skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm guessing that a big attraction is that these events provide motivation. It's like telling an athlete that if they want to exercise, they can do so any time on their own. There's no need to go to the olympics to do it there. However, most likely wouldn't mind being used because the benefits go both ways.
That sounds like a great way to get murdered (http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/oakland/crime/). What are some of the places that are better or should be avoided?
The average debt of college graduates for the class of 2010 is $25,000, and is estimated to be $27,000 for the class of 2011 [1]. Compared to housing, this is not a lot of debt. Many people these days will even buy a car on credit, which can be a comparable amount of debt, of course depending on the car.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/education/average-student-...
As someone who uses both iPads and vim a lot, I'd disagree with this.

The iPad screen should be ideal for making selections with your fingers directly because the keyboard and the code are so close together.

It currently doesn't feel ideal, I agree, because text boxes are designed to prevent you shooting yourself in the foot when you touch the screen by accident. A power-user tool could remove a lot of the safety and slowness from making selections.
You could ask the same question about why restaurants don't give away their leftover food directly to customers. It sets a bad precedent from their point of view.
Its a way for up and coming devs to get known; else we are left at at mercy of YOUR contact network which may not know about us.

Its also expedient in terms of time we have to invest pursuing that position.
I have read a book on a similar vein. "Do the work" by Steven Pressfield. Although he starts from the point where you know what you want to do.

Incremental improvements. Do one thing until you are convinced you can do it, do not listen to the inner voice that puts you down, just do it. Over and over again.

I'm still trying...
I'm confused. Do people pay to attend hackathons? I can understand a contribution to costs (ie for pizza etc) if there are no sponsors but paying seems odd.

I've run one hackathon myself and it most of the feedback I got was quite positive. Off the top of my head, the things that people liked were; the chance to meet/work with new folks in a low-risk way, to try out some new tech/language/framework that they'd never got round to, do something within a short deadline.

Overall, it went pretty well and it I don't think anyone was (or felt) 'used'.
A link to the patent: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6116545
>so people who don't want to work shouldn't be forced to work.

I'm not sure I understand your POV on this. In your mind, how would these people sustain themselves?
You've been going to the wrong hackathons then. If you look hard enough you'll find some where you don't need to sign anything, and if you can't find any, start planning one.
Maybe I should've posted the Google link instead; but would that have gotten the message across?
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work at all. The Done button after "I have read the terms.. " didn't work and then the build your popup box was loading for infinite time (yes infinite).
The top bar looks very much like Google's!
Incorrect.

Car insurance generally "follows the car." If you lend your car to your buddy and he gets into an accident, your insurer is the primary. If you don't have insurance on the car, then if he has insurance it may cover some of the associated costs. That all gets settled in court.

Collision is not required, but liability is.
If you check out the patent, US6116545 and see what citations they have, it seems like there's a whole lot of different patents on various orbital maneuvers.
Not only that, but Stichting BREIN (sponsored by the US media industry) also successfully got the court to gag a Dutch political party from mentioning The Pirate Bay in the context of circumventing blocks, on their website.
Two things:

First, the bart shutting down at midnight doesn't mean there is no public transit. You can almost always take the bus.

Second: You can move near SF state, either in the city or in Daly City, and have an ok roommate/rent situation with managable transit options. Especially if you are willing to bike a bit.
Building things for charities is an entirely different thing. I should've clarified that in the article. I'm referring to for-profit ventures
Show HN: My two NYC Disrupt hacks Rapunzl and Fake Mark Cuban
Best on mobile devices:
Rapunzl.co - Find a haircut and deals in nyc (can be applied elsewhere, but we had a female founder with a huge issue that there was no real app)
Fake Mark Cuban - Twillio App - 1-732-979-2017
Text him with what you want to build (ex: a ruby on rails social network for cats)
Throw in free Pizza and a few beers and I'll be there.

I would relish the opportunity to meet new people and work on something different.
I've been to two hackathon type events. I would have gone to more, but I was living in an area without much of a startup/hacker scene.

The first was SuperHappyDevHouse, following Startup School in 2006. It was mostly hackers working on their own projects and occasionally collaborating. I saw no evidence of anybody attempting to exploit anybody else, especially not non-hackers trying to get free work from hackers.

This was the second: http://hackd.it/. I've gone a couple times now, and didn't feel like there was any exploitation going on there. The ratio of hackers to non-hackers was good and people seemed to mostly be working on things they had a stake in.

A similar event run by non-technical people looking to get their ideas built cheap/free wouldn't be enjoyable for hackers, I expect. If you know an event is like that, don't go.
Cars vs Robots 2
Uh... that's beyond stupid if it's true Maybe the patent is on equipment/method used to calculate the trajectory?

If not, I'll patent my trajectory to work and make a few bucks on the side.
I had the same thought. TorrentFreak explains it quite nicely: http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-outfits-launch-attack-on...

Those guys really are great journalists.
Event organizers often attach a hackathon to their show in order to sell more tickets.
They don't even meet interesting people/new opportunities?

I truly have no idea, I live far, far away from the valley in a different world.
I'm not entirely sure what hackathons Ryan Carson has been to, but this post is seriously misguided.

Developers don't go to hackathons to be "code monkeys", rather they go to build something cool in a fun environment. It's often a great break outside of the day job to build something they would otherwise not have the motivation to. No one is stealing their concept or forcing them to take it further, it's just fun.

As for hacker mansions, people like to live with like-minded folk and code. What's wrong with that? I fail to see how people are being exploited here. Perhaps some examples would help.
I remember Swedens first social network, StajlPlejs, started at 96 and changed name to LunarStorm in 2000. Had about 20% of Sweden on that site. Well before 2004.
RIAA Thinks LimeWire Owes $75 Trillion in Damages
A ring of offices surrounding a common area (with couches and whiteboards) is the best environment I've been in. I have fond memories of parts of Apple's Infinite Loop 1.

Reportedly Apple was going to put cubicals in the IL buildings, but decided to go with hard-walled offices because it was cheaper in the long term.

(I haven't worked there since '94 or so -- for all I know it's wall-to-wall cubicals, with three minions to a cubie and the fourth hunkered under the table beside the power strips).
You are right - I'm not that familiar with the US scene, being from Slovenia (EU). My last hackaton was Copenhagen Startup Weekend, which I think is a similar event, since I "had" to code A LOT :) The good thing the emphasis was not on media/buzz, but connecting people (I guess that's why it was at Nokia HQ in Denmark :).
I'll just briefly hit the major points of what I think is "wrong with the system" since this is obviously a huge topic.

First, public educations are a crap shoot. A high school diploma is a joke, it doesn't even guarantee basic literacy or numeracy. This is a big reason why white collar jobs have increasingly been forced to rely on other credentials. Despite vastly increasing per student spending over the years the quality of education hasn't improved at all and by some measures has gotten worse.

Second, student loan debt is out of control. It's too easy for people to sign themselves up for huge amounts of debt regardless of their future job opportunities. This distorts the market and creates an education bubble.

Third, society has turned its back on "dirty jobs". It's becoming less and less common for folks, especially middle and upper middle class young adults, to aspire toward jobs that involve manual labor. There's nothing wrong with construction, welding, automotive repair, culinary arts, etc. Trade schools are faster and cheaper than a 4 year college, and they typically leave a graduate with very solid prospects at gaining a fairly well paying job just out of school. If more people made that choice unemployment would be a lot lower.

Fourth, "vanity degrees" are far too common these days, partly for the reasons listed above. If you need higher education to further your career then if you pursue a degree with very shaky career prospects and you go into massive debt to do so then quite frankly you made a very bad life choice, and all of the people who helped you do it (your family and friends, your counselors, your loan officers, etc.) are partly to blame as well. Yes there is value to studying history, or English literature, but you should never for even a single moment fool yourself into believing that you are doing anything other than digging your own financial grave when you are indulging in those majors.

Unfortunately for a lot of middle and upper middle class 18-25 year olds there has come to be a great deal of pressure behind taking the same "acceptable" educational and career track. High school -> 4 year arts & science degree at a prestigious school -> white collar job. If you are in high school or college right now I urge you to challenge this. Look at your career prospects and finances seriously. Consider becoming a STEM major if possible. If that's not feasible consider switching to a trade school. And try to get yourself into the job market early even while you are in school to build up your resume and your skills. It's far, far easier to study history and English lit as a hobby in your free time than it is to build a well paying career on such things.
very nice graphics and an interesting idea
> It’s a joke and I’m tired of it. Developers aren’t monkeys in a cage who can’t wait to do the next “hackathon”. They’ve got families, bills to pay and every other pressure that normal people do. They don’t want to drink Red Bull all night and sleep under their desks.

Except I do want to do those things, and many others do as well. Not all developers have families or lots of bills to pay. Even those with lots of responsibilities enjoy the occasional hackathon.

If they don't appeal to you, don't go to them, but don't pass it off as a joke because there are many people that really do enjoy hackathons and get some value out of them.
With a wealth redistribution mechanism like basic income.
I love the design factor and simplicity to get 1 thing done right. Good job!
These days? Nothing much. When they had half-finished industrializing? They were a totalitarian state that invaded its neighbors and launched a surprise attach on the US to keep us from intervening. Lets call that the worst case scenario.
You're actually just repeating what he said: you're talking about guaranteed income. Public works projects are very close to guaranteed work (and will never get funding in our current system). 'Care for our old and sick' is a $5/hour job. But they will get paid 4-5 times that. Again, its guaranteed income.

>>learn art and design and make the world more beautiful, engineer spaceships, create amazing entertainment

Lets not pretend that every human is capable of doing any of this if they only had the time. The people who are capable will do it, the rest won't.
Liability is a function of risk which isn't necessarily a function of fault. In capitalism the returns and risks are, by default, routed to the owner.

Shares in a company whose factory gets wiped out by a hurricane you will experience a loss. This isn't the shareholders' fault, but it is a risk assumed by owning the asset. The shareholders could later sue management for being negligent and management could sue the construction company or risk advisor who said hurricane insurance is bull, etc. But the risk first comes to roost with the owners. A similar outcome would be expected if a tree on the factory premises toppled over and killed a pedestrian.

The principle difference between my example and the RelayRides case is the limited liability afforded by a common stockholder versus unlimited liability of a sole proprietorship (which is what you operate as if you directly interact with RelayRides as a natural person).

P.S. Those of you piping up about how this could never happen in Europe, note that this is because European countries tend to have higher insurance caps. In this case I would expect, in my completely un-qualified opinion, RelayRides to be ultimately responsible for implying that a $1 million liability cap was sufficient.
"Immigrant" here means non-English speaking immigrant, particularly Spanish in this case. China town would also be described as an "immigrant" neighborhood. But English speaking wealthy immigrants tend to blend in and not form into cohesive neighborhoods.

This is a bad thing to say because in educated, liberal America racism is the worst possible crime you can commit, and non-English communities tend to be non-White (this was not so true 40 or 50 years ago). So if you voice that you don't want to live in an immigrant neighborhood, you will be accused of being a "disgusting racist bigot".

I think it is perfectly reasonable to dislike living near lots of poor people who speak a different language than you. But I missed a few brainwashing sessions in college. You shouldn't say things like that out loud if you ever visit America.
Did you by any chance post this comment in the wrong story?
I wish we had more hackathons. Working intensely together is the best way for both sides to gauge each other. I consider myself a crusty old codger, and I'm tired of shotgun hirings where you are expected to work together like gangbusters after just an interview together.
The difference they are promoting is sharing search engine results, and other content:

http://www.so.cl/about/faq

For example, I created a post about a tabletop game I ran this weekend, and was able to search within the posting process and quickly add two images related to the status update.
A lot of bitterness on behalf of the author against, essentially, people who don't have kids and choose to spend more of their time coding. Sure we don't want to drive people over the edge by encouraging everyone everywhere to work all the time, but this post makes it seem like anyone who makes different life choices than the author (not having a family) is somehow just getting swindled.
5 fonts plus creative bundle. Save 95%
@Futurebot

You should get a degree if you can, period.

Whether you work as a fry cook or not. Education is worth it. It has value, to you and to society, apart from its utility as a factor in filtering people for job positions.

No one wants to see the US become even more uneducated.

If you want to get cynical about the job market, try thinking of it this way. No doubt most have heard the old adage, "You need to sell yourself." Another way to think of this is that "jobs" are really a question of convincing someone else to pay you. That could be an elaborate process involving educational degrees and past accomplishments, or, in today's world, it might be something like the startups discussed here on HN: You announce a bit of software and a website, and the thundering herd starts clicking. Some of the herd is willing to pay. If that percentage is large enough, you have a runaway success, something like Dropbox.

Those who are paying you are not asking to see your resume. The only people who cared that you graduated from MIT were the VC and their clients who funded you. That is, if you were funded. Don't kid yourself. The most important people you convinced to pay you werenot the investors. They were the customers.

Now, maybe you become wealthy overnight. But that does not reduce the long term value of your degree from MIT. The degree is not necessarily the cause of your success. Wealth can be made with or without education. (That has always been true, otherwise small business, which is the majority of business in the US, would cease to exist.) Technology allows this to happen now in a way never before seen in history.

But...

Education has value to you and to society because education will make your life more interesting and an educated society is better than an uneducated one.

These are tough times. But things go in cycles. If you skip education, and then years from now things get better, you may regret it. Get an education as early as possible (i.e. if you have the money, do it). It will benefit everyone in the long term.

Things go in cycles.
pedigree
Replacing CouchDB views with ElasticSearch
It would be quite awesome turning this into a command line tool and hosting it on github... you could name it PHPLint.
Me is not me?
No US universities, I guess they can easily get way better paying internships.
I don't think you're giving enough credit to the optimistic youth! They notice all right, most of them just don't care enough because all they really want to do is programming, motherfucker. After X years in the industry their passion might fade (and possibly their skill if they stop coding altogether), but it's not naïvety that gives rise to the occasional optimistic youth who gets screwed.
I file this one under Wrong But Interesting. There's still a ton we need to do in terms of innovation for prosperity, notably in medicine and energy. And I think we're in the early stages of seeing total disruption of social organization (open source software model of p2p production applied elsewhere). But still an interesting piece and useful thinking exercise.
Great concept and execution. Love the icon!
I've never been to a hackathon but as a coder it sounds fun to me.

Not everything's about the money.
Yeah, I go as far as to enter a password that I can't remember (copying it from some text file) and leaving the cookie only on the reserved browser. Keeps me from checking FB when I'm on my phone with nothing to do
join as 3rd founder of NFC startup in NYC (YCW12)
The dawn of NFC in the marketplace is upon us. Google Wallet, Isis, and more - you've heard the names and the hype...

But is this all really going to revolutionize how we shop? Is it possible to bridge the gap between the brick and mortar and online shopping experience?

These are the questions you can help answer by joining us right now.

We're looking for someone who can engineer a multiplatform application from the ground up. From concept to the app store.

You know iOS, CocoaTouch, Android, you name it. You have the experience to helm and launch expansive feats of software engineering.
You can mentor other developers and be a real leader.

And you're ready to take a chance and help us change shopping forever.

Email ycw12nyc@gmail.com with guthub, links to things you've built and anything else you think will impress us.
" Developers aren’t monkeys in a cage who can’t wait to do the next “hackathon”. They’ve got families, bills to pay and every other pressure that normal people do. " - Ryan Carson

Really? So most hackers that go to these things have families?
> "If you don't speak English in America, you tend to be poor and less educated"

Such as the Asian immigrant population.

Which, last I checked, is experiencing quotas at Ivy League schools because they're getting in at rates much, much higher than any other race, and tend to come from backgrounds of higher education, even if their parents' English is poor.

You're trying to generalize your argument to minimize the appearance of being racist - but your argument doesn't actually generalize beyond the Latino community, which by and large does fit your description. So really, your objection isn't against "people who speak poor English", it's against Latinos.

> " I fully realize I am not allowed to say this in Liberal America because this makes me a DISGUSTING BIGOT"

Nah. From your own self-description I'd characterize you as an ivory-tower elitist (ironically, something conservatives tend to accuse of Liberal America) - you know, inability to find common ground with people with low-SES and low-education and such... Race does seem to play as a factor for you, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when you say it does not. But of course, I don't know you in real life, so such judgments are rarely wise.

This argument isn't going anywhere productive, so I'm going to step out of it with this: your exact same rationalizations have been used against Blacks, and smells very close to the same arguments we hear coming out of the "I'm not anti-gay, I'm pro-marriage" camp. If it quacks...
And will probably get no users, too. Also Google did call it something close to an experiment. It was the media that called it Facebook killer, just like they called Wolfram the Google killer when they launched.
People would still want to work. But they'll start working on things they actually care about, because they won't be enslaved by their fear that if they quit their jobs they'll end up homeless or without health insurance. Right now so few startups dare to actually imagine new things because investors must be pleased and profit must be made. Plus, if we escaped the job-for-survival mindset, we would actually start focusing on automation. It's a mistake to think that automation hasn't come at the scale we expected because of unprecedented technical challenges. It hasn't come because the government has stopped throwing money on basic research. We need to focus on wild, idealistic, big-scale projects. And admit that the private sector isn't good at radically innovating, because, to radically innovate, you need to have been failing for many, many years, and have someone sustain you throughout those years. The best the private sector can do is catch up and minimize costs, like SpaceX does.
I agree with you on the reason Developers go to hackathons. That's why they're so likely to be taken advantage of. I'm simply saying that the young developer community needs to be wary.

Regarding "hacker mansions" a cursory read of this job posting should reveal what I'm referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3961037

It's clearly written by someone who thinks they can throw material things at a Developer and then get them to work 20-hour days for three months straight.
I can feel the innovation stimulation happening all around us!
My interpretation of that paragraph was that no single person was likely to be interested in all three of the neighborhoods mentioned because they're all so different.
How much are internships usually paid in the US? For some parts of the world (developing, especially) the GSoC stipend is ridiculously high.
Good piece, with major implications for public policy. Encouraging more people to go into startups is great, but funding more R&D (especially in energy) is crucial as well. Also, Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From makes this case very well at book length.
How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
Right. And, to clarify to anyone else, the videos I'm referring to were released just last month.
And a nice short url.
Agreed, I commute into sf from the east bay, my commute is longer than I'd like now so am planning to move closer but not into the city. Sf is so dense that it can often be the same commuting length in terms of time coming from across the bay as if you lived in the city
Facebook Wins Oregon Tax Break