skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If somebody wants to support ReactOS development, he can do it by use of https://www.bountysource.com/teams/reactos/issues

Cast your bounties on bugs that bother you.
I agree with most of the TC commenters. They're raising money for R&D yet there are so many things about the engineering behind this that are fundamentally flawed.
disclaimer: not a web dev, don't really have a dog in this race.

The reaction here strikes me quite a bit - talk about supporting an old web browser which has a small market share, and the reaction will often be that it's a waste of time. No-js users are a miniscule fraction of a typical site's audience, so why would those sites bother to support them any more than they would bother to support an old browser?
How to become a better designer
> Why can’t I work on an existing project?

Man I'd love to join a hackathon where you are encouraged to work on your personal projects, and you get to share it with other attendees, and they get to share theirs with you, and hopefully someone finds your project interesting and then it's not a 1 man project anymore or vice versa.

Most (if not all) hackathons in my country are sponsored by companies to try out their new api's, gather potential hires under one roof, or for investors/business people trying to find developers/co-founders.
Buffer overflows occur in C because the language doesn't force programmers to perform those runtime checks and so many don't (or don't do it correctly).

Rust makes sure you are checking those things. Some of those checks are only at compile time and have no runtime cost. Others have a runtime cost but in the vast majority of situations the 'performance hit' will be negligible. Anywhere it is important you would rearrange your code to move the checking out of any critical path.

Note that it's still the same thing you'd have to be doing in C anyway to be both correct and fast. Rust just makes sure you don't forget the correct bit.

http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/intro.html#safety-<em>and</...

Regarding complexity and being cumbersome, Rust increases compile time dependency, but reduces debugging complexity.

Personally I would rather spend a bit more time at compile time thinking about memory ownership than spending hours (or even days/weeks) tracking down memory problems.
Lisp is a language? I thought it was a round bracket based ASCII art :S.
Understanding the Economics of Uber
That law allows AS to get money for "snippets". Google then decided not to show snippets for any site for which it had to pay up (but just link with title).

AS reports that their traffic went down so much due to that shorter format that they project a 7-digits loss a year per site. (at first they gave permission only for some sites to get directly comparable data)

So AS gave Google a revocable free license to show snippets and complains that they were pressured into doing so because "Google has a monopoly".

So they want to get Google to show full snippets (so AS gets their usual traffic and ad revenue), but to also pay for them (because there is that new law that allows AS to demand it).
Sell Services on Amazon
The author is building alternatives: civic hacking meetups. So for people who hack the institutions around them, it never has to be as simple as going or not.

Personally, this cultural critique is far more interesting than any hackathon I've seen. I was even at a company which hilariously tried using hackathons to pay off technical debt, instead of simply scheduling it. (The damned Scrum Master was surprised I had no intention of staying during weekends; somehow he thought this plan would overjoy me, since I claimed we mismanaged technical debt.)
Future programming languages will be about tooling, not syntax. Look at C# with ReSharper and Roslyn to get the taste.
Does it transfer to a new vehicle? Cabs put on so many hard miles that it seems like a really steep price for something that isn't going to last that long.
Anyone who is left to openly suffer under an addiction, mental [or otherwise] illness, or who is left to believe that being homeless is somehow a better life than they might have otherwise, is being abandoned by society.

Addiction is not a choice. Mental illness is not a choice. And having your soul crushed to the point where you find it less humiliating to remain homeless, is not a choice.

In my experience, the only people who truly choose to be homeless are people who have advantages that they give away due to some ideal that they think they'll achieve by living a humbler life. These people might not have a home, but they also aren't disadvantaged the way other homeless are. Making this distinction is important, as it cuts to the heart of real homelessness: an inability to help oneself. And that's why society is supposed to help.
The UK Teenage Fintech Unicorn Is Hiding in Plain Sight – Monetise
"Erlang is a general-purpose language and runtime environment specifically designed by Joe Armstrong at Ericsson for building highly parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant systems."

Nice contradiction :). (Haven't seen any Erlang GUI frameworks or e.g. text editors implemented in Erlang).
It's been tried. Look at plan 9, or MS Singularity, or heck even BeOS was a clean break in many respects, with certain things implemented at low level and used throughout the OS.

Turns out compatibility and understandability is really useful, and it's good to define your complex systems in terms of simple systems. Worse is better.
even if there are engine specific optimizations (like the #! javascript single page application path thing they promoted for a while), the major engines usually converge towards a single format quickly.

And the fringe engines (YACY and the like) had no idea how to work with SPAs in the first place, so no loss there...
This just verifies that water is a good shield against radiation. The slides explained that any proximity to, not to mention physical contact, with the object would be highly dangerous but having a mere 1.4 meters of water in between the human and the object the dosage would be negligible.
Ought to wonder if today's XKCD is related...

http://xkcd.com/1453/
I am somewhat amazed by how long it is taking the population to move away from Windows, now that there are real choices for mainstream users (Linux Mint, OSX). The look of Linux Mint feels especially Windows XP/7-ish, which is probably why I and others feel so comfortable with it.
How to create a gif novel
It just occurred to me that Hackathons which stress on the caffeine-induced sleepless continuous-production aspect of programming are the opposite of what Rich Hickey termed "Hammock driven development" : http://data-sorcery.org/2010/12/29/hammock-driven-dev/

I guess the "furious activity IS productivity" approach of such hackathons is appropriate if you're building the next great website where the assembly of components is the challenge but they are probably not great for solving open-ended problems such as designing an algorithm or figuring out how to solve a puzzle (a business puzzle, a programming puzzle, a life puzzle).
I think your conflating the services his customers provide with what he provides, all this man does is lease medallions to other companies/people.
They are all converging on these features because they have proven universally useful. But there is still a lot of work going on about other, new features. Some examples that interest me:

- effects and exceptions - should we use monads (Haskell), macros (Rust), handlers (Eff, algebraic effects), extensible rows (Koka)

- memory usage - how should we handle deallocation - using reference counting with infrequent GC (Python) or by being very careful (C++), using just GC and allocating freely (OCaml/Haskell, Java & Nim use "realtime" GC), using uniqueness semantics (Rust, ATS), using memory pools and great care (Objective C) - none of these approaches is perfect and optimal for all situations, and it's very frustrating that they don't really fit together

- safety and security - I'm really interested about provable programs, either dependent typing (Agda) or refined types (Liquid Haskell, ATS). Both require quite a bit of "static knowledge" - immutable data structures, or unique mutable data structures, and effect annotations for functions (plus, there are additional problems in lazy languages).

All of the above seem really hard to do using a dynamically typed language, but hopefully we can devise a way to have both a dynamic and a static provably efficient and secure code in the same program, same language, with clear split between the two.
Had a near lock on desktop operating systems. For a brief period of time. Which was quickly eroded by better, cheaper, more agile competition. If that is the definition of a monopoly you'd wonder why it is the bogey man. A monopoly is supposed to be enduring and accrue endless profits and competitors, not just be a successful business.

You ask whether this is what we want the government to intervene in? Quite frankly, no. Whatever ham-fisted attempts they make to try and 'intervene' will end up making things worse, as it usually does.

The market will sort google out sooner or later. They have an operating overhead budget that makes your eyes bleed and an extremely low switching cost product.
+1000 usually hackathon are the extension of a stereotype that a developer should make a fantastic app in 24h.
I can understand about designers and business models, but to project and develop a real app from scratch take a lot of time.. if you don't use pre existent code
They were doing things in their routine. Thus it's routine.

You're misrepresenting things.
He could try to say that, but it doesn't make him correct.

And in fact if someone used valgrind and fixed any errors (which plenty of people have done successfully) that completely disproves him.

He should retract his false statement due to evidence against it.
haha. that's hilarious. i worked at a company that was trying to change its image from 'sweatshop' to 'we know tech' image (like a google or facebook). What better way did they think to accomplish this than to have 30 of their engineers work for 24 hours straight developing features they were too stupid to come up with on their own!...oh yeah, they had a ping pong table too...so its all good. And shitty pizza.

I'm 40 now, and i remember my manager was like "You going to the hackathon? I want you there." I'm like "are you kidding me? I'm not coding for 24 hours straight with no sleep...and then have to come into work the next day...damn dude, if you're going to have us do a 24 hour session, at least do it during the day (not a weekend)"

He really had no response for that.

the kicker was 1st place was a $50 starbucks gift card.
To be accurate, he predicted not the PC and the internet in this clip, but having a terminal (console) at home that connects to a computer somewhere else. My dad had that in the late 1970s: a big (printer) terminal that connected by 300 baud modem to his office.
'This rabbit got to wear an “active contact lens,” and showed no observable ill effects.' sounds so much better than 'animal testing has so far suggested no observable ill effects'
If you drill a hole 1500m deep, and you use concrete as the material of the object used for energy storage, and the volume of the object is V [cube meters], when the object is at its maximum level you have stored an energy of:

E = 10 x V KWh

This means that with 10 cube meters of concrete you can store 100 KWh (more or less the energy consumed by 10 households per day). If what they claim about doubling the energy storage is true, with the same amount of concrete you can store 200 KWh. 10 cube meters of concrete would weight just 24 tons, not so much after all.

Assuming a hole 1600m deep, and a system of cables capable of handling 250 tons (100 cube meters of concrete), you can store up to 2000 KWh (so you can serve 200 households for a day).

I don't know the price of drilling a hole 1600 meters deep, but with these premises, if the price is in the range of
1-5 millions $, a medium neighborhood can afford the operation.
Google uses tracking data from previous searches to influence their search ranking.

As soon as you figure that out then it's easy figure out why it's so tough to compete with Google on search. No-one else has a similar set of data.
hey, catchy name, for some ms I thought of iOS... maybe it's just me doing too much iOS development in the last months.
The best is when your PM goes to one and then comes in on Monday expecting you to implement all your features by 1AM if he gets the Pizzas in...

IMO it breeds bad habits of coding, planning and management...
The medallion itself is physically attached to the cab, but since the medallion does not expire I'm sure there is a transfer process.
I would be very suspicious of finding a job offer at a hackathon. A company who wants workers that are willing to go without sleep to code are just looking for naive talent to exploit.
The striking similarities between Game of Thrones and business (spoiler alert)
They're good for young people. When I was young I would have found them inspiring.
They haven't been open to the public (yet), but at Khan Academy all ours have been "healthy hackathons."

Have personally loved it. Eating and sleeping well required. We even bring in healthier snacks than normal and force people out at midnight.

More here if interested:
http://hackweek.khanacademy.org
http://bjk5.com/post/56123354891/how-we-ran-the-second-khan-...
Create your awesome personal website in 10 Min with 1.99$
Example website : http://veecarddemo1.per.ws
Well, first of all just "moving" is a hassle. Then people, for whatever reason, tend to be attached to what they call "home." And third, probably, because we like it.
Right.

e.g. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/?author=1
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/?author=2

Pointless information disclosure
Controlling the market would mean excluding competitors and capturing all the profits. Microsoft is a poor example of a monopoly as any long term shareholder will tell you, because they have little power in the market, a scant ten years or so after they peaked in market share. That is an extremely lame monopoly if it is one.

All businesses are subject to market forces and cannot sustain a monopoly, Microsoft and Google included. Neither really meet the definition of a monopoly, which is generally the exclusion of all competition in a market.

A real monopoly is something like control over a city transportation network, something like taxi licensing. Which can only happen through government control.
I've been to several hackathons, and I have a hard time relating to the article.

The hackathons I've been initiated by some open source communities (sometimes sponsored by a company, but that company wasn't involved in the topics), and were mostly not about the hacking, but about high-bandwidth communication between folks that usually only converse via bug trackers, IRC and email.

There are no prizes. Often no new projects come out, but existing ones are advanced.

I get the impression that there are two kinds of hackathons, the commercially motivated, and the community one.

IMHO it makes a lot of sense to distinguish those two when talking about hackathons.
The hole court case was about bundling, nowdays everybody does that. Can you imagen any operating system beeing sold without preinstalled browser?

Also how would people go about downloading the other browser if there was not internet explorer?

When apple had much of the smartphone market, there was not antitrust against them, but there was a browser on that phone. Also if you cant put any software on a computer you sell, then the logical conclusion is that we should only be allowed to sell pre installed kernals, everything else would be abusing monopoly position (assuming there is a high market share in the OS). Microsoft probebly had 99% market share in defragmentation tools back then as well.

The faulty assumition is that the product is the operating system, in reality the product is more then just the operating system its a hole bundle of diffrent software.
No one is forcing you to use Google, Facebook, Amazon or any other Internet website. End of story for me.
I'd say that the book started as a bunch of untried ideas for how to represent interesting processes that show up in cognition... and it's largely the same now.

It doesn't work very well if you take it as an instruction manual for how to make AI, especially because it describes many processes that we know no good way to compute.

But Minsky's writing represents the currently-hibernating field we call "good old-fashioned AI" (GOFAI). What makes it "good"? GOFAI contains ideas about what we wish AI could do that we've kind of abandoned in the present, not because we don't want to do them anymore, but because they're very hard, and there are easier ways to get results.

The current wave of machine learning techniques will probably give diminishing returns one day. Going back to a GOFAI text such as Society of Mind is a way to dream about what comes after that. In the extremely optimistic view, it might help you recognize an opportunity to do something new with AI when a new computational technique makes it possible.
I don't run a WordPress site, but it seems to me that failed password lockouts should be a standard feature. Even a lockout of say five minutes makes brute-forcing all but the most useless passwords implausible.

I looked up Wordfence. The way it preemptively blocks attacks from all domains that attack any Wordfence user's site is pretty clever.
> In the end, email is the best way to communicate with your customers.

I can't say I agree there. It used to be, but not now.

The signal-to-noise ratio for mail is very wrong for many people especially those who don't know any better and give out their address to every web form that asks for it. Spam protection has too many false positives when you ramp it up to the point of bringing that significantly down.

For a relatively technical audience RSS is probably the way to go, but for the karate school example that isn't going to fly as you'll need to get people "get into something new" to get their updates so just a basic web page is the most reliable thing (though that has less "push" than the other options as people have to remember to go look).

Facebook used to be a good compromise. Changes over the recent times and those that are planned are changing that.
List of URLs checked by Twitter for its app targeting
I think a "non-interruption weekend" specifically designed around healthy food and sleep breaks is more fruitful in general.

The true value of a hackathon is twofold (imo)

- you don't have normal office interruptions and the like and can focus on one thing for an extended period

- you get to meet interesting people and exchange ideas

I think just focusing on that and mostly ignoring the "extremeness" of hackathons would be awesome. Instead of thinking "how can I code on for hours" a better focus would be "how can we generate a very productive and pleasant environment and still reap the benefits of hackathons".

For example, if it's a biggish place, childcare for parents would be something I'd think about before diving into how to get more coffee to the venue ;)
Why would you assume that everybody wnat to move away from microsoft? Most people are ok, they dont have a deep hate for microsoft and just wait until they can move away from it.

I tried to get people other things but usually they just prefered windows in the end. Sure part is familiarity but not all of it.
Although I cannot recall any specific name right now, I have certainly seen programs handling a single Ctrl-C different than say two Ctrl-C in quick succession.

Example: Pressing one Ctrl-C will display a message like this on some programs (which do not want to terminate themselves upon receiving a single SIGINT, because accidents happen): "Press Ctrl-C again to quit."
Next from the author, "Why I don't like startups."

meh
On mothers not coming to hackathons: at Museomix[1] events we have at least 50% of women and many moms. Anecdotally, I clearly remember that at the very first Museomix in 2011 Nathalie, a participant, had a 3 months old daughter at home. Her dad was keeping care of her.

Museomix last 3 whole days, is probably beyond the traditional hackathon (in the sense that devs are only a part of the teams. 1/6th to be precise).

I guess the absence of moms is rather a question of general gender imbalance and culture of the event.
[1]http://museomix.org
The future of programming should be one language for all layers of the stack, from the database to the model to the UI. I think that hints that it should be a form of declarative.

And if it's declarative, it should be focused on managing state.

And if it's a thin syntactical representation of its VM, instructions/code could be interpreted immediately at entry and be managed as state, so you wouldn't be working with a text file but querying the AST equivalent of what you wrote.

And if you do that, you can create the management tools and structures to truly understand and manage both data and code.

And if we do that, the future of programming would look less like today's mangle of a thousand wires to something more like sculpting and architecture.
This is a good piece.

I have seen some anecdotal evidence of unsustainability of the business model - e.g. a trip from my neck of the woods to LAX is priced as $114 on Blacklane.com, $110 on Limos.com and $149-197 for Uber Black (so that the comparison is apples-to-apples) - but was never able to articulate it into a longer-term business model problem.

The car service companies do operate at lower-cost structure, and probably don't mind using Uber to fill some spare capacity, but arranging for a trip in advance via a cheap aggregator (not sure what Blacklane or Limos.com charge) will always net the consumer a discount.
There's an argument to be made that, given the cost of medallions, men like this are essentially enabling people who couldn't otherwise afford to be taxi drivers to do that job.
Nope. All full time, on site. A good working environment counts for one hell of a lot, and the cost of living here is low.
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> The sensations are actually happening, right here, right now. Thoughts about the past or future are just mental constructs and have no reality beyond that.

Except, those sensations might not be 'actually happening'.

> The sensations feel like tiny extremely weak electric currents zapping through on the surface and disappearing. Or it could be a weak throbbing and itching sensation. Sometimes you get the feeling of the area under investigation being in a state of tension. It doesn't matter what the sensation is like. What matters is that you are aware of these sensations.

It doesn't surprise me at all that, after concentrating on a particular body area in silence for 8 hours a day for 3-4 days, people would associate various sensations with that area. For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paresthesia

If meditation has helped you personally, that's great. However, I take issue with preaching dubious advice.
I'm fully on Google's side in this news story, but the fact that no-one forces you to use them... that's irrelevant to monopoly or anti-competitive laws (both of which are good things to exist, even if they can lead to shitty attempts at execution).
Your point makes all sense and I totally agree with it. And it made me remember an old joke about programming languages of the future, through a fictional book cover: [1]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/dPjtGVj.jpg
> Said another way, you should never think of animations discretely (i.e. "slide in from left") if you're thinking about building touch-based app. It won't feel natural.

That kind of goes against thinking of animation as tweens. Instead, you want something more physics based that can respond to touch in real time yet remain controllable enough for user interface usage; e.g. verlet and/or inverse kinematics.