STL Hackathon Canceled After Social Backlash | Hacker News Reader

STL Hackathon Canceled After Social Backlash

philipithomas.com

76 pointsphilip120959 comments

Sad story. Back in the 90's I used to eat with friends at an Unamas! mexican restaurant which had a jar where you could drop your business card for a chance to win a free lunch. I asked them what they did with the cards, they didn't know. So I asked them how could I collect my free lunch if I won? They said "You will get a coupon which you can bring in for a lunch." I said "When does the winner get picked?" and they said "Every Friday, someone comes by to get the cards, they pick the winner over the weekend. So on Friday I went over at 5:30 and waited for the cards to be picked up. In comes a well dressed lady with another jar, same labelling, drops it off and picks up the one with cards. I intercept her on the way out, and ask what she is doing with the cards.

As it turns out, she was the receptionist for a recruiter in the valley, they took all of the business cards, added these people to the list of people who they told their clients were 'looking for jobs' and then tried to move them from one job to another. I pointed out that Calfornia state law required all of that information to be available at the point where you entered the 'contest.' She said she would pass it on.

On Wednesday when I went in the jar was gone.

There is no free ride, but their are free trials.

That would also be illegal in the European Union. The Data Protection Directive requires all uses of personal data be opt in (ie you cannot use someone's personal data for a purpose they didn't opt in to), that personal data be kept accurately (you cannot say that someone is looking for a job if they are not) and it also limits how companies can contact you (so the recruiter would not be legally able to contact you nd they found a job)

I think it would also be illegal to share that personal data with other bodies (so the restaurant cannot give the business cards to someone else). It's all kinds of illegal.

I'm pretty disappointed with Teralogix on this, front and back.

I reached out to them early to offer help since their organizer wasn't plugged in to the local dev or startup scenes. There was no follow up. Then when that nasty legal note was discovered, I reached out again and found out that their intent was to make it an offer to join Teralogix and be funded by them, not a requirement. Alas, they fumbled both and I'm disappointed we won't get to see some new ideas from this event.

I feel like hackathons are going mainstream. Companies will run hackathons because they "heard" it helps with hiring, but won't change any of their standard legal paperwork for IP developed on their premises.

The sponsored hackathon is the new 40 year old guy throwing on a leather jacket attending indie shows to sign bands.

The value of the hackathon is rapidly diminishing. In fact I'd venture to say once they started to be formally organized they started to devalue.

What is an "STL Hackathon"? Is it related to the C++ standard library STL? The STL file format? Has it been mentioned on HN before?

STL means St. Louis.

It's the location, St. Louis.

If you read the article, it's pretty clear that it's referring to St. Louis. While I agree that it should have spelled it out in the title, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to click through and RTFA.

> RTFA

It's not spelt out whether your intent here is to berate the guy or not, but I get the distinct impression that it is. Your response is rude and uncalled for.

I read the article and it's not clear to me that STL is supposed to be equivalent to St Louis, because it isn't spelt out, and furthermore, I don't intend on looking it up in a dictionary of acronyms referring to foreign places that I may never visit, without first knowing that STL refers to a place.

No. It's not "pretty clear". I read the article and I had no idea.

But then, if you'd have RTFA then perhaps you would have known that too?

The third paragraph mentions St. Louis in an unabbreviated form. I picked it up almost right away.

STL is the airport code and shorthand for St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

It's the Standard Library now. STL is the SGI precursor. People insist on calling it STL for whatever reason, maybe because it's the STandard Library.

Or it could be St. Louis? Or Seattle?

The hackathon refers to the airport code for Saint Louis.

I think you mean Standard Template Library in that context. The C and C++ standard libraries aren't referred to that way (at least not commonly!).

Just as people call them "ATM Machines" it doesn't mean "STL" is the name of the C++ Standard Library.

I was so shocked that St Louis had anything close to resembling a "hacker scene" that I swore it had to be some SF event being overly clever with its name.

I live about 30 minutes from STL (or as the cool kids say: StL) so maybe I'll check out their monthly Code Til Dawn http://www.meetup.com/allnightlong/#past

It is this Friday! I'll be there. It's an awesome event.

Swing by TREx sometime too (http://downtowntrex.com)

There's some great high-tech, hacker, and startup stuff going on in Saint Louis:

Yearly

The Strange Loop Conference: https://thestrangeloop.com/

Monthly

Lambda Lounge: http://lambdalounge.org/

Saint Louis JavaScript Meetup (STLJS): http://www.stljs.org/ http://vimeo.com/stljs

STLRuby: http://stlruby.org

Code Until Dawn: http://www.meetup.com/allnightlong/

StartLouis: http://startlouis.com/

Build Guild in St. Louis: http://saintlouis.buildguild.org/

There's lots more too, those are just ones I'm either involved in or hear about frequently.

Haha. This is great. Seems young programmers are not so naive about IP after all, eh Teralogix? Nice try. Way to go St. Louis hacking community. Always read the fine print, and ask questions.

After talking to Teralogix, it seems this was the result of an overzealous legal team and a novice marketing lead on the project--as opposed to well informed and well orchestrated deviousness on behalf of the organizing company.

I agree, applause for those who discovered the clause, but the better outcome would have been for Teralogix to do it right. Sadly, that didn't happen either.

That's still an incredibly lame excuse. Someone took the time to write that language into the contract, and whether through malice or inaction, no one corrected it. It's unforgivable no matter who you point fingers at internally.

Every employee is a representative of the company. That includes the legal and marketing departments. And it is indeed, as another commenter calls it, lame for persons outside those departments to use them as an excuse. It's their responsibility to communicate with their colleagues and present a consistent face of the company. I know little about Teralogix, but from reading of this little stunt I am not sure I want to. Extremely unprofessional.

Unrelated - these Svbtle clones are getting out of hand. I guess this one isn't so bad because the button placement and giant caricature are different, but still.

I like it as they generally work really well on mobile. Much prefer that to individual layouts that force you to use readability or similar.

The kudos widget is a direct ripoff. The notable differences like the charicature are probably deviations from the WordPress theme.

The kudos widget bothers me, but Svbtle has a nice, clean design and I don't think there's anything wrong with copying it.

Just curious, why does this bother you?

It's too close for comfort. I'm not saying any layout with Helvetica and a sidebar is automatically a Svbtle clone, but this is clearly stolen design, and that doesn't sit well with me.

I can understand, however, did you know that Svbtle is 'inspired' from http://drawar.com/ ?

Again, I'm not saying Dustin Curtis is the only one allowed to use Helvetica and a fixed sidebar. But this blog has copied fonts, spacing, kudos, and generally the layout is exact. Not similar, exact. There's a line that needs to be drawn, and I feel this crosses it.

First - I'm quite happy that the event has gotten shut down, for now.

Second - I've always felt like this was the case of a company trying to do something they didn't fully understand. I got the vibe that these terms were cooked up by a lawyer in order to "protect" and "provide value" to Teralogix.

I just wish they would have been more responsive to the community.

The winning team comes up an with idea, it becomes IP of Teralogix who are then sued by a patent troll for infringement. The current state of affairs..

The sad thing is I've seen hackathon's happen that have similar terms. One was a student one where 50% of whatever anyone made would be owned by the founder and he had the right to invest if he saw fit.

I wonder if you could 'hack' this by working on a project that won, and to use and depend on GPL (or even AGPL) software. If they use it, you've made them open source their code.

As long as they don't distribute the code, it's not a problem. Companies can maintain an in-house fork of GPL projects without having to release the source.

If it's AGPL they have to release it the software is publically available. That's the point of the AGPL.

> As long as they don't distribute the code

No. If you have Affero GPL (AGPL) licenced code, you have to make the source code available if you make the programme "accessible to the public over the internet", even if you don't distribute the code. It's a new licence from the FSF, designed for web applications and the modern 'cloud'/'internet' world.

please read between the lines here. "Companies can maintain an in-house fork..."

Wait, we have a hacking scene in St Louis? Crazy.

Come hang out with us!

This Friday is Code til Dawn: http://meetup.com/allnightlong

What, really? That's awesome!

How've you been liking it? It looks like there were 20 people last meetup.

I love it! I'll be there.

How many of these folks are AFNIC-related? Is there a big non-DOD presence in STL for tech stuff?

I honestly don't know of anybody who comes to code-until-dawn events that has military background. Ed Domain who started Techli was Air Force Reserves, but I don't know if hee was AFNIC.

also a startup scene - http://meetup.startlouis.com

You seem like a smart guy, and I really like your writing style... but why use the flakey Svbtle clone... you can do better than that :)

how is it flakey?

I'm open to suggestions :-)

Is that a "pirated" svbtle theme?

"WP-Svbtle" by Gravity on Mars: http://gravityonmars.com/2012/03/28/svbtle-based-on-wordpres...

ugh. Why would you copy some closed community's look? It gives a terrible impression. Wait a sec while I post about copyright on my techcrunch clone blog.

"Great artists steal," or something.

thanks for the link, I combined that with https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-heroku/ and now we can have one-click svbtle clones on heroku!

derpa derp

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