Frisk a Hard Drive?
By the way, when I say "real-time", I mean:

1) you can invite friends who are online via chat, and they can see what you wrote in real-time

2) you can see the answers arrive in real-time

This is before I knew about Quora ... I thought it was pretty ambitious to do in 14 hours :)
Yes! Wikipedia could definitely fund itself by selling links on the top of every Google SERP! Why didn't they think of that? :)
Self-esteem is often the root of most cyclically self-destructive behaviors. It may be that you may know the right thing to do for any given problem, but find yourself unable to resolve them when dealing with yourself and your own happiness, health and security.

I recommend counseling for anyone struggling with repeat habits that are self-destructive or self-defeating. Simply having someone outside your circle, able to help you explore the underlying motivations and challenges can result in massive quality of life improvements in a short period of time.
In a way it is similar to the old idea of "get out, get some air, go for a walk and clear your mind" and then problem solving comes out at its best.

It also connects to the old saying "La nuit porte conseil" - aka "the night brings council" - or "best to sleep on it".
That is the reason Free software products have so much problems becoming competitive wit proprietary solutions.

People will pay without doubt $600 for a commercial product like Office but have a lot of problems to contribute with someone making software for him for free.

We don't value what is cheap, like a woman that plays "hard to get", we value most what is expensive. When people pirate Photoshop they fell the value of their software is at least $1000 because it cost that much, while the effort deployed in GIMP, Inkscape or Blender seems worthless.

Those software products feel "almost there" but needs a lot of work for being useful for a professional. These projects need real money for having people working on them full time, not as hobbies like fontforge with his horrible UI because the author does not care, just a hobby.

Note to LibreOffice guys: When people read EUR 50,000 they think "Those greedy bastards want so much money from my pocket". Geeks or normal people seems to ignore a lot about business, that it takes MILLIONS of dollars to make a successful software product like Firefox, Android, Blender, Wikipedia, Photoshop, FinalCut or AutoCAD. It took BILLIONS to made Office, Windows or Linux.

So ask for small contributions and put a bar progress like wikipedia(people love them) and write down the reasons people or companies paying you $20 is good business for them. That you are more than 25 people working for them because if you don't tell people don't know it.

If you were a company that asked $100 per seat, you will need just 500 seats to get this money, MILLIONS of companies in the world need an Office suite so don't be shy, ask for millions of dollars-euros like firefox did(And you will get it because there is a need for it).
I have a hard time actually hacking at such events, but I've seen great development work happen in a slightly different context --

I think the ideal format is a pair of events, separated by a week or two. At the first, you present some cool new technology (a new sensor, embedded platform, api, etc.). You show some examples of how it works. People get together and discuss, form teams, etc. Then, during the next week or couple of weeks, they get together in person at other locations, or collaborate online, to develop stuff. Then, there's another big public meeting, where successful projects can be demonstrated. Best of both worlds. Maybe at the second session people can beta test, give feedback, etc.

(I'm actually at SuperHappyDevHouse 42 in San Jose right now; learning more about Intel TXT in a corner with my laptop, while other people play board games and socialize...)
I doubt I'm the only one but I really don't like python.

Python makes simple things hard. It has no switch statements, no lambdas. It has significant white space (I've tried and tried but I can't get over it).

There is no simple way to drop down to the command line which means I can't easily use it to replace the scripting I have to do on a day in and day out purpose.

On a side note I greatly prefer go's approach to white space. It's not significant but there is a piece of software that rewrites code to the "standard".
For my site, Scribophile, it was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. You post your writing for critique, but must earn points by critiquing the writing of others first. This is what I did when I launched:

-Nobody will join a site if it looks like a ghost town, and sites always begin as ghost towns. So I had a lot of my friends create several accounts each and just futz around to give prospective members the illusion that the site was older and more active than it really was. I personally critiqued people's writing under several pseudonyms, and even though I don't write much myself, I sat down and wrote some stinkers just to post on the site to make it appear active.

-As I mentioned, you must critique writing to earn points, but you can't earn points if there's no writing on the site! So the first few hundred members got the ability to post their writing for free, without spending points. This seeded the site with some content--low quality content, but content nonetheless.

-I had a paid account option in place from the start (freemium model), but at first everyone who signed up got a free upgrade without them knowing it. That means they got to use the site to its full potential, and thus seed it more effectively, while I was growing the user base. They told their friends about this great new site with all these features... and once I felt that things were rolling along smoothly, I flipped the switch for new signups to start with a free account versus a downgraded account, so I could start getting paid. (I grandfathered in everyone who had signed up up to that point.)

-I spent a lot of time personally canvassing writer's blogs and offering them a free upgraded account if they were interested in joining and participating. Never mind that anyone who joined was automatically upgraded like I mentioned earlier! Writers write a lot (naturally) so finding blogs belonging to writers was pretty easy.

-I set up a few free writing contest with big cash prizes to launch the site. The catch was that instead of submitting your piece via email, you had to post it to the site using the points you earned from critiquing. So I basically "bought" early activity in that sense--both more writing to seed the site, and critiques, which is the most important thing.

-Along with relevant blogs, I also posted in forums telling people about my site. Turns out most forums aren't too interested in having someone sign up just to advertise their new venture and then disappear; so instead of advertising that I had launched Scribophile, I advertised the free writing contests I mentioned above. Seeing "announcing a free contest with cash prizes" is much more tempting than "hey guyz, come see the new web site I just made, pretty please use it!"

That's all I can think of right now off the top of my head. 3 years later and Scribophile is paying my bills and still growing strong.

Obviously things will vary greatly from case to case, but the takeaway is that it takes a lot of hard legwork, persistence, and maybe even cash to seed a site with users. Launching isn't the finish line, it's the starting line.
Ask HN: Is TDD/BDD hampering your startup's agility?
I'm a fairly big fan of agile software development, but at the risk of being deemed an agile heathen, I'm beginning to doubt the benefits of test-driven development (and BDD) for a lean startup. Developer friends drinking the agile kool-aid swear by BDD. In theory, it's great--saves you time by identifying bugs at lower-levels and guarantees that everything works.

In practice though, I find myself spending a disproportianate time writing and getting test cases to pass compared to just writing good code and testing in a browser.

- For functionality that I know works, I sometimes have a difficult time writing and passing tests especially when the functionality is unique (e.g. Facebook login?).

- When we pivot or iterate, it seems we always spend a lot of time finding and deleting test cases related to old functionality (disincentive on iterating/pivoting, software is less flexible).

- Test cases (namely Rspec) are just plain slow to run (seconds staring at a screen before getting positive or negative feedback).

- There always seems to be about 3-5x as much code for a feature's respective set of tests as the actual feature (just takes a lot of damn time to write that much code).

- Most of the code in a lean startup are hypotheses that will be tested by the market, and possibly thrown out (even harder to rewrite test cases with slightly different requirements over writing from the beginning).

- Refactoring breaks a lot of test cases (mostly with renaming variables).

I do think TDD is great for client work, but for lean startups, I'm not so sure.

For a startup that is iterating very frequently and trying to reach a product-market fit, I find TDD to be harmful and actually impede agility. Speed trumps reliability here.

Like security (budget vs security) are speed and reliability 2 points of a continuum? Where is your slider as a lean startup?
Steve Souders DID work with the author. Now he made a "competing" script loader called ControlJS which is what this entire blog post is about.
As I understand it, that is about it. And for that exact reason it bugs me that they call it fork/join.
I was going to tell him off for missing Enumerable.Aggregate, but then I noticed that he posted 6 months before that was included in the standard libraries, so I'm going to have to let him off.
Suster makes a good point, there are interesting assets outside of Silicon Valley. And to spin off from one of his own points, about the content industry being centered around Hollywood, I'll just throw this out there:

http://www.essortment.com/film-industry-city-wilmington-nort...

http://www.wilmingtonfilm.com/

http://www.ncfilm.com/

Believe it or not, but NC (Wilmington and Southeast NC in particular) have a thriving film industry. So if you're looking to do something that requires people with skillsets around filming, there's a whole other world here on the East coast that can provide that.
Based on the actual drawing process and brushes available, this looks like it's based heavily on this work from "Mr. Doob", which I use quite frequently.

http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/
Update: They do give credit in the ABOUT on the page/extension, happy to see that. :)

I like that they've added an undo, but I wish it was unlimited. 1 undo just isn't enough. This is a seriously cool drawing app to play with though.
First thought: Perhaps try to transfer to another school? There are great schools out there where you can find motivated, smart students and perhaps even find some great co-founders.

Second thought: Stay where you are one more year/semester and use all of the time normally spent partying to create a great open-source project that will act as a resume. There has to be some way for companies to understand the level of complexity you can handle, whether your code is clean and loosely coupled or if it is rookie code, etc.

Third thought: Stay in school and find a co-founder and an idea and apply to three-or-four of the top incubator programs before quitting school to see if you can dovetail into something where you can be surrounded by great people.

I am, of course, assuming that one year off will turn into two years off, which will turn into just plain giving-up on school. When I think about my four years in college, I realize that I learned how to be a great entrepreneur, how to manage massive complexity, how to be a great leader, etc. outside of my comp sci classes (which were absurdly easy for me since I had momentum going in -- I started with senior-level classes my first year in). That's something that many people doling out "college is a waste of time" advice fail to realize. Working in a startup isn't about slinging code, it's about collaboration, interaction, being put on the spot, learning to respect others in spite of their faults, not being afraid to take a stand in something you believe in, etc. Those are things one can master in college if one prioritizes those outcomes.

I once asked my advisor (a big name in computer vision at the time -- I was an AI guy) why the university didn't teach programming on a particular computer in a particular programming language and his response was "you're not here to learn, you're here to learn how to learn," and in my case, that was a lesson I needed.
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California State Salaries
* Mono is backed by Novell and not Google

* From the Mono Licensing FAQ [1]: "Microsoft has announced that the ECMA standards for C# and the CLI are covered under the Community Promise patent license. Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those components for free and for any purpose."

* The Novell-Microsoft agreements provide further protection for companies that choose to use Mono. [1]

* Many companies are using Mono for commercial purposes. There is a list at http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono

* Notably, Linden Studios uses Mono for Second Life servers. (See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mono)

[1] http://www.mono-project.com/Licensing#Patents
Excellent feedback, I agree it is too verbose. I definitely need to improve on the copy skills. I'm going to review it tonight.
I find nothing interesting in the original post to be honest. Just somebody that has a superficial impression about C# is complaining. Even the first 25 comments that I read are of no particular interest.

Meta: I wildly guess the HN post gets all the upvotes because initally people think that it will be about a google employee not allowed to use Lisp in google.
What's obsurd is the increase from 2009 to 2010.

Great recession? California bankrupt ? Someone never got the memo, it seems.
From a pragmatic point of view, Ruby on Rails does generally take less code for web applications than comparable languages and frameworks. This makes it faster, but only if you know RoR.

Other languages and frameworks may not be considered sexy because they take a lot of code to do common functions, aren't concise languages, or don't have an easy or "right" way to do some things. RoR is also sexy because of the ecosystem of plugins (gems) that solve a lot of boilerplate problems.

However, I agree with everyone else, choose the right tool for the project.
Intel to hire 4,000 workers this year
Samsung Flexible AMOLED Display at CES 2011
I'm at SHDH as well (hi!). There's definitely a mix here, but I think part of that is because of the venue. The only reason I'm on HN right now is that I'm waiting for a screen scraper to finish, which is terribly slow on the wifi here. I was hacking until my battery died, at which point I decided to explore and mingle a bit until an outlet opened up. At past events, it was a similar mix - certainly not 24 hours of pure coding, but it's an environment where I can hack away on stuff I've been putting off for a while and still enjoy myself. YMMV.
YC startup people drink a lot of coffee. Should we have an article on each coffee shop frequented by founders of successful YC companies?

There are notable hackerspaces. Notable hackerspaces should get coverage on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is very up-front about its definition of "notability".
I also wanted to add that the right tool may also be dependent on price.

You wouldn't buy a $2,000 nail gun if you were only building a bookshelf, despite the fact that a nail gun is far more efficient than a hammer. Think developer salaries and cost of tools.
For me type inference changes the picture, since it reduces the duplication you see throughout Java-style statically typed code, but doesn't give up all the benefits.
Congrats on launching! Just signed up. Couple of questions:

1. Love the design. Did you do it yourself?

2. Did your employer have any problems with you working on the side (do they own the IP)? If so, how did you get around this?