jeffbr13

What makes a good hackathon? As a frequent attendee, these patterns have stuck out as successful to me:

1. Set over the course of a weekend. Allows greater breadth of attendees. Not 24 hours (which is somewhat manic) but rather a more leisurely schedule of Friday: beers/pitching/team-forming; Saturday: hacking; Sunday: polish, pitching-practice, pitches, award ceremony.

2. Strong focus/process/timetable. Ensure everyone knows the schedule and judging criteria they're hacking towards. Set out the support infrastructure and resources at the top of the weekend so people can get up to speed in the methodology of the weekend. Startup Weekend tells attendees to create a plausible startup, then links them to Lean Startup resources and hands out lots of post-its for their business-model canvases. Major League Hacking tell people to make something "cool", then feed them boxes of Red Bull and loaner-hardware. Horses for courses.

3. Experienced organisers and mentors. Have at least one person for whom this isn't their first time running a hackathon, and knows how to sort out and prepare for all the little things that can (and will) go wrong. Mentors are invaluable for setting the tone of the hackathon and guiding everyone through the event and criteria (see point 2).

4. Pizzas/generic junk food are fine (and expected!) once in a weekend. ONCE. Similarly, lots of caffeine and beer (at the beginning and end) is great for getting a buzz on, but put out plenty of water and maybe some juice/herbal teas as well. There'll be plenty of natural highs by wrap-up time, and reasonable adults won't attend if they think they're gonna feel terrible the day after (see point 1).

Other thoughts:

- Thematic hackathons provide an opportunity for hackers to learn about a new domain, and for domain specialists and otherwise interested-persons to get involved where they might not at an event specifically organised for them, but OTOH it can dissuade some hackers from attending who don't think they'd be interested. In order to resist any gimmickiness, there should already be a dialogue or narrative - either an existing community which has already expressed interest in the domain (e.g. an open data community regarding city-infrastructure), or more general hype and interest (think Startup Weekends).

And remember, it's people in a room to have fun together in a slightly unconventional way. Make sure that you build up the community and teamwork of it all the way through, look after everyone, go have beers after, and start planning the next one if people are asking for it!

Google Play's radio feature has been amazing in my experience, and way better than Spotify's. Especially for stuff which is a little bit out of the mainstream, the selection-quality is so high that I wouldn't be surprised if they were using some of their Google suggestion-fu to generate it from what tracks users have played together in the past.

> There needs to be either a big stick (Python 2 being really bad, but it is actually pretty good)

Doing any non-ASCII string-processing in Python 2 with any regularity is a more than regular-enough beating for me.

The frequent puns wouldn't have been so appalling if the author didn't figuratively "take a breath" on the page, and point them out every. single. time.

There are a handful of more generic crowd-funding platforms out there, so no need to build your own. A good candidate website would be more than enough to build.

As a bonus, crowd-funding your candidacy would give you early validation. And, as a comment below says, you should be able to convince enough people to scrape together £10k, if you expect to run. Fail fast, and all that.

You certainly have my donation, and my vote if I can still afford to live in London by election-time!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100275

Interfaces aren't only visual - blind users still have to interact with something.

And some have all 320s, and a surprising number are buying mostly vinyl. But everyone uses YouTube to listen to tracks they don't own, aren't available to stream (many, for Spotify), or are vinyl-only. It's always the go-to for house parties.

There's a lot of variety out there, but you're right, YouTube is the backstop.

Or, in the time-constrained-support-worker model, a high profile release just means that they trust the publisher's quality control, and won't flag it for review as quickly as self-published content (which is highly variable in quality).

It's a poor QC process, not a stylistic or editorial review.

You can outsource the voice recognition. Windows[1] and Mac OS[2] both seem to include speeech recognition APIs these days, and of course, what with it being 2014, there are online APIs[3] and forthcoming browser support[4]. All of them appear to support limited command grammars, which is perfect for this sort of simulation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API [2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/... [3]: http://api.ai [4]: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/12/05/enhancing-ux-with...

This is the correct response for open-access journals.

There's an economic imperative to keep the process secretive in paid-access journals, rather than improving it - they can claim this vetting process is their 'secret sauce' and it's one way many attempt to justify their fees.

As we've learned from open-source, if you can get enough eyes (identity isn't actually that important) then all bugs become shallow.

> NTS shows are very much made of songs the DJ likes - that is all the qualification they need

The idea of DJ-as-selector/curator (rather than producer or 'personality') has had a resurgence in the electronic music scene over the last few years. The tastemaker DJs on stations such as Rinse FM and NTS are increasingly reaching wider out or further back to find old gems and weirder music to build into increasingly eclectic sets, and I think this has been driven partly by the mainstreaming and homogenisation of electronic music culture into "EDM" in the US, but also as an antithesis to the machine-made reductiveness of Spotify genre mixes.

As a regular club-goer here in Europe, it's no longer enough for a club DJ to merely play one genre all night long -- a crowd expects to be surprised and entertained.

If you're looking to widen your scope, the electronic music community has some great resources out there, and you can dive into any of these and find something utterly new and exciting without much trouble:

1. http://www.residentadvisor.net 2. http://www.xlr8r.com 3. http://rinse.fm 4. http://ntslive.co.uk 5. http://musicforprogramming.net

Skyscanner (http://www.skyscanner.net/), who are bigger here in Europe, do the same thing as Kayak, only more-so - they have close to a thousand separate data-sources which they can query for prices, and they fall back on ITA and Amadeus only when necessary, because those queries cost more. Tends to result in better prices for the end-user, because the level of competition between vendors is phenomenal.

(source: was a Skyscanner employee for a bit.)

The independence campaign has to hand-wave the issue, and can't outright declare that Scotland would almost certainly have a currency-union with the UK, because it's ultimately contingent on the UK government.

If they did, the unionists/UK government could attempt to call their bluff by having UK politicians declare that a currency-union would never happen. It's doesn't cost the unionist politicians very much credibility and it undermines the independence campaign on that key issue, whether or not a currency union is a strong likelihood in the case of independence.

Does anyone else find the author rather aloof from financial reality in this article?

> the education I received was well worth the $16,000 a year my parents paid, after scholarships.

> The students all now say they’re confident in Minerva—although of course they can leave whenever they like, with little lost but time.

The writer embodies the all-American liberally-educated Ivy League "coastal-elite" stereotype (writing in the Atlantic, after all), so I shouldn't be surprised at their reflexive apprehension towards an attempt to undermine the old institutions which are so tied up with that identity.

Pfft, cauliflower-cheese in a baking tree is where it's at, yo.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosminah/6005082151/

This really bothered me in an article remembering a man who spent most of his life studying and trying to raise awareness of psychoactive chemicals:

> Ecstasy, known as MDMA

It's MDMA (the chemical compound 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) that's usually known as "Ecstasy", but many other chemicals are also sold as "Ecstasy" as well.

Very few people die from MDMA overdose, or even the effects of MDMA, but that doesn't always extend to the other chemicals sold as ecstasy[1] - I was at the Warehouse Project opening night last year where a guy died and several others were put in induced comas because they were supplied with PMA rather than MDMA[2]. Whether or not you agree with using psychoactive chemicals recreationally, any misinformation can be dangerous to the people who will use them. I feel this error should have been caught by the editor.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA#Purity_and_dosage_of_.22e... [2]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-24314997

Yep, as the Google N-Gram view in the article shows, usage of "theater" overtook "theater" in the late 1970s, but the two had quite similar usage rates from the 1940s onwards.

Style guides generally update to represent the editorial team's preferences, to reflect changes in the wider world (e.g. see the comment in this thread about "Constaninople"→"Istanbul", or to make a point (see the New Yorker's continued use of diaresis in coöperation etc.[1])

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#Engl...

It's "programme" in British-English for everything except "computer program" (in my experience). Probably because most programmer-culture is centred in North America.

I imagine that it's simply some NYT writer(s) using the British-English spelling, rather than a wider cultural trend, unless somebody is aware of any other examples?

Vim's home-row commands are great... Unless you use a non-QWERTY keyboard layout.

A lot of developers forget that there exist other methods of input, and mnemonic-based shortcuts are one of those things that make a lot more sense than attempting to optimise for a tiny reduction in finger-movement (which ought to be the domain of the input-device anyway).

Doctors aren't really scientists, although some might think so -- they're taught the results of scientific research, and how to apply that to diagnose and treat patients. There's a reason that "evidence-based medicine" isn't just called "medicine". Most of it is pattern-matching on learned knowledge. The result is that some of this knowledge becomes outdated as the underlying body of scientific knowledge evolves, which may cause problems if the practitioner doesn't keep up with the latest changes in their field.

This probably applies to engineers, too because we use scientific (or logical) results imply certain solutions, and we don't always realise that validity of the underlying assumptions changes over time.

Unless you're actually formulating hypotheses and running experiments, you're probably not a scientist.

<http://www.neatorama.com/2009/01/01/mad-scientists-are-actua...

Great idea, but why not just outsource the social aspect and leverage pre-existing link-discussion boards (i.e. HN/Reddit/etc)? As a user, I'm unlikely to want to change both the way I comment, and where my comments go.

Legal frameworks are definitely tractable, and investing the time to navigate them more effectively can give you the same sort of competitive advantage as mastering a technology.

Same principle, different domain.

Combine it with a Pressy button[1] and you won't even need to override the power button.

[1]: http://get.pressybutton.com/

I hear Snapchat is quite popular these days...

But, in all seriousness, how is Peeps different from Snapchat, where I can choose who to send videos and photos to?

It's notable if you've never written a C program before, and have no idea what even a minimum valid program would look like.

The heavy-lifting of this seems to be [gaudi](http://gaudi.io/) "a way to describe a system of Docker containers using a simple DSL" and a drag-and-drop interface to generate a script.

gaudi seems to be the perfect tool for setting up database + applications + web containers, but has anyone used it in practice?

Well, the data points are pretty much unreadable, with everything being smooshed on top of each other.

Yep, goose is quite a dark meat, and is easily overcooked to dryness. But potatoes (or anything) roasted in goose-fat should be the highlight of anyone's christmas dinner!

Ducks, also, are both friendly and delicious.

+1 on this.

If you were hiring, you probably wouldn't choose someone who describes themselves as a novice. Don't focus on your lack of experience, but your other attributes.