skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me it's also not about "building software" it's a mix of things like trying out a new technology. Creating a proof of concept that I can work later on (maybe for years ;-) But one of the most important things: Work with other people. Feel their workflow. At Hackathons there is lot of intense energy and in the end it's about us and not any marketing guys.
Sounds like the movie 'The Island'

I will politely disagree with your premise.
So, because people would watch too many star trek episodes, we should have them die? Doesn't sound too ethical. There is no moral argument for death. As Aubrey de Gray explains, will you ever come to a point where you are perfectly healthy and happy and then decide to just die because the date of your birth was "too" many years ago. I don't think you would decide to do that, even if you had been alive a million years.
So instead of having these machines in our serverroom inside our office, we'd have to pay for using them in a data center and register URL's, only because some ISP's use an insane way to handle NXDOMAIN? There are many valid reasons to "go into the cloud", but this is not one of them.
Indeed. Those who are going to attribute you will attribute you anyway, without needing a gun held to their head about it. Those who won't, won't.

Many of these concerns are addressed in Peter Saint-Andre's essay "Who's Afraid of the Public Domain?":

http://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html
I think this is spot on, I doubt the actual code written at the event gets much use afterwards but the connections made and the teams formed can go a long way.

Our startup (www.stylegauge.com) began at London Startup Weekend 2011 and is now a few weeks away from launching trials. The codebase has changed completely and the ideas evolved a lot but it was the hackathon which got it going.
IIRC the judge in this case required Oracle to pick their best patents out of their portfolio and to sue on those alone. They don't get to go back and trawl through the rest of them hoping to get lucky a second (or third, or fourth) time.
Sounds like "The Free Music Philosophy": http://ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp.html
Interesting and pointless at the time, and of course sometimes that is the best type of entertainment.
"Hello World" tests really need to go away and be replaced by a concurrent workload that represents 100s of users accessing, writing, etc.

I remember a test that compared MySQL to SQL Server (Microsoft's SQL Server) a few years back.

MySQL had SQL Server beat hands down... For 1 concurrent user.

Once things scaled passed 10-20, SQL Server started winning.

At 30-50, MySQL could no longer respond and would crash, while SQL Server scaled to 90!

But everyone was wowed by the 1 user-load test! And countless posts were made over the years showing how MySQL is superior to the obviously flawed SQL Server.
> "Your ISP (network administrator, ..) is intercepting and manipulating DNS requests. Do you want to use Google DNS instead?"

I would prefer

"Your ISP (network administrator, ..) is intercepting and manipulating DNS requests. Do you want to install a local caching DNS server and use it instead?"

Unbound [1] is a local DNS server that I have installed on all my machines. Small, fast, security-oriented, IPv6, BSD, made by NLnet Labs.

[1] http://unbound.net/
Obj-C is essentially a preprocessor on top of a C compiler. Whether that C compiler is C89, C99, or C++11 is up to you.

Obj-C also includes the Foundation classes that were originally introduced with the OpenStep SDK in 1994 (NSObject, NSString, NSNumber, NSArray, NSRunLoop, NSAutoreleasePool, etc.).
I take "Amazon RDS" being in the top 6 as a sign that these numbers are pretty worthless - the whole point of RDS is that it's easier to set-up and administer than a do-it-yourself install.
My argument is that use of the word "fascist" itself prevents us from rational discourse of the trends and problems at hand by driving us to extreme positions.

"Fascist" is not the correct word for what's happening. It's a loaded and extreme word. Sure, you can quote an one-sentence online dictionary and use the vagueness of that definition to convince yourself that it is correct. Or you can use an equally simplistic definition like "privately owned but under absolute control of the gov't" and again, claim accuracy. No scholar of political science would ever use a one-line definition for something as culturally and politically significt as fascism.

Even Wikipedia, hardly a controversial source, wouldn't: "Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology.[1][2] Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education, and eugenics."

The discussion is about an important issue: the increasing control of the US gov't and regulatory agencies over the free agency of US citizens. Jumping in and saying "fascist regime" is not furthering rational conversation.

Also, calling somebody on injecting the emotional baggage of that hyperbole is not making "rational conversation impossible".

In another paragraph I was asked if use of euphemism by media was a big part of the problem at hand. I'd say no, it's the opposite: use of extreme polarizing language is a big part of the problem at hand.
What 95% of Bosses Don't Realize: Progress Gives Far More Happiness than Money
How Can We Build a Strong Third Party? | Newsflavor
We'll know that iOS and [Mac] OS X have truly been unified when they ship on the same install media. Oh wait...
I can't remember where I heard this, so don't quote me, but I've heard it partially has to do with graphics kexts in some or all of those machines being 32-bit and a reluctance from Apple and the manufacturers (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) to update them. That said, I'm not sure how that would rule out the Mac Pro, then, because the chips I heard cited were the old Intel chips (950, x3100) and AMD chips (X1600).

Again, don't quote me!

edit: this assumes Apple is moving to 100% 64-bit.
Because command-tab takes away your focus. There are other things in that menu as well that you might switch to. With tmux, I can split my windows into regions and turn the terminal into an IDE.

And then I can detach from it and leave it running as I switch to another configuration.

And I can invite you in to pair program with me over a low-bandwith solution.

Finally, when I switch from OSX to Linux I can have the exact same environment. For example, I use this on servers.

So it's the same reason you'd use vim over Eclipse. Sounds like nerdery for the sake of nerdery, until it works for you.
I disagree. Hackathons are sprints, and just like have the occasional sprint workout can be a great way to augment your distance running routine, hackathons can be great for augmenting your software development routine.

Here are some reasons why I like taking part in a hackathon event (assuming the goal is to produce some sort of web application):

- Tradeoffs are easy. You have no time for bells or whistles. You consider a basic feature list and start working. If a feature starts to take too long to implement it, you just axe it. You probably end up with something that doesn't have many bells and whistles, but the key distinction is you end up with something. I can't tell you had some many side projects I've worked on had some painfully implemented bell that was pretty cool, but was pointless because I never got any core functionality working.

- All you can do is use what you know. In one hackathon group I was in, I was the guy who ended up knowing the most sysadmin/web server stuff, and the guy who knew the most HTML/CSS/JS. So I basically did my best to manage through installing/configuring everything at the server software level, and then mucked around with some CSS templates trying to shoehorn it around my team's application code. I spent the whole time out of my comfort zone, on two very disparate pieces, and it was great. Here was an environment that required me to do nothing else but pick up those technical skills, in a very focused time period, with tangible results if I did. Much more effective than all those times I'd think, "hmm maybe I'll play around with jQuery more" and never did.

To go back to the running analogy, good software development is like running a marathon. It takes time and discipline, not preparing effectively usually means you'll end up going slower or being injured, and it's all about a steady incremental process that builds up into something great. But sometimes it just feels good to toss out your planned 20 mile run for the day, and just run out your front door and sprint around the block as hard as you can for 10 minutes, pushing yourself in a different way and learning something about your skills or capabilities that you never would otherwise.
I'm more surprised that people actually expect us to have this in the back of our minds at all times. There's a reason they didn't go replacing all stairs with ramps.
I definitely think good software can be made in 24 hours but sure, if you're trying to build Skynet in a Hackathon it will probably not be very good.
In this particular case I'm not talking about grabbing random people, I'm talking about people who are very skilled in a similar tech stack (which has a much higher supply/demand ratio, and getting them up to speed with the very similar but niche stack. Basically you're just learning some new APIs and some new service providers (i.e. proprietary ORM instead of Hibernate).

But I agree with your assessment of consulting firms and the scaling/quality issues therein. I also feel that consulting shops expenses tend to scale a lot closer to profits than some other businesses, so I stay out of it:)
We do? Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGYs4KS_djg

Most people have no clue what constitutes a healthy meal. Moreover, they are strongly incentivised to eat crap by the fact that crap food is (much) cheaper than healthy food. Combine the two, and you have vast numbers of people who basically eat sausage rolls, pizzas, burgers, chips and chinese takeaways (probably not the worst of the bunch), along with epic-size sugary sodas and mega-calorie coffees on a pretty much daily basis.
Regular expressions are for lexing (breaking up input into tokens, AKA "tokenizing"), parsers are for assembling a stream of tokens into a parse tree (according to a grammar). You can kinda-sorta get away with parsing via regular expressions, but "surprisingly complex" regular expressions (http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html) should be a sign that you're using the wrong tool. De-coupling lexing from parsing also means that your grammar won't be cluttered by issues like whitespace handling.

Perl's RE extensions can be used to do some parsing, albeit at the cost of potentially exponential runtime (http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html * ), since they're NP-complete (http://perl.plover.com/NPC/NPC-3SAT.html). (Congrats, your parser is now a denial-of-service attack vector!)

* If you find this article interesting, you'll probably love _Parsing Techniques_.

> I'm going to upvote this on the general principle that I've seen a lot of programmers who don't quite know what parsing is, but reading a 310-page book is perhaps not the best way to familiarize them with it.

This book is a _reference_. For someone who wants to learn basic parsing techniques, I'd first direct them to something like Niklaus Wirth's _Compiler Construction_ (PDF: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf), which has a quick and clear introduction to recursive descent parsing, but only briefly touches on other methods.

The Grune book is for when you need to understand the trade-offs between (say) different kinds of chart parsers, how parser generators work, classic performance optimizations in Earley parsers, or error handling strategies. It has quite a bit more depth to it, as well as an excellent bibliography.
The second edition was updated in 2008, and adds a lot of new content.
Shameless piggybacking: Also look into the work that complexity theorists have done with quantum complexity classes like BQP.
I've had this feeling before and I've worked with people who express this feeling. My question is, what is the alternative to having this feeling.

You want to show that you are now knowledgable of better methods and you would like the criticizer to recognize that your mistakes are not ones that you are still making. Furthermore, you can't really blame the criticizer, they're just trying to help you become a better programmer.

It seems all you can really do is give the sheepish grin and say "yeah, well, that was written at a very foolish time in my life..."
/dev/sigh - programmer rage
Surely, it's hard to draw the line, what if you've written a similar thing before? or spent weeks coding in your head before hand?
Ex-Apple Engineer: The Future Is Not In iPads Or Other 'Hokey Visual Facades'
> misspelled a certain word three times in your comment.

Well, vane is a legit word, so it's more of a misuse. I meant to use vain. I kept thinking vanity, ah well. It was bothering me, but I got sloppy.
Here are some more detailed sources.

http://www.nature.com/nnano//journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nnano...

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano...
I don't understand this bit: Under both system of copyright and copyfree work, J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of book, became a billionaire

JK Rowling became a billionaire through licensing her characters to film-makers, toy-makers, etc. a method that is totally dependent on intellectual property.

Am I missing something?
What would I do if I had to start my college life again?
I wish I could re-start my college life.
I think I rather be uploaded to a virtual reality environment with the ability to download to humanoid robots almost identical to the human body such that the difference in perception is almost negligible.

The robots should be identical to the human body at least skin deep. Our skin could be a synthetic material very close to the real thing. We will need none of the organs that currently keep us alive.
I disagree with others that have said that these tests are worthless for a real application. It is worth knowing the baseline speed of a framework as this affects the maximum number of requests you will be able to achieve, without scaling out your application.
Shell School: Learn unix shell and sysadmin tasks
Gapserver: Phonegap Apps with jade, stylus and coffescript
Casa de las Americas Colloquy on the Woman 20-_24 February
I don't thing hackathons are for building a software that will be shipping right away. I think the objective of hackatons is to do quick experimentations, be as creative as you can and see if something interesting and new comes out of it in a few hours.

If something doesn't exist you don't even know if it's possible to accomplish. In a normal working schedule it would be very difficult for you to get time to work on something nobody-knows-if-it-will-work-or-not. Besides, your boss will not be very happy if you 'waste' time on that.

So the goal of hackatons, in my opinion, is to spend some time to travel on uncharted seas...you may find nothing...you may discover America. But you have only discovered it, not conquered it...that will take more time :)
The point of hackathons is also the reason why this quote:

there will never be a Julia Child of software

rings false. Julia Child would cook stuff in front of you on TV so that you could watch how a real cook uses her tools, and hear the cook talk a bit about how she approaches her work.

Obviously the point isn't to taste the food - it's on TV. And obviously the TV show barely scratches the surface of Julia's work: It took her years of practice, apprenticeship with knowledgeable teachers, hundreds of tests of recipes, and so forth. But just because watching Julia can never be the same as being a chef doesn't mean her shows aren't useful.

The point of a hackathon is to get an up-close look at other people in your craft using their most familiar industrial-strength tools and techniques to build something a bit bigger than an academic example. Just shoulder-surfing a programmer using their tools well can be inspiring: Look at what DHH did for Textmate.
Ask HN: What support solution do you use?
I'm a solo owner, working in my spare time. I intend on brining on an outside contractor to help with "tier 1" support.

The support/customer interaction emails easily pile up in Gmail.

What customer support solution do you use, and what's the nature of your site? Zendesk? Google Apps?
I suspect there could be a huge market if Apple allowed frameworks to be sold on the mac app store on a per seat basis - so framework developers would get some cut of each sale.
Funny how different people see different things.

The vital piece of information in the graph is the relative size of the wage. If the author had started at 0, it would be far harder to distinguish differences between the skills, by the same principles that make pie charts mostly unusable.
This was one of my first questions when I first looked a Pinterest. I don't think it is ridiculous, and I'm not sure they are protected. The interesting question is, if they were to loose a court battle, would the court just require them to remove the image in question, or would there be larger implications?
Thanks for spotting an error. What I really meant is that J. K. Rowling would probably earn a lot of money either way, even if not with such ludicrous rent. I updated the text to reflect what I actually mean.
Learn English. Get Married
Yup. Similarly, one person I'm working with who is a good coder but who happens to have a bit less experience apologizes whenever I find a bug in his code. I just want to tell him, "don't apologize, bugs are just part of the game!" There are bugs in my code too ;) We fix them, and move on.
There's a pretty wide range of hackathons, I think. Focused ones where you go start-to-end on a project in 24 or 48 hours are one specific kind. Others are looser, more like dev parties, sort of like gaming LAN parties but not focused on gaming. Some people at an event like SuperHappyDevHouse (http://superhappydevhouse.org) treat it like a coding sprint, but others work more leisurely on long-term side projects, observe what other people are doing, chat about new technologies, find a few people with similar interests and work their way through a tutorial, etc. Lots of ways to approach it as a concept and social setting.
to save people poking around (because the linked article is quite appalling vague) - what you might call the "active part" of the gate is a single atom. that is surrounded by input, output, and gate connections and insulation that are all multiple-atoms in size. so the single, central phosphorous atom controls the flow from source to drain, depending on the gate voltage.
whoa what a pleasant surprise seeing my project on the HN front page this morning! just an FYI: this is a "demo-quality" project, not production-quality. it's probably not ready for HN-level traffic! please email me if you have more detailed suggestions or bug reports, thanks.
Twitter reproduces 99.8% of George Orwell's novel 1984
I tested the Infinite Monkey Theorem (kinda) using words found on Twitter. They unknowingly reproduced 98% of George Orwell's novel "1984" in 12 hours, and went on to complete 99.8% of the entire book in ~9 days.
What? How's that relevant?
"Excuse me ... but which one of us has a penis".

I have in fact been in the room when someone has actually said this. It was intended as a joke and the lady to whom he was addressing his query (who just happened to be his boss) was also in fact highly amused by it.

All the other men just sat there with their mouths literally hanging open.
There can be a safety net for startups - college. If colleges could be refocused from teaching psychology to creating tech businesses, then student loans could be the financing. Anyone, including middle aged or seniors could go to college from 1-5 years, learn tech skills while creating a company from day 1, and have the current student loan industry finance it all. Olin College in MA and Waterloo University Independent Studies Program, Ontario, Canada, are two such examples that are close to the description (although not completely, because they focus on projects and not projects with business plan attached).
MacOS KenDensed: Hello Mountain Lion & Apple’s Straight-shooting CEO
It's ok - someone has submitted a sigh to point this out:

http://devsigh.com/sigh/58
And yet, every release of OS X since Lion seems to pull in more features from iOS. Launcher, the notification bar, even some of the apps are starting to make an appearance.

1) Some of the apps only make sense to appear in OS X. Why shouldn't OS X have a messages app (which actually is just iChat integrated with the Messages protocol)? Or a Notes app? Nothing special here.

2) The notification bar was needed in OS X even before iOS appeared. Even Windows Vista introduced a notification sidebar. So, no surprise OS X adopted one too.

3) Launcher is indeed an idea borrowed from iOS, to add something OS X needed, namely a quick way to launch apps (and that is not by browsing with the Finder in the Applications folder). OS X user used a lot of similar apps, and the folder Dock "stacks" was half-way there.

So: apps and ideas are gonna be exchanged between the two.

The important thing is:

OS X and iOS ALREADY ARE the same OS. The share the same Mach/BSD kernel, the same services, most of the same runtimes, the same filesystem, etc. They are like two different "distros" of the same OS, for a different architecture and with a different UI.

So, whether OS X and iOS are "united into onto" will not be on the OS level (they are already the same kernel etc), but at the UI/runtime level.

At the level, there are some signs that the two Cocoa runtimes are converging (for example, iOS used to not have garbage collection, whereas not it has (sort of, with ARC)).

But there are no signs that OS X UI and iOS UI are gonna get reunited in the most important distinction, the touch UI thing. Apple has added touch gestures through the trackpad, but there won't be a touch screen. The way monitors/laptop screens work it's just not possible to hold your hand and touch one for stretches of time --you can even get cramps. That cannot be changed: it's the laws of how our body works.

What we CAN get, is some kind of laptop with a detachable screen that turns into an iPad --and then supports touch interaction.

Until something like that is available, OS X will not get like iOS UI-wise in the only thing that matters: the touch UI. Borrowing some concepts like notification screen, a launcher, or sheets and stuff, does not matter. They could just as easily have been developed for OS X in the first place.
How Forbes Stole a New York Times Article and Got All The Traffic
> Solve the reputation problem, and you solve the gossip problem.

I agree - this is the key! I've been really thinking hard about the whole reputation problem. In a way, Google found a way to solve reputation problem on the Internet for website, and therefore their tremendous success.
Would equivalent method work on people - just give reputation points by Citation (or Followers, as Klout is trying to do)?
I don't think that's enough - plus my feeling is that there are bunch of dimensions to a Reputation.
And on top of all that - we haven't even solved Identity issue on the Net yet.