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Hack.summit()

hacksummit.org

137 pointsjdoliner34 comments

This looks pretty cool; I just registered.

However, I will be that guy that points out that only four of the 33 speakers are women and over two-thirds of the speakers are white men.

While I do appreciate that a good number of the non-profits are ones that help women code, having a low number of women/minority speakers certainly doesn't help and could even be counterproductive to those causes.

Thanks for the feedback Martin. We're continuing to onboard additional speakers to further diversify our roster. The non-profits are helping us in this reach-out via introductions.

White males were the most encouraged demographic to go into tech when their age group was young. The fact that there are a lot more white males in that group just demonstrates what society was like in the past.

If I was throwing a convention, I would want the best and the brightest 30+ year olds for wisdom/experience reasons. And since everyone agrees that males dominated the space in the last 15 years, why would it even make sense for there to be a higher percentage of females presenting?

Should we punish these brilliant people (it's quite the collection of intelligence) because they were born in a certain era? I mean we could, but that would just bring us in another equally bad direction.

>most encouraged demographic

I used to mentor college students in a biology lab. I tried to get the students to learn basic programming and data analysis for biological data. All but one of the girls turned down the opportunity. All the males at least tried it out, some got very deep into programming.

> While I do appreciate that a good number of the non-profits are ones that help women code, having a low number of women/minority speakers certainly doesn't help and could even be counterproductive to those causes.

I don't disagree. However, is it reasonable to expect the conference speaker roster to have significantly higher diversity than the industry itself, considering those speakers are drawn from the industry? Some would say yes, and I think it's a good idea, but it is going to be harder.

I think the fact that to get a ticket I dontated to Women Who Code is more than most conferences will ever do, and I'm not going to vilify them for this, personally...

Just so that this doesn't get buried in the comments, here's a repost: We have a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at http://hacksummit.org

I saw this, but decided to donate anyway.

Here's a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at hacksummit.org

It would be really nice to have some info about each programming non-profit. E.G. Why they are in your donation list. What they do. Why you like them. Why I should donate to them.

They all sound really interesting, and I want to pick a good one to give too, but unfortunately I don't really know anything about any of them.

As it is now there is a huge cognitive barrier to completing registration. I want to give, but I don't know whom to give to. I could complete the registration by facebook/twitter, but I can afford to give a little bit and don't want to go the free route.

I came close to closing the tab, thinking I would come back later, but I also know I might forget and I don't want to miss out on what looks like a great con!

Great question. You can find out more about each non-profit by hovering your mouse on their logos on the homepage. You can also visit their websites by clicking on a logo, for even more deep information.

I went ahead and registered by posting to facebook using http://www.paywithapost.de/ and received a ticket code.

After doing so I received an email saying my registration was incomplete and the email gave a link to complete my registration.

Clicking back through to pay with a post it looks like they still have my registration.

Maybe the email is going out prematurely before you have a chance to receive a webhook from pay with a post?

Thanks for the feedback. Everything was processed fine, but looks like their was a delay more than 5 minutes before submitting the donation info. Please ignore this email, we are extending the time period to prevent this email from being sent prematurely.

Speakers include:

Tom Chi (co-creator Google Glass) - Grady Booch (creator the Unified Modeling Language) - David Heinemeier Hansson (inventor of Ruby on Rails) - Brian Fox (invented the GNU Bash shell) - Rebecca Parsons (CTO, Thoughtworks) - Hakon Wium Lie (inventor of CSS) - Alex Gaynor (Director, Python Software Foundation, and core committer to Django) - Sarah Allen (Presidential Innovation Fellow, led development for many Adobe products) - Gilad Bracha (co-author of the Java Language Specification) - Kent Beck (creator of Extreme Programming, created Test Driven Development, co-created Agile, author of 9 books) - Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki, contributed to Extreme Programming, co-author of Design Patterns) - Bram Cohen (inventor of Bittorrent) - Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass, Haml, m.wikipedia.org, book author) - Matei Zaharia (creator of Apache Spark) - Melody Meckfessel (Google Director of Engineering) - Jon Skeet (the top answerer on StackOverflow) - Scott Hanselman (author of multiple books) - Jeff Haynie (founder of Appcelerator) - Ryan Bubinski (founder of Codecademy) - Aaron Skonnard (founder of Pluralsight) - Floyd Marinescu (founder of InfoQ) - Steve Newcomb (founder of Famo.us) - Orion Henry (founder of Heroku) - Janet Wiener (Engineering at Facebook, big data expert) - Scott Chacon (CIO, Github) - Chad Fowler (CTO, Wunderlist, well-known programming educator and blogger) - Salil Deshpande (open source investor titan) - Hadi Partovi (founder of Code.org, was in charge of Internet Explorer, advisor to Dropbox and Facebook) - Qi Lu (EVP, Microsoft)

Easier to read:

  - Tom Chi (co-creator Google Glass) 
  - Grady Booch (creator the Unified Modeling Language) 
  - David Heinemeier Hansson (inventor of Ruby on Rails) 
  - Brian Fox (invented the GNU Bash shell) 
  - Rebecca Parsons (CTO, Thoughtworks) 
  - Hakon Wium Lie (inventor of CSS) 
  - Alex Gaynor (Director, Python Software Foundation, and core committer to Django) 
  - Sarah Allen (Presidential Innovation Fellow, led development for many Adobe products) 
  - Gilad Bracha (co-author of the Java Language Specification) 
  - Kent Beck (creator of Extreme Programming, created Test Driven Development, co-created Agile, author of 9 books) 
  - Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki, contributed to Extreme Programming, co-author of Design Patterns) 
  - Bram Cohen (inventor of Bittorrent) 
  - Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass, Haml, m.wikipedia.org, book author) 
  - Matei Zaharia (creator of Apache Spark) 
  - Melody Meckfessel (Google Director of Engineering) 
  - Jon Skeet (the top answerer on StackOverflow) 
  - Scott Hanselman (author of multiple books) 
  - Jeff Haynie (founder of Appcelerator) 
  - Ryan Bubinski (founder of Codecademy) 
  - Aaron Skonnard (founder of Pluralsight) 
  - Floyd Marinescu (founder of InfoQ) 
  - Steve Newcomb (founder of Famo.us) 
  - Orion Henry (founder of Heroku) 
  - Janet Wiener (Engineering at Facebook, big data expert) 
  - Scott Chacon (CIO, Github) 
  - Chad Fowler (CTO, Wunderlist, well-known programming educator and blogger) 
  - Salil Deshpande (open source investor titan) 
  - Hadi Partovi (founder of Code.org, was in charge of Internet Explorer, advisor to Dropbox and Facebook) 
  - Qi Lu (EVP, Microsoft)

(First off, yes, this is very cool :-))

This strikes me as an ingenious way to promote a service like Crowdcast. Even if the speakers are being paid for their time, the thousands (potentially?) of developers who will get to know about the product through what is essentially a live demo will be very valuable. And it raises money for charity. Assuming the technology holds up, this really does seem like a win-win :-)

Thanks Peter. We are working closely with the founder of Crowdcast. He's an incredible programmer and we're lucky to have him helping us. He benefits tangentially from this exposure.

Haha thanks for the compliments Peter ;)

(ceo of Crowdcast)

The "Favorite Languages" need a little updating. I wanted to pick OCaml, Rust and Hack.

Haha.. we've got "Other" as a catch-all. Not quite as cool as listing more languages :)

Also, maybe split "C, C++"? C is one of my favorite languages, C++ not so much.

Not serious, but I think it would produce interesting results.

Given the title of the page, I'm kind of disappointed that this wasn't defined. http://i.imgur.com/zKu6byK.png

Give us 24 hours to come up with something cool :)

Just saw it – nice! :)

Very cool, I registered with the HN code with no problems.

Will these hangout videos be recorded for viewing later? I did not see that listed in the FAQ.

Yes, it will be recorded for those who registered. Note: by attending the live event, you will be able to ask Q&A with the speakers too :)

What a fantastic line-up! Is there an agenda yet - I couldn't find one?

Full agenda coming soon :)

BTW, here is a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at http://hacksummit.org

Note to self: read the comments first. Oh well, I'm very happy making a donation to any of these great nonprofits.

Any chance you could accept bitcoin? Seems like a really cool event otherwise.

I think that's a great idea. We really wanted to accept bitcoin but ran out of engineering bandwidth. We were looking at dogecoin too. I hope developers who are unable to pay in cash will still join us through sharing on social media (or if you're a hackernews member, using the free promotion code mentioned elsewhere in these comments).