skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it's always going to spark arguments. There are many of people who are invested in calling themselves hackers, and some of them want to be cool but don't want to be associated with those scary criminals, so they'll try and tell you certain hackers are "actually not hackers, but crackers" and the whole thing gets derailed into a Hackier-Than-Thou competition.

From my perspective, there's a certain je ne sais quoi of real hacking, and it has nothing to do with churning out an MVP in a weekend. In fact, sometimes the greatest hacks are the least practical.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Real-li...
FWIW, In the games industry it's fairly common practice to totally ignore anything a potential programmer made in a game jam (unless they carried it on afterwards).

Feels somewhat equivalent, even though it's probably for different reasons.
Medium.com style confirm dialog
Akrasia? :)
If you adhere to a tradition, you get to borrow its age :)

http://xkcd.com/297/
HN is not best place for yellow newspapers.
Clickbait and/or wishful thinking.
Last I heard, they've been spending most their time getting patents filed since the US switched to first-to-file in 2011. There might be more physical progress once that's done, or so I hope.
You'll see it on the Mac, too, since the MS web fonts are installed by default.
It is actually very easy/simple. Imagine a piece of Java code that calls "new Object()". I don't program in Go, but essentially, the VM would create a temporary variable x := MakeObject(typename = "Object"). Then if that's assigned somewhere, the VM would store the record. When things go out of scope, the GC collects.
Hackathon is a side-effect of a wider change in modern software development. We seem to have successfully commoditized a portion of it. This portion called "apps" is mostly a cosmetic rearrangement of underlying components. Flush funding and the apparent status such work provides is hard to ignore. I mean how am I supposed to say no to a 10k prize money for 10-12 hours of work?

Whenever a product is commoditised, the brushes hide and the hammers come out. Imagine how the elite calligraphers of the 15th century felt when their beautiful noble art form was replaced by a block of wood. And the disgust they would have felt of seeing books in the hands of common folk instead of the Kings. IMO I think it's alright since we are not sure yet whether the hammers cannot change the world. They yet might.
Take a look at the free software community (which is incidentally very well-correlated with what the "hacker" community used to be 20-30 years ago, and has much more of a claim to being the intellectual heirs of that group than the hackathon crowd does or even the HN crowd does). There's a lot of focus on ethics and civil liberties, and maybe a bit too little focus on effective PR and on shipping, but it's very refreshing.

As a concrete suggestion, LibrePlanet https://libreplanet.org/2015/ is next weekend at MIT, and free for students. Or see if there's a Debian group in your local area.
disk encryption, totally locked down VPN (forcing everything over VPN with 2FA, if you're not in the VPN your packets are going nowhere), some even forbid USB drives.
I was basically saying maybe the cause for the creativity increase in test subjects is due to a cultural association of high-status creative occupations rather than because the extra head-space tingles our neural spatial exploration networks.

In the alternate "high ceiling'ed places yield lower creativity" world, maybe we would say of the same exact fMRI study that obviously the neural spatial exploration networks are being overloaded by processing the tall room, hindered from devoting neural energy to the creative tasks at hand like they can so efficiently in the low-ceiling rooms, or some other story.
Socialism has nothing to do with organizational structure.
Penn's hackathon is by application only. I think this is pretty silly. Here's a quote from a Medium post by one of the event organizers announcing this year's low acceptance rate of 30% [1]:

The people that got in had almost all either won major hackathons before or
worked on multiple projects that each blew our socks off in a spectacular fashion.

I'm just trying to imagine these kids at Penn sitting around a table deliberating which applicants have the most "major" hackathon victories and most "blew our socks off" projects:

Organizer #1: This team looks promising. They placed second at the State U hackathon last spring!

#2: That's not impressive. Everyone knows that StateUHacks is a third-tier hackathon. A monkey with a rotary phone could win the Twilio prize there. Who do you think we are, Cornell?
This is UPenn; we accept elite hackers only. Only the cream of the crop from HackMIT is good enough to don Dropbox t-shirts with us.

#1: Ok, how about this girl? The side project she submitted under the "Supplemental Materials" section of our application looks pretty good.

#2: As IF! I'd give that side project a 4/10. No infinite scrolling? What a waste of my time. And look at that .ly TLD. It's like, "HELLO, 2012 is calling and asking for its domain name back," am I right?

[1] https://medium.com/pennapps-x/pennapps-x-application-stats-6...
You weren't alone experiencing the key repeat issue in your TE. I was an early purchaser of the TE as well, and my understanding is the first batch of MX-Blue keyboards they made all had this issue. I also returned mine.

I am also a big fan of the curve to the Natural keyboard, used to be my primary keyboard. However I find the combination of mechanical keys + a tenkeyless standard layout design (noticed a sore shoulder from mouse hand being far to the right) offers the most comfort for me at the moment.
So we're all wasting our time. Some people find more interesting ways to do it than others.
> The build may also break because of a change in an external dependency.

It shouldn't unless you've been lax in how you specify your dependencies, or the library maintainers have been sloppy in what they claim for backwards-compatibility.

Obviously in the real world, both of those things happen.
Your rant is perfectly founded. There is absolutely an issue in the current tech-scene of people with super-sized egos and the ability to justify nearly anything if it means their start-up idea will succeed. Most of these attitudes change with age, but some won't simply because they'll never encounter any real consequences or talk with people outside their social-circle. You're running into a high-concentration because, I assume, you have a lot of young inexperienced people at your hackathons. Already tech-scene in general has this issue; it's higher with the young who tend to be inexperienced; then you're at a hackathon where it has a high chance of attracting the extra-intense of those types of people. It's even extra x 2 if the person comes from a well-off family. So their parents are wealthy, probably the parents friends and their kids are all well-off, go to a fancy school walk right off campus into fluffy VC-funded paradise without knowing anything of the world outside of wealth & tech. Anyone would have a difficult time developing empathy in that situation.

You may or may not be religious, but this quote comes to mind: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" --Matthew 16:26

Best thing, imho, is don't let them change you. Stay compassionate and have empathy towards others; especially those outside of tech. Don't let your ego inflate to the point where you start saying things like "We create value! Everyone else should be praising us!" When you start to feel troubled by it walk away from tech. Have a walk in a nice park or something. Next time a homeless person asks for money, give a larger amount and perhaps try to strike up a conversation to hear their story. If you can, even volunteer at a homeless shelter. Definitely avoid trying to apply computer-world-boolean-logic to humans. Listen to people and appreciate emotions; don't consider emotions an inefficient distraction. Emotions is what makes us human and keeping in touch with them helps you understand others. Embrace your emotions and allow your heart to move you instead of your programmer-mind from time to time. Try a dancing lesson or 2. Maybe even read some romance novels. Remember the cashier that sold you that cup of coffee this morning is just as important as you are. Basically, don't lose your humanity in this goldrush.

There's more to life than social apps & VC-funding.
Well I don't know what they use but there are a bunch of streaming media servers that can do this. Wowza Streaming Engine [1] is top notch and pretty standard [2]

Wowza even has a kind of a demo app [2] that can do the streaming part of what meerkat does and it's been around for at least a couple years. The streaming part of meerkat is not real interesting or novel but the social part clearly is.

If it's me and I want to get to market really really quickly I would just pay someone who specializes in this to run the streaming infrastructure because it's the least interesting part but actually pretty hard to run at scale yourself.

As an aside, I think they are in trouble because Facebook or Twitter (just acquired a competitor in beta) will get into this space quickly... The tech is not novel at all and the existing social networks have the graph already and can replicate this very easily now that it's showing promise.

[1] http://www.wowza.com/products/streaming-engine

[2] http://www.wowza.com/customers

[3] http://www.wowza.com/products/gocoder
I don't see any real connection. The HTTP header doesn't make the requested web page be sent over and over.

A better way would have been to establish a series of SMTP servers ("towers") that forward the mail in a circle endlessly.

Let people subscribe to that kind of mailing list, getting one mail per day. And let the SMTP chain exist as long as there is one subscriber left.
> They talk about a couple inches of snow as the biggest winter storm this season

Every single news station does that, not just your local Fox. Every single one.

They LOVE disasters. The 3 R's they call it. Rapes, Robberies, Disasters/Wrecks/Riots.

It got too annoying for me - I don't watch news anymore, just read it.
> If you round down before multiplying, then you get an invalid answer.

Your argument here is based on the premise that the subjectively-inflicted-pain of "a whole lot of specks of dust in a person's eye" can be treated as a multiple of "one speck of dust in a person's eye", which to me is the point of absurdity that makes the whole thought exercise fall apart.
Those infrastructure level things are supplied by less than 5% of the workforce. So yes, 95% of the rest, when just considering basic needs, are superfluous. I would be stoked to analyze, maintain and create clean water systems used by the rest of humanity. How many Roman Aqueducts are still functioning? Capitalism and bullshit jobs are not the only way to sustain a virbrant human race.
The IRS and the TSA come to mind.
Marketing, litigation, interviews, credentialing, auditing, sales...all of these are useful for the company, but don't help society at all. "But society can't benefit from a company that goes under from ignorant customers/lawsuits/incompetent employees/fraud." Then perhaps society should stop doing those things to companies. These jobs are necessary because, of course, it won't. That's the agency problem.
> FB should ask for permissions to read _all_ SMS to make TFA via SMS a tiny bit more comfortable?

If Android had a permission called "Only read one text message to verify your phone number" maybe Facebook could use it.

Honestly, I don't know what Facebook is trying to do, but similar arguments come up frequently with Android apps. The permission model is IMO broken, because it requires upfront permission for everything the app may ever want to do. There's no way to install something, minus SMS permission.

Maybe Facebook is evil and does want to read all of your texts and upload them to advertisers. Maybe they don't. It's hard to determine that simply from the requested app permissions, given the poor granularity of those permissions.
Try asciidoctor and its stylesheets.
You do realise that Oracle's JVM isn't the only one and there are many open source JVM alternatives. Quite a few of which are designed for lightweight systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

And I have no idea what you mean by baggage. I am assuming you mean "features" like JNI, JMX etc ?

If that is the case then the modularisation of the JVM is something that has been underway for a number of years now. It is targeted for Java 9 release:

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/

And there is no difference in the way Oracle or Sun has managed the JVM. Changes are still made through the JSR/JEP process.

And finally again no idea what you mean by countess Java developers wanting to reuse their knowledge but in a different environment.

Android is already an option as is Swing but honestly does anyone care about desktop apps these days ?
Watch Lost and Love (2015) Chinese Full Movies Online – Watch Full Movies Online
> They are, however, often poorly presented. I got tired of that problem, so I am working on making it easier to get better exposure during hackathon presentations even if the presenter is not amazing at pitching.

I think that hackathons should revamp this process. If the goal is truly to build something amazing then judging people on 2 minutes pitch does not make sense. Maybe let a couple days to a team of judge to go through the project/code etc...? Just a random thought.

> They often continue to work with interesting people after the event is over even when they are not winners.

I second that, I got several interviews that way.
I'm 6'7". I would say I like tall ceilings because I'm sick of hitting my head on chandeliers and ceiling fans. :)

The funny thing is, I've noticed it doesn't matter how tall the ceilings are, but they always screw up the stairways in homes. I always have to duck to go down stairs. My house has 8 1/2 foot ceilings in the basement. I have to duck just as much as I do in houses with shorter ceilings. Or so it seems.
Lebenswerk means life's work, not life.
Definitely something lost in translation...

You don't need funding to make an open source solution to game development.

There is lots of competition out there for what you are doing. Have you compared your project to others just like it?

Best bet is to continue to work on the open source project, but if you need funding, do that separately, and don't confuse it with open source.
An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning [pdf]
Odd Jobs on Disco Street: An Introduction to BASIC for the Young (at Heart)
A computer is a machine which you can use to "simulate" a set of rule. Any other definition is just pure fantasy and hand waving.
Excellent! Thanks for your help!
I've been criticized as being too harsh in code review before, and I'll try this.

I'm not sure how to apply it in all cases though. Frequently the issues I see are coding standard violations... use of exceptions, bad use of virtual or function pointers, ...

How do you say 'we dont use throw here' as a question?
Being extremely defensive isn't going to help you.

PW had valid points.
You aren't wrong. I've been going to hackathons for many years and there's been a steady increase in folks who are going "to win" rather than folks going for the fun, the energy, the comradeship. Meeting other smart folks, sharpening your skills and having fun were always the big drivers for me and everyone I used to meet at them. I think GroupMe was a turning point. Big win, lots of $$, and that attracted a different kind of person unfortunately.
I love(d) these! Stewart(sp?) Chifet is an awesome guy too...
Arq Backs Up to Google Cloud Storage Nearline
DCC relies on all parties to have a specific port open and even then if the connection drops all hell breaks loose.
Expected nothing less from our Zuckerberg. NSA at least makes the pretense of seeming hands off when fucking over people, Zuck just doesn't give a shit.

Anyway - what can we actually do to stop this? Anything? Clearly this is the beginning of something unthinkably bad, and we should do absolutely anything to stop this.
There is nothing inherently wrong with hackathons. Software development is one of few disciplines in which one can cook-up something valuable quickly in few hours. Imagine medical students trying out this in their discipline :)

However, there is somehow perception that creating via hacking == great engineering. Hacking is a part of engineering. Engineering requires discipline, attention to detail, due diligence and long term view. Think about all the amazing bridges, or design of fighter aircrafts. Sure there might be moments where something was solved with clever hacks in these endeavours, but its the rigor of engineering that makes the product final shape.

There is also non-technical aspect. Great hacker may not be == great team person. All the amazing things around us were created by "teams".
For others who may be confused (as I was), note in the sidebar that this course is for "introductory computer science algorithms." While I suppose it is most certainly a collection of algorithms, I would generally expect such topics to be listed under "data structures" or "discrete math" at most universities.

In my experience, "algorithms" denotes a higher level, more advanced course (OBSTs, flows, stable marriage, ILP/LP...)
Vaguely unrelated: you should upgrade from Windows XP. It's a security risk to you, as well as simply out-of-date. If you want to stay in the Windows ecosystem but don't like 8 or 10, then get Windows 7. (Otherwise, try Linux!)
I think a key part of the question though is the fact that it didn't used to be just entry level devs and college students at hackathons.
I must say this is very interesting pont of view - eye opener.

When we will get a company that will actually shove all those nasty corpo style companies under the rug and actually improve web?
MAS S65: Science Fiction to Science Fabrication
yeah the selective hackathon is a relatively new thing and kinda stupid - like hackathon organizers have some magic formula for picking winners... dumb idea
How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise -- Sophocles :-)
Don't they already use LaTex?
When I first tried this course a few month ago, the little helpers (think clippy) were driving me nuts!

Half way through writing a line of code they would pop up and tell me that my code couldn't execute, maybe I should add a semi colon. It's really distracting and of course code can't execute when you are in the middle of typing an if-statement. It is not helpful at all.

On top of that there's no "submit" button (because it is supposed to test continuously) so sometimes when I was done it wouldn't test the code and made it impossible to get a "completion" on parts.
Sorry for the downtime, last time I ever use a free webhost!
The same reason you dont try to gouge out eyes. What happens when the other guy thinks he has to kill you or risk permanent disability?
not sure if telescope is a good boilerplate for meteor.
I think it tends towards unnecessary abstraction complication and ends up rather brittle in the end.
Try changing the post frequency from "daily", for example. The code complexity, in this case, making a previously non-existing abstraction (post frequency) difficult to alter... better to start with the basic meteor 3-file default app (or something similarly simple) and build one's app (and knowledge) from there...
I'm a pretty experienced Meteor dev and I find telescope to be confusing...
Netbooks are being subsumed by laptops, as laptops get smaller. Several of the "ultrabooks" are thinner and lighter than my old Dell Mini 9. The 11" models are perfectly acceptable "netbooks", they just don't call them netbooks anymore because that was an indicator that it was kind of a crappy computer, but was small and cheap and good enough for browsing the web. The cost is getting closer to netbooks, as well, though I guess the really thin and light laptops are still pretty pricey...they will converge fully eventually.

In short, tablet has taken the place of the "crappy tiny laptop", and the modern good laptop has gotten closer to the size of the crappy tiny laptop without being crappy. The sweet spot for the netbook has shrunk to the point where it almost doesn't exist anymore, and thus there are no netbooks.
The land of three thousand megabytes
could be. what else could it be?
An information oligarchy may be the single source of truth.
Discussion on HH: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonhackers/permalink/1...
How to create, dissolve, and remix teams to be more dynamic and more innovative
Hmm... I understand. I've learned a lot using Telescope but I'm not an experienced developer, but what do I know?
That was my thought exactly! My data structures & algorithms course covered most of these topics and more and that was the 3rd CS class required in the curriculum. The 3000 level algorithms course I took as part of my CS program, included Big O notation, NP completeness, P vs NP, advanced uses of graph algorithms, dynamic programming, reducability.
I tend to think that automation demands redistribution, and working and earning wages and thereby product has proven a good mechanism to redistribute. So that is, why there are jobs with a high bullshit share.
I also think, that rather than being steered by some privileged elite, society as a whole values stability instead of uncertain outcomes of everyone realizing his true potential.
Hackathons are a good way to make yourself try to build something in a short space of time with a new language which can teach you more about it than any amount of lessons.
the DEA has a country wide network of license plate scanners, tracks everyone on interstate highways to catch drug mules.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-criminal-la...

So this seems very plausible. Giving you the Occam point on this one.
rush I jadhav
What's wrong with this? They're not preventing you from paying for Internet access, they're offering some access for free. People in India are free to start competing ISPs.
Rushi
Lots of piss and vinegar here, but little that's constructive. What's the alternative? Waterfall? Chaos?
You probably made progress on that task, though. Added unit tests, clarified requirements, etc.
Seems like we need a return of the BBS ethos, where anyone can put up some bandwidth and invite folks to join in the party for free.

Perhaps internet.org is only going to create a new market for Internet provision that will be 'easy' to enter. Let them get their chained masses, then roll out a normal ISP with wide open doors.

(Of course, this would depend on the ability to actually get Internet in the area .. and assumes they don't have peer licensing all wrapped up somehow.)

And then there is this age-old fact, which hasn't really gone away in spite of Zucks' efforts: The Internet perceives toll-booths as damage, and routes around them. Here's hoping there will be "peers on the ground" who will fight this battle from there, too.
It would be awesome if there was some mechanism to mix comments from different places. The economist comments are interesting.
Most of the files appear to be images, not source-code.

"I can't help but wonder, though, if the way we tend to go about it can really affect change in a meaningful way. How many people are actually going to go through the effort of setting this up and running it? And keep it running? And put up with inevitable bugs? And updating it? How well can it inter-operate with other types of services? While they've gone above and beyond to document a contribution policy and use GitHub Issues, is it only possible to add a feature by hacking on a huge, monolithic project?"

How do ideas and open source generally work? How does a tree grow?
Not Found (#404)
This will not end well for Facebook. Once you start competing like this, you quit competing with innovation and eventually end up losing to someone else.