skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Processing is excellent and I have used it extensively. I have also used Nodebox, which is something similar but in Python: http://nodebox.net

Most recently however I have switched to using Field. I'm not a huge fan of Java syntax, so being able to write Processing apps in Python/Jython via Field is a big win for me.

http://openendedgroup.com/field

There are lots of features I haven't even touched in Field yet...
First, the answer is an absolute yes. Hackathon would be great. I would rather do that all night the first night than go to a party (realizing, of course I just posted this on the internet, and now look amazingly lame). I think the two most important things are internet access (which you have covered) and good working space - for example, folding tables, chairs, and powerstrips are more than fine (in fact, we can bring our own of the later), but places we can sit next to each other will be key.

And energy drinks.
But I imagine those are more like regression tests, right? Not write the test first BDD/TDD-style, then implement the whole search engine around it, tests. That was the implied context of that statement.
The best part of the article is the obvious sockpuppet in the comments. Same format I saw among many paid stock bashers: Buddy up with the emoticons, claim little, suggest a lot.
Probably too busy raising you.

It's nice to have a simplistic 12 year old's attitude in thinking you can just do stuff if you want, but life is full of so many factors. Right wingers especially seem to have this child-like mindset.
I just had a nerdgasm. This is gold. I can be reading one book in one place, instead of having Dummit and Foote, Atiyah and MacDonald, and the more example-laden Geometry of Schemes lying next to me.

Thank you.
I will never understand what quality education and sports have in common.

In fact, with the rate of brain-damage suffered by american football players, I suspect sports are actually a detriment to education, not even counting the resources they suck from it.

EDIT: Another case against college sports, and sports scholarships: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/26/drexel-basketball-r...
I'm donating - what Sony is doing is illegal. I understand that his work has lead to the option of piracy, and I fully support Sony's decision to ban consoles that have been modified from their online network - however the legal battle against geohot and team fail overflow is wrong.

Bottom line; this is a worthy fight to wager and my money will help support it.
> Also, Peet's is so much better than Starbucks.

This is only relevant if there's a Peet's anywhere near you. This is untrue at the majority of places I've been to with a BN.
> "Designing in-house means Apple doesn’t have to pay licensing fees to third parties to use their intellectual property. For instance, the A4 chip"

Isn't the A4 an ARM + PowerVR and doesn't Apple pay design licenses on both those?
How about this: general manager/CEO of San Mateo country's transportation department makes $400,000:

http://www.samtrans.com/pdf/Executive_Compensation.pdf

Does the market really require that wage to keep the buses running on time? Are the skills necessary that rare? He makes more than the President of the United States.
Perfect timing to see this on HN. I was thinking about playing with either Hadoop or Node.js tonight (both for the first time), I guess this post made up my mind. It's installing now. This is exciting to work with, and a lot different for me being a long time C# developer moving to the Linux world.
Theses statistics come up several times a year, and they are always misleading. It's Hard to measure how much money a University makes on sports teams. I go to a school that has a BCS football program that makes more money then it spends (objectively, spent ~18 million last year and made ~23 million). I don't know about the athletic program at large. But beyond that $23M in revenue directly from the football program, there are some other revenue sources that are hard to measure.

Schools like UT make a whole lot of their money off of alumni donating directly to the program. When UT lost their head coach, on of the alumni flew in several potential candidates for the position on his private jet. How do you measure that in revenue?

Further, I would not have gone to the school I chose if it weren't for the football program. Season tickets, even in the nosebleeds, for a team that has won its conference more often then not in the past 5 years, has way more value to me then the ~$300 that I pay. That definitely reflected in my decision to go here, and I probably would have gone somewhere else otherwise. So we can claim at least ~$30k per year to my school for their athletic program.

Also, depending on what they include in the athletic program, it can be even more involved. Would you have gone to a school with no intramural programs? What about if they had no gym? Maybe a lot of people would have, but the majority would not.
Given the kinds of changes Wal-Mart demands of music, I wouldn't trust them to sell any of the more interesting books unaltered.

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores3_2.html
The only thing hard about it was changing my mind set. This is a really hard thing because you don't get it until you've crossed over to the other side. There was one point in time when I was working full time and going to school at night that I almost quit. This was when there was a lot of talk about most programming jobs going to india and when I was really unsure if I was good enough to get a job when I finished. All these people on the Internet seemed so much smarter than me, etc. I doubted and almost quit, but I didn't.

Now that I've been hiring programmers for years I understand that most programmers are not that good and the smart people on the internet are probably the top 5%. growing up I didn't know someone that was successful that could tell me these things from experience.

So the two biggest challenges in my eyes are the mindset of the underprivileged, and I have no idea how to fix that. And, most people simply don't put in the effort and make the sacrifice. They'd rather play video games.

So I believe the two biggest
The Notion Ink Adam is cheaper...

Notion Ink Adam with LCD & WiFi (no 3G) - $375 USD
Notion Ink Adam with LCD, WiFi & 3G - $425 USD

Notion Ink Adam with Pixel Qi display & WiFi (no 3G) - $499USD
Notion Ink Adam with Pixel Qi display, WiFi & 3G - $549 USD
They might be able to ship "more marginal improvements" if they are well funded.
Why don't you just drop the "write tests first no matter what", avoid the "never write a test because it's too 'slow'", and instead adopt a pragmatic way:

"Write some code, write some automated tests, shoot for X% coverage, in no particular order."

Sometimes you write the tests first, sometimes the code, and just shoot for a % coverage level. Coverage is a decent indicator of quality and works as a limiter on "test masturbation". Your goal should be to get the most bang for your buck in the tests and avoid testing things more than once.

The worst thing you could do is treat this like a boolean problem and stop writing tests completely. Having no automated testing is just as bad as having way too much of it. I mean, you don't want to end up like Digg and have to rewrite the whole thing just to screw your users over with new "features". :-)
The average cost per inmate in California is about $49,000, twice the cost to run prisons in other states (the average is around $28,000). Some states are even less. The average cost per inmate in Florida is under $20,000. Texas is a little over $15,000.
Nearly all US universities lose money on education too. The average Ivy league school spends 3x more per student than it charges for tuition.
> Tests are an investment, but once you've done them, every
> time you run them from that point on is free.

True, but they have their own maintenance cost. When features evolve in the future you have to pay to update the tests as well. Worthwhile, but something to bear in mind.
So why are student clubs being giving an effectively unlimited budget out of proportion with the number of members?

At all the universities in my country, student clubs (whether they are about sport, non-sport competitive activities, interests and hobbies, or even 'drinking clubs') get paid by the student association (which has a finite budget to provide services to students) based on the number of students in the club. Student sports clubs are unlikely to be able to afford any full-time staff - but that isn't really necessary when there are plenty of club members willing to volunteer.

I have to wonder how any university could not have at least some limits on how much university money clubs could spend per member.
The story of bottled water (short film)
A hundred upvotes, really. Tim Cook turned Apple from a sloppy, cluttered mess to a perfectly tuned and calibrated machine. He designs business processes like Ive designs hardware enclosures. He's still at it, too, telling investors during the last earnings call that Apple once again snapped up a boatload of supply on an unnamed type of component.

I bet he'd be amazing at Starcraft, once he learned the ropes.
As much as I love TMQB, and I do agree about the excesses in administration levels at both college and pro ranks (I believe his post superbowl column dealt with the extravagance of pro front offices, in terms of the labor talks). There are obvious biases to his work :

Some coaches' salaries are covered by booster funds, not by the school itself: but booster funds funnel money that otherwise might have been donated to a school's academic programs

This is simply untrue for most major sports universities. Boosters by and large donate to the school for sports, primarily, and then to education, secondarily.
Phil Knight's largesses to the University of Oregon help both athletic and scholarly activities, but when the rumor that he gets to call one play a game [1] indicate the real reason for his contributions. Robert Burton's several million dollar donation to UCONN was primarily focused on its athletics [2] and his lack of approval in their hiring of Paul Pasqualoni resulted in his desire to have his $3million donation refunded.

Rich people aren't bragging to their friends about the SAT scores of their schools, but are bragging when their team beats your team.

[1]http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2011/feb/06/uconn-contro...

[2]http://terrapinstationmd.com/2011/01/26/uconn-donor-writes-v...
One of the big reasons Universities compete in sports is to attract alumni donors. If you just look at it at a micro level, the direct expense on sports is probably more than the revenue from sports. But if you factor in alumni donations, then I've heard that the benefits far outweigh the costs.

I was in a Division II school, and they made a big push to get into Division I. And the main reason they gave was to get alumni involvement in the school.
Chicken Scheme looks mighty fine
how about le rabot? a small town in france

http://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&q=le+rabot+time

just need a way to find out local time, that's all
Does anyone know if a hackathon has been held where there were active measures/rules/restrictions in place to ensure that all development was done within the period of the hackathon?
Here's my slider, which is working really well at my startup.

1. Speed trumps reliability Also, manual testing of stable features is wasteful.

For things at the business logic layer, I have a suite of (many) unit tests that verifies that all of the domain objects do the right thing. They are small, fast, don't break when I refactor the code (automated refactoring tools FTW) and easy to work with.

I have another set of integration tests which talk to some external services (twitter, fb, etc.) these are slow and aren't as core to the business logic.

I have yet another set of tests that test the real database (I use simple test doubles in the unit test layer).

Whenever we update code in our source control system, a TeamCity server builds, runs the unit tests, integration tests, data tests, and then does a zero-downtime deployment to our production server. Immediately after that, we run a handful of tests against the server to make sure that the server isn't totally broken.

This sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but it makes us able to deliver so much more quickly than any alternatives. Continuous deployment means that no time is wasted on manually pushing code to servers. Also, it means that the changes made are the smallest and safest changes possible.

And, most importantly, it means that you don't have to spend a lot of time manually testing existing stable features just to get a baseline of reliability.

Do I strive for 100% code coverage of all classes? No. There's a continuous cost-benefit analysis going on. If something is tricky or would create brittle tests, I don't have automated tests for it. If something is really core (e.g. proper enforcement of game rules) I sure as hell am going to write tests for it. Right now, I'm at 72% test coverage.

Trust your common sense here. It's not all-or-nothing. You can get meaningful speed-and-stability-improving-value out of having some tests without having to test every single line of code.
To the downvoter: A downvote won't change reality.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...
Agreed. The numbers just don't make much sense without that context.
That doesn't disprove the statement. If may very well be that the football (or whatever) program turns a profit and the rest of the athletic department loses more than the profitable program makes.
Oklahoma pays it's own way. In fact, it gives nearly $1 MM to the general scholarship fund annually.

Of course, the only citation I can offer is being a former student athlete, and having my support staff, coaches, and university executives repeat the statistic on the record like, well, a broken record. I haven't seen the line items though myself -- I wasn't on the student liaison committee.
yes, and they pay Samsung to make them too
Cool! I dunno if we'll be able to make it out again (we were the Night Scheduler guys), but I'll definitely see what I can do.

Really? There were a couple that I could see that being a possibility with (the Etsy/Flickr guys), but I didn't even consider them as contenders seeing as how they sponsored. shrug
In happier news, the GNU userland software continues to be important and useful. Please don't downplay the GNU project's contributions. Argue with them if you like -- there's a lot to disagree with -- but at least acknowledge what they've done.
I like the ending point about 28k breakfasts as motivation to make them couunt.

A mentor once told me, "look it takes 7-10 years to build and exit a company. You're 35. If you're successful, you'll probably only do 2-3 significant companies before you retire to angel investing or whatever, so choose the businesses carefully."
This seems terribly pernicious to me. Indeed, Stallman's arguments about the "GNU/Linux" terminology have always struck me as a rather naked form of question-begging designed not to make an argument, but to assume that he's already won it. That he is so insistent that everyone use his terminology merely illustrates that he is often not interested in making arguments so much as forcing everyone else to accept his conclusions.
and it's competing with a product announced over a year ago, not the next generation of iPad due any day now.
Yes, you should use unit tests in FP.

Traditionally you build larger functions on top of small ones, and you might change the later. Unit tests guarantee that the larger functions still work after those changes.

Also, in Haskell, I prefer to do property-based testing instead of unit testing. Google for quickCheck for more details. (There's an Erlang version as well).
Just semi-hosted a hackathon recently. Key elements:

- good desks / places to sit and code
- reliable internet
- free dinner, midnight and/or 3am food
- healthy food in addition to junky food
- some like energy drinks
- don't have people pitch their ideas
- have an official wiki for people to post their team+idea
- tell contestants your judging criteria before the hackathon starts
(and make sure judges know it)

- keep presentations speedy, with a gong to keep people honest
(<5mins for final demos)

- have a nice big central room for everyone to code in
(don't spread people out across the building)

- don't require judges to give feedback after each demo

Some of these are lessons learned from the New England College Hackathon (http://nech2011.com/).
Well I'm happy your child is healthy but your attitude is exactly the problem. The question isn't what your child's life is worth the question is could that doctor have done the same thing for less money. Because if we could've paid him $500,000 instead of $1 million we'd have $500,000 more dollars to save the other children's lives. Don't get me wrong, if the doctor can make 1 million elsewhere then we should pay him 1 million. But if he can't we shouldn't pay him 1 million simply because government officials don't mind spending other People's Money.
Were you one of the Trippy guys? Really liked your application. I was one of the two Night Scheduler developers.
Thanks for the heads up, investigating it now.
Somehow I feel for the Chinese government (not really). They're caught between a rock and a really hard place.

On one hand they have to control the flow of info over 1.5 billion people and it's getting increasingly hard. With every piece they ban there's always a bit of Streisand effect. With people getting more and more knowledgeable about how to get around the system to get their sources (see Egypt 2011), that effect gains more and more amplitude.

On the other hand they just can't pretend to release their grip by ignoring that kind of material. It's 1.5 billion people. If they let go even just a little bit, they're bound to lose some control they'll never be able to regain.

A rock and a hard place. I really can't fathom what the future holds for China.
In the long run they are all dead. Look at the financial ratios http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/jsp/finance/compinfo/Ratio...

EBIT -0.2%.
Apple 'outsources' all of its marketing to TBWA\Chiat\Day but that doesn't affect the quality of the output, or their control over what gets produced.

Just because they don't own the tools doesn't mean that they aren't telling people exactly how to use them.
Of course. I'm simply saying it makes them less vertically integrated.
Is there a way we contribute without our wallets?
I will never understand what quality education and sports have in common.

Ever seen 50,000 alumni show up on campus for a theoretical physics conference?
I would be glad to address the substance of their argument if they ever manage to produce an argument with substance.
This is the kind of thing I read HNN for - stuff I never even knew I needed. Do I understand correctly that Field lets you build graphical representations of your code? Kind of like ... graphical literate programming?

This is where my wife would say "Jézus Mária és minden szentek". It's ... full of stars ...
I'm sure just getting the word out about what is going on so those who can help financially can hear about it will help. Spreading the word is always just as important.
Ever seen 50,000 alumni show up on campus for a theoretical physics conference?

And when those 50,000 alumni show up on campus, what do they do to make the education at that university better?
It's not a question of being able to afford it(I assume you could give everyone who attends the entire conference a pizza and still have $ left over) it's what would be most effective for the most people. If you get a local place to do it for you you'll not only save on the cost of pizzas(more profits to invest in the winner of the event) you'll give a local place some much needed attention. Plus, since a lot of people who will go to the hackathon already live in the area, they'll get quite a few new customers as well. And if that's not a win-win, I don't know what is.
I've personally seen more 1 generation college attendees in my athletics career circle than not; they're not ignorant jocks trying to skate into the pros, they're trying to better their standing by any means necessary. Most athletes also understand that they "go pro in something other than sports," to steal the NCAA tagline.

Ask your alma mater's department heads, deans and development officers if sports matters. Research (even tech transfer) doesn't raise enough cash to fund our current university system. Tuition doesn't either; and state support (if applicable) doesn't get far either.

Donors provide the rest. The best way to butter up a donor is through university brand prominence. A non Ivy League school can't compete in the same fields as an MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, etc. You have to increase your university brand through any respectable means necessary. Sports is often that angle.

Go ask your endowed profs if sports matters in any factor to their compensation. It's likely they'll admit that it helps, at minimum.
The iPad is available to purchase.
More than just licensing the tech, Apple buys the companies who make it. Apple owns Intrinsity, which designed the A4 processor. Apple also owns P.A. Semi, which contributed to the A4 SoC. Apple partially (10%) owns Imagination Technologies, the makers of PowerVR.
TECO was so ugly because the command language and the programming language were the same thing: You programmed TECO by entering the same commands you used to do editing with it, and those commands were both terse and made heavy use of control characters.

On the other hand, it was also a high-level programming language with native support for strings and regular expressions and, of course, the editor qualified as an interactive interpreter. TECO-the-language actually got reasonably popular within the communities that used it as an editor, especially the ones that had the more advanced TECO variants with all the bells and whistles.
Female  foreign correspondents - Code of silence is finally broken
Excellent point. People showing up to a school for non-academic reasons clearly provide an academic benefit... Not.

I also haven't seen a theoretical physics conference gather dozens students late on a Friday night, but that doesn't mean kegs are good for education.
Refactoring breaks a lot of test cases (mostly with renaming variables).

Please tell me about this. My experience is that refactoring tools can often apply the same refactoring to the tests as to the code. For OO projects, the only variables visible to a test should be temporary variables to hold test objects. Renaming those shouldn't be a hard refactoring.
Help out Khan Academy
The College Results website

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=16...

allows drilling down to a comparison of similar colleges to any college you care to name, and looking at a Finance and Faculty tab to see the spending per student at the college.
They pay for the university's existence.
In terms of total production we have fully recovered and grown beyond our peak. It's only industrial production that hasn't fully recovered.
I'll accept 1 American moving from upper middle class to lower middle class if it lifts 3 people out of poverty in the third world.

In some ways, this makes me long-view bullish as an entrepreneur. Imagine the opportunities to serve a global market that lives at first world standards.